First live birth using Fertilo procedure that matures eggs outside the body

[gnfargbl]

There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them. Even for a healthy woman at an optimal age, the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous, yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children. A technological solution would be an easy out here, and if it were available then people would very likely take it, for better or worse.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous

Friend just gave birth. I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design.

Everything about human birthing is a hack. The placenta. The rotation and cord and length of the process. The ridiculous frequency of stupid fuck-ups which often result in the death of a baby or the mother or both. Pregnancy strikes me as one of those processes proximate technology could absolutely do better than nature in 9/10 cases.

[JofArnold]

I suspect you're right. But I've just last night finished Brave New World and what strikes me is production of children in that book almost entirely for the purpose of labour.

So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders. Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?

[coldtea]

Such practices is why the Brave New World is a dystopia

[mschuster91]

> There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them.

It will be a huuuge time until extrauterine reproduction is viable even for mammals as small as mice. We barely understand pregnancy and its effects in humans as it is - IMHO it's barely ethical to research around pregnancy on mice, even less on "higher" levels of intelligence such as great apes. It's only a relatively recent discovery for example that fetal cells transfer via the placenta into the mother's organism [1], but it's only extremely recent that further discoveries into the mother-fetus interactions were studied [2].

Hell we're not yet sure if cloning humans actually works - it took a great deal of effort for sheep, and to this date we haven't even managed to work out the ethics for humans in gene-editing, just look at the controversy around He Jiankui [3].

Not saying it isn't worth the effort to hold a debate around human germ line research... but I think the time is premature, we should have it once we have proven it possible and safe in primates.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/

[2] https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_inci...

[mensetmanusman]

I will be amazed if a technology solution in biology can compete with 100 million years of evolution. Even children born via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro biome stuff.

[xattt]

After ex-utero pregnancy is achieved, the next step would be some form of recombinant human analogue breast milk synthesis. Beyond that, breast milk tailored to mom-babe pairs.

Yes, formula exists and has created billions of healthy children. However, breastfeeding is a signifiant commitment of blood, sweat and tears for many moms that want to do best by their babes.

[MrDresden]

> ..yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children.

Just so it is said, not all cultures on the planet are as equally bad at supporting parents.

[remarkEon]

That way madness lies.

Growing children in a vat, to be bought and sold. That's what you're talking about. As a kid or young adult I never fully understood the Butlerian Jihad plot point of the DUNE universe, but as an adult and a father I certainly do now.

[patrickwalton]

I would guess that the negative consequences of widespread adoption of full gestation out of the womb would be much worse than the consequences of epidurals and C-sections. There's evidence that epidurals are actually worse for maternal mortality, since the epidural disrupts the natural birthing process, leading moms to need C-sections, which increase mortality. The moms I know have had better, less traumatic and painful, birthing experiences by working with coaches that help them understand and listen to their body through the process.

Being around those moms, especially my wife, it's fascinating to learn about how pregnancy is the foundation of mother-child bonding. So it's easy to see how artificial wombs would be much worse. I guess that's the point of Brave New World, how destructive the loss of that and other bonds is.

[pnutjam]

Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others.

What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? They will stack up over time since who wants someone else's baby when you can get your own so easily.

This will also be abused by some jacka## like Musk who wants to build a labor force for something distasteful. Imagine a Mars colonization effort with exclusively young people who were raised in a sealed environment and don't know anything that was not fed to them.

[thatfrenchguy]

I mean, raising the child after is actually the hard part, and women get shafted there around 99% for societal reasons.

[hooli_gan]

I don't believe healthy, social children can be born in this way within our lifetime. Babies start learning their mother tongue in the stomach while being out and about with their mother. There may also be hundreds of other things happening in the stomach that we don't know about, which are needed for healthy children

[nashashmi]

The headline inspires SCiFi stories of creating humans outside of the woman. But that is not at all what this story is about: eggs were brought to maturity level outside of the woman.

Currently eggs would be matured inside the mother with artificial hormones.

Now they can be removed before maturing and inflated after in a dish. Then fertilized. Then be injected back into the mother. Hormones are still used in the next step.

[chiyc]

The article claims an 80% reduction in injections, but they must only be counting the injections prior to egg retrieval. After the 2 weeks of injections before the egg retrieval, there's another 8-10 weeks of intramuscular injections after the embryo transfer.

Still, this is a great development to lessen the entire ordeal for women undergoing IVF.

[pgryko]

'With nearly half of the women in the US never reaching their maternity goals, there is an urgent need for innovation' - did they just describe having children like a KPI?

[sebmellen]

It is! If ~50% of the population feels unfulfilled because they haven’t been able to have the children they wanted, we should fix that. But clearly it would be better to look at the root cause than to rely on this specious invention.

[bpodgursky]

When you talk to people who are successful in their personal lives, that's how they treat life goals. Sounds over-formal but that's life.

1. Get married

2. Buy house (by 30)

3. Have kid 1 by 32, to allow 2 year birth spacing for X children

etc.

People like to be wishy-washy and romantic about finding partners, settling down, having kids... but the people who end up where they want to be are usually far more intentional about it.

[bdcravens]

Many of our "heroes" speaking about having children the same way. Steve Jobs said having children was far more important than the work he did at Apple. While he's going in a different direction with it, Elon Musk has focused on a lot on declining birthrates and what that means.

[s1mon]

I first read that very very differently with a word which is almost an anagram of Fertilo, which begins with 'fe' and ends with 'o'. I was very confused how what has been euphemistically described as "swallowing kids" would produce viable eggs.

[Smithalicious]

It's okay, you can say "fellatio", we're adults here

[dinkblam]

> Gameto is rapidly expanding the availability of Fertilo […] in key markets such as Australia, Japan, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru.

so, are those the key markets for expensive fertility treatments?

[bdcravens]

Or markets with lower burdens of entry (ie, regulations or religion-political opposition)

[kazinator]

> In the U.S., the company is preparing for Phase 3 trials.

That's that country where, if you do anything such that these eggs don't make it, you're an abortionist.

[nimish]

Oh boy we invented Axlotl tanks!

[stevenwoo]

Not if you have read the fifth book. Spoilers for approximate 50 year old book but IIRC Axlotl tanks just women forced into coma to gestate/bear children remarkably like the Handmaids Tale, published at about the same time.