The Medical Futurist Explains – The Artificial Womb

Click-bait high-tech or healthcare headlines confuse and mislead readers, as more often than not they claim either superlative traits or hellish dystopias about innovations. In my new article series, I try to make sense of sensationalist news in healthcare as well as address the real purpose of digital technology and its ethical considerations. Take the artificial womb. Instead of visualizing the utopian scene from The Matrix, where babies are not born, but “grown” in fluid-filled bags, the artificial womb will help save the lives of extremely premature babies in the future. Let me explain. What happened? – Premature lambs were successfully gestated in artificial wombs On 25 April 2017, Nature Communications published a study led by researcher Emily Partridge that provided the most successful demonstration yet of an “artificial womb”. Extremely premature lambs, a close animal model for human fetuses, were suspended in a liquid-filled, plastic-covered extra-uterine womb, allowing the lambs to further develop for four weeks. The researchers used eight lamb fetuses that were 105 to 115 days old—a level of development comparable to a 23-week-old human fetus. The small, pinkish living beings were floating, dreaming, eating and growing as if surrounded by “regular” amniotic liquid. According to preliminary estimations, animal studies will be completed within two years, and if approved, such artificial wombs might be tested on extremely premature human fetuses withi...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Bioethics TMF Explains artificial womb future Healthcare Innovation Medicine pregnancy Source Type: blogs