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July 18, 2008

Making babies: the next 30 years

From Nature:

Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born 30 years ago this month after being conceived outside the body using in vitro fertilization (IVF). Helen Pearson asks what developments in reproductive medicine could have an equivalent impact in the next three decades.

Baby_2 Next I expect that germ cells — sperm and eggs — will be successfully derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells [cells that have the potential to develop into any of the body's cell types]. It will be possible to make iPS cells from skin cells, to make germ cells from these, and then combine them to make human embryos. It means every person regardless of age will be able to have children: newborn children could have children and 100-year olds could have children. It could easily happen in the next 30 years. I have no idea if the technique will be used, but it means you could have millions of gametes that could be combined at will. Today you can't experiment on human embryos because it's considered morally repugnant — and they are difficult to get. If embryos could be grown in culture like any other cell line, this latter problem would disappear. It would mean you could introduce any kind of genetic modification. The cell lines could be used to correct a mutation or to engineer an improvement, and used to make a mutant embryo for research purposes. They'd become like any other type of cell line. They would become objects and would be used as objects.

I have no idea what kind of moral value or rights we would give to those embryos. We'll probably go through the same agonizing we did with IVF. It could be terrible to begin with, but then it'll become a fact of life. Maybe 20–30 years from now we'll read in newspapers that someone made 20,000 embryos and studied their development, and we'll decide it's OK.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:05 AM | Permalink

Comments

Ford preserve us.

Posted by: Carlos | Jul 18, 2008 9:33:48 AM

I think the Next Big Thing, whenever we manage it, is be artificial wombs. We can already carry out conception in a dish, and can incubate preemies starting ~25 weeks. The trick now is to figure out the in between stages. I shouldn't be surprised if out-of-body pregnancy became as big and significant as the pill.

Posted by: D | Jul 18, 2008 10:26:47 AM

Actually I will be fairly surprised if artificial wombs turn out to be the Next Big Thing. At least, I don't think that we'll end up with a free either/or choice any time soon. Closer approximations to artificial wombs might indeed help very premature babies to survive, and very likely that technology will continue to get better. But saving the life of a "preemie" with this kind of technology is a lot different from deliberately starting from nothing more than the proverbial "glint in someone's eye" and choosing to have an artificially-gestated baby.

If my quick Google search is accurate, there's no particular correlation after all between allergies (or at least food allergies) and premature birth or low birth weight. But our medicine will have to get a _lot_ less primitive before it will actually be safer to gestate a baby in an artificial womb than in a real one. For the next century or so, at least, I would guess that would be an unconscionably risky thing to do -- given any kind of choice at all.

No guarantees on accuracy, but for a randomly Googled starter link on likely health risks, see the "Preemies: factors for survival" section of

http://www.ocfamily.com/t-kidHealth_ATVs_autistim_preemies_injuries_CPR070108.aspx

Posted by: DaveG | Jul 18, 2008 5:06:15 PM

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