The Matrix Is Right: Japanese Scientists Develop an Artificial Womb

The Matrix Is Right: Japanese Scientists Develop an Artificial Womb

Why isn’t this on the news? Because it happened in 1996. How close are we today to motherless births? Probably closer than you think.

Many would agree that the act of giving birth is one of the most fundamental human experiences but this paradigm will most likely suffer some changes in the near future. Should such a scenario unfold, it will bring about unprecedented political and social turmoil.

But the concept of ectogenesis (the development of a fetus outside of its mother’s body) is not new. The term was coined in 1924 by British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who predicted that by 2074, 70 percent of all human pregnancies would be artificial. Despite being a visionary, Haldane couldn’t have foreseen the rapid advancement of technology during the past few decades. If he knew how fast things would evolve, his estimates wouldn’t have been so conservative.

In the mid-1990s, a team of Japanese researchers led by Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara developed a technique called extrauterine fetal incubation (EUFI), which enabled them to suspend goat fetuses in artificial incubators containing synthetic amniotic fluid. The fetuses were kept alive by connecting catheters to the umbilical cord and supplying them with oxygenated blood and nutrients.

Kuwabara’s team managed to maintain an artificial pregnancy for three weeks before running into complications but that was nearly 20 years ago. With the medical advancements of the past two decades, how far could that period be extended?

In 2003, researchers at the Cornell University took things further and grew a mouse embryo for 17 days in a bio-engineered artificial womb. Leading the experiment was Dr. Helen Hung-Ching Liu, who described the embryo as “a well-formed, healthy mouse with eyes, legs, with a tail.”

More recently, Dr. Liu and her team managed to grow a human embryo for ten days in an artificial womb. At the moment, experiments such as this one are highly regulated and constrained by a 14-day limit. But we can safely assume that these regulations only affect public projects. As history has shown us, controversial experiments have been carried out by various government-sanctioned entities without the general public’s knowledge.

For all we know, artificially-incubated humans might be growing right now in secretive bio-engineering facilities. A disturbing prospect, but not an impossibility.

Source: http://locklip.com/