Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [69]
Having tasted success, Liu removed and destroyed the embryos: according to the US Federal Government’s rulebook, two weeks is the maximum time for which you can grow human embryos in a US laboratory. She remained excited by what she had seen, though, and decided to take the research forward using animal embryos instead – mouse embryos, to be precise. This too was successful. But it was also disturbing. Liu made an artificial mouse uterus, just as she had made an artificial human uterus. She placed mouse embryos in its tissues. The embryos implanted happily, and their cells began to divide. The growing embryos sprouted blood vessels. They went almost to full term. And every single one had significant deformities.
Gestation is an incredibly complex process that requires an ever-changing chemical environment. As every researcher trying to build an artificial uterus has found, each stage has particular requirements, and the whole process places enormous demands on our ingenuity. But it is still just an engineering problem.
Ectogenesis, growing a baby outside the womb, will begin the ‘third era of human reproduction’, according to Stellan Welin, Professor of Biotechnology, Culture and Society at Linköping University, Sweden. The first era was ‘normal’ conception and pregnancy; the way modern humans have been reproducing for the first 200,000 years of their existence on this planet. The second era began with the birth of Louise Brown in 1978. Here, the foetus begins its life outside a woman and is then implanted into her body. In the third era, which may begin in our lifetimes, the entire gestation of the foetus can take place outside the woman’s body. According to fertility researcher Roger Gosden, who worked with Robert Edwards at Cambridge University during the pioneering days of IVF, this will be the boldest evolutionary step for a hundred million years – since embryonic membranes were first adapted to make a placenta and sweat glands were modified to produce breast milk. And it will happen, Gosden says. ‘The chance at last to understand the most tender period of existence and, even more importantly, to heal diseases and to help with the creation of life will surely prove irresistible.’ Arthur Caplan agrees: it might take sixty years, he suggests, but it is ‘inevitable’.
The fact that we can discuss all these technologies, that we understand the issues involved and have reduced them to engineering problems, suggests that it will indeed be inevitable. Our command over the processes of life will raise innumerable issues, but the important point to note is that it will happen – and, for all the hand-wringing and soul-searching we might do beforehand, it will not be the end of the world.
When the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was a child, her grandmother told her that the sky would fall down if she did her embroidery on the Sabbath. In a move that cemented her commitment to experimental results as the best source of reliable information, Meitner decided to test the notion for herself. One Sabbath she tentatively stuck the tip of a needle into her embroidery. Nothing happened. Then she made a couple of stitches. Still nothing. For the rest of her life, Lise Meitner happily enjoyed her favourite hobby seven days a week.
The sky did not fall on our heads as we learned to perform IVF. In 1977, the economist and social analyst Jeremy Rifkin issued an apocalyptic warning about the technology that seems a little ridiculous today: ‘What are the psychological implications of growing up as a specimen, sheltered not by a warm womb but by steel and glass, belonging to no one but the lab technician who joined together sperm and egg?’ Looking at Louise Brown, born in the following year, the answer is clear: there are no psychological implications whatsoever. Rifkin has since suggested that children nurtured in an artificial womb might become ‘violent, sociopathic or withdrawn’. That is a pointless, ignorant and potentially harmful speculation. The human experience changed with IVF, yes. But the sky did not fall