From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read more from the series here.
Decades before the first “test tube babies,” there were “biological cradles.” In fact, artificial wombs, which may soon be entering human trials for high-risk premature babies, got their start as far back as the early 1960s when researchers developed devices and methods to grow human embryos in a lab for as long as 50–60 days.
“This is not the relatively simple tissue culture,” Popular Science associate editor Joan Steen explained in June 1962, “where highly specialized cells like bone marrow or liver are kept growing in glass dishes fed by nutrient broths.”
Steen visited the lab of a surgeon in Italy, Daniele Petrucci, who had been developing embryos for their potential to support organ transplants. “This is growing the whole organism from scratch,” Steen wrote. “Taking the microscopic human egg cell and attempting, against all odds, to fertilize it and keep it alive for a long time.”
Much has changed in embryo research since 1962. From growing and printing synthetic organs to cellular reprogramming to artificial wombs, what scientists have learned from embryo studies has been breathtaking. But we still can’t sustain human embryos outside a womb for very long, and, more than a half century on, Petrucci’s vision of lab-grown organs remains mostly experimental.
Ectogenesis, the process of growing a human from conception to birth outside a body, is still the stuff of science fiction, ominously portrayed by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where lab-grown babies are engineered into social castes. In part, that’s because, by the 1970s, ethical concerns about embryo research led to funding restrictions, laws, and research regulations that have limited what scientists can explore. But it’s…
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