What is ‘Artificial womb’?

January 26, 2022

Recently, in a Twitter exchange, CEO of Tesla Elon Musk, co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and founder of e-commerce platform Gumroad Sahil Lavingia talked about population collapse and use of ‘artificial wombs’ to tackle this crisis.

Highlights

Their talk was focused on possible world population collapse as well as the options of creating synthetic or artificial wombs as a solution.
According to Elon Musk, if there isn’t enough population on Earth, then there won’t be enough for Mars.
Use of synthetic wombs would further remove the high burden of pregnancy. Thus, it will reduce the inequality.

What is ‘synthetic wombs’?

A synthetic womb is also called as “artificial uterus” or “artificial womb”. This device allows for extracorporeal pregnancy. In this process, foetus is grown outside the body of an organism, normally carrying the foetus to term.

Application of artificial womb

Artificial womb is a replacement organ, that have many applications:

Artificial womb can assist male or female couples in the development of a foetus.
This can be performed as a switch from natural uterus to artificial uterus, thus moving foetal viability threshold to a much earlier stage of pregnancy.
The device can be compared to neonatal incubator with extended functions.
It could be used for initiation of foetal development.
It could also help in making foetal surgery procedures at early stage an option, rather than to postpone them until the pregnancy term.

Significance of artificial womb

Development of an artificial womb could help in saving lives of premature babies.

When was artificial womb reported?

In 2017, a device closest to an ‘artificial womb’ was reported, when a research team from Philadelphia revealed that, prototype biobag successfully supported lamb foetuses. All emerged from the biobag healthy and evaded complications associated with preterm birth.