Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) are ready to test their artificial womb on humans. In 2017, the researchers used the artificial womb to help premature baby lambs grow to full gestation. Now, 6 years later, the researchers are ready to begin trials on humans.
From scientificamerican.com:
In a natural womb, a fetus receives oxygen, nutrients, antibodies and hormonal signals and gets rid of waste through the placenta, a transient organ in which fetal blood interacts with maternal blood. Of these various roles, artificial-womb technology is most focused on providing oxygen and removing carbon dioxide, replacing the mechanical ventilators that are often used for neonates. These can damage fragile developing lungs that would otherwise still be filled with amniotic fluid.
The artificial womb “would bridge a baby born extremely premature through those days and weeks when they’re most at risk for lung and brain damage,” Werner says. The CHOP group has signalled that it would wean babies off its system after a few weeks, when their organs are more fully developed and their likelihood of healthy survival is higher.
The group’s system would work by placing extremely premature babies into what it calls a Biobag, filled with an electrolyte-laden fluid designed to mimic amniotic fluid. Surgeons would connect the blood vessels in the umbilical cord to a system that oxygenates blood outside the body. The fetal heart would still pump blood as it does in the natural womb.
The researchers have named their artificial womb, EXTEND, which stands for Extra-Uterine Environment for Newborn Development. The womb is NOT supposed to be a replacement for a human womb unless and until a newborn is less than 70 percent of the way to to full term. As a matter of fact, the womb wouldn’t, couldn’t fully gestate a human child from conception to birth.
A fetal surgeon at CHOP, Dr. Alan Flake, said of the experiment, “If it’s as successful as we think it can be, ultimately, the majority of pregnancies that are predicted at-risk for extreme prematurity would be delivered early onto our system rather than being delivered premature onto a ventilator.”
It appears that the team intentionally developed a womb that can never be used to gestate a human for a full pregnancy term, and thus they seem to wish to hope to avoid the ethical questions that might otherwise rise from such an experiment.
Still, the very creation of an artificial womb opens up many scientific ethical questions, such as “is it moral to “grow” humans in laboratories? It is only a matter of time, after all, until some research team decides to take what’s learned through EXTEND and seek to build an artificial womb that COULD allow scientists to “grow” humans in laboratories.
We have no idea just how important to the development of a human being it is to be gestated in the womb of another living human being. Beyond the basic biological needs and protections a womb provides, there may be other elements of gestation science might not ever be able to grasp (such as the “emotional” needs a mother might provide to the unborn child that a fake womb would never be able to duplicate).
The development of this technology COULD lead to more dangerous artificial wombs that COULD one day lead to humans being grown in labs, but it could also save the lives of thousands of premature babies per year in America alone.
It is probably only a matter of time before some state will allow experiments that lead to growing humans in labs, but, despite that, this particular development could be a game-changer for so many parents that might otherwise have lost their child, but now might have options to save their child’s life.
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