Earlier this year, molecular biologist and filmmaker Hashem Al-Ghaili touted his vision for an "artificial womb" Ectolife: 75 state-of-the-art biological cabins, each with 400 "artificial wombs," and a facility capable of carrying 30,000 babies a year.
Ectolife will make fertility problems such as low sperm count, miscarriage, and childbirth pain a thing of the past, and with the help of CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing technology, it will edit the baby's physical characteristics through more than 300 genes: customize the baby's eye color, hair color, skin color, height, physical strength, intelligence level... Be a promising future.
Advances in "artificial womb" technology
The technology is strongly supported by Musk, who has always been worried that if the fertility rate is allowed to continue to decline, the overall social and economic decline of mankind is not alarmist. In 1950, the average number of children per woman had in her lifetime was 4.7; in 2017, that number plummeted to 2.4 and continues to decline year by year. Europe, North America, and East Asia have entered the era of ultra-low fertility, and the generation replacement rate has dropped to 1.6-1.1, and it is estimated that the population in developed societies will become extinct in more than ten generations and hundreds of years.
Musk then contacted Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the blockchain platform "Ethereum", and Hashem Al-Ghaili, etc., to start "Blade Runner"-like brainstorming and scientific research innovation. Now the technology world has the name of "Musks": a group of "crazy" knowledge/capital duos led by Musk, who hold hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and dare to take risks and challenges, hoping to transform human society and master the future development direction of human civilization.
While Ectolife is making progress, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands has the world's largest "artificial womb" research and development team, and its equipment is now used to rescue (previously difficult-to-live) premature babies. Guid Oei, a professor at the university and an obstetrician at the Máxima Medical Centre in the Netherlands, said: "[Now] it's just an 'in vitro version' of the human womb. We plan to complete the trial by 2025 for clinical use. ”
In 2017, the "artificial womb" animal test by Alan Flake's team at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia successfully grew sheep embryos in an in vitro facility for 4 weeks (the trial was eventually terminated due to "animal protocol" restrictions).
In 2021, Israeli scientists used the "artificial uterus" for the first time to cultivate 5-day-old mouse embryos for 6 days, successfully breeding nearly 100 healthy mice, equivalent to reaching the human fetal stage.
China's "artificial womb" research started late. Researchers Gu Qi and Wang Hongmei of the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wang Shutao, a researcher of the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly researched the key problems, and spent nearly 5 years to develop the "bionic uterus", and have successfully developed blastocysts (E3.5) to the early organogenesis stage (E8.5) in vitro, and the relevant results have been published in Advanced Science.
At present, experts in the scientific research community believe that its technology can be used for clinical trials of human embryos. However, at present, all national governments have not approved "artificial wombs" for human testing on human grounds for human ethical, moral, legal, scientific risks, etc.
Ethically shocking
The technology of "artificial wombs" has not yet taken shape, and it has caused an uproar among the crowd: support against the word opposed.
"Progressives" believe that the technology of "artificial wombs" will achieve true social equality between men and women, ushering in a new historical era of human awakening and individual liberation.
Opponents believe that this technology will lead to the disappearance of gender differences and the complete collapse of traditional family concepts and social morality. Many voices suggest that in vitro reproduction technology will corrupt the biological meaning of males and females (by the Creator).
However, opponents seem to have to use God and literary means to influence the government and temporarily delay the development of "artificial wombs". Modern history proves that the condemnation of God, morality, literature and art may be delayed, but it cannot stop the development of science, technology and productive forces, from gunpowder to atomic bombs, from steam locomotives to spaceships, repeatedly proving the above laws.
"Artificial womb" technology or the only way for mankind to move towards "interstellar civilization". After a long interstellar voyage, interstellar colonists not only have to breed offspring, but also need to obtain animal protein food on aliens, but it is impossible to move entire cities and Australian ranches into space to "wander the earth". The predictable future of science fiction is to refrigerate the fertilized eggs of humans and animals, after a long interstellar voyage, establish an interstellar base in the outer solar system and even the "Kuiper Belt", and cultivate new humans through the "artificial womb", as well as breed various animals to create a new biosphere.
And "interstellar civilization" is destined to be only a very small number of future human top elites can set foot in, even if millions of astronauts colonize space, for the future tens of billions of earth humans, it is only one in tens of thousands. And "interstellar civilization" will inevitably reverse affect our home planet, and of course human beings on Earth will also use this technology. For governments, the "artificial womb" can completely solve the "fertility dilemma". Genetically modified and machine-bred "customized people" will theoretically have greater advantages than naturally bred people in terms of physical ability, intelligence, and avoiding genetic diseases.
For example, the human eye has many structural weaknesses, resulting in human vision not reaching the ideal level. In fact, the octopus's eye structure is more reasonable than that of humans, Hawkeye has obvious advantages in long-range vision and moving target display, and the night vision ability of cats and dogs is also enviable. Traditional nature breeds human beings, and it is impossible to have the above sci-fi abilities. But people who are genetically modified and then implanted in "artificial wombs" are likely to have fantastic vision.
Bones, muscles, hematopoietic system, cardiopulmonary function, immune system, can also be optimized and modified through genes, and even eliminate high genetic probability gene defects such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and mental disorders.
Then, compared with those of us who are naturally conceived, people made of "artificial wombs" will have a greater innate advantage, almost becoming "X-Men" mutants. Will they eliminate people born naturally? If there is a trend of elimination, is it biological evolution or a human tragedy?
Also, will the "artificial womb" bring about the alienation of the relationship between mother and child? Since ancient times, the culture of all ethnic groups of mankind has generally emphasized the deep relationship between mother and child. From the early stages of pregnancy, every pulse of the fetus is connected to the mother's heartbeat, every time the baby sucks the mother's milk, every time the mother's sincere caress... The established emotions of blood and milk make children have a deeper subconscious attachment to their mothers, can technology and machines replace?
Can a machine-born child who is not conceived by the mother establish a flesh-and-blood relationship with the parents, or can only form a relationship between an adopted child and an adoptive parent? It is difficult to determine at this time.
The development of genetic technology, and the application of "artificial wombs", will allow human reproduction to completely free from marriage, family, and even parental factors. For example, the parthenogenesis technology of the team of Hayashi Katsuhiko, a professor of biology at Kyushu University in Japan, if combined with an "artificial womb", will make only single parenting heirs (only single mothers or single fathers in the biological sense) the norm.
Human society takes tens of thousands of years, and the traditional family-based ethical and moral system established since the prehistoric Stone Age will be disintegrated, and the human whole and the individual will have to start "parents are complete, only single parents, machine makes people, human-machine integration, biochemical transformation of people..."
•(This article is only the author's personal views and does not represent the position of this newspaper)
Wu Xu