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To Be Born in a Bag

Despite recent progress, artificial wombs still face technical challenges. De-extinction efforts, of all things, are driving it forward. Just how much is anyone’s guess.

Credit: U.S. Patent and Trademark OfficeA team in Stockholm, led by obstetrics professor Bjorn Westin, connected seven “pre-viable human fetuses,” obtained from aborted pregnancies, to a simple circuit that pulled blood from a vein in the umbilical cord, oxygenated it, and returned it into the body. Matt Kemp, the lead investigator of an artificial womb project at Australia's Women and Infants Research Foundation, wrote in his evidence for last year’s FDA review that no data yet suggests the new approach can support an extremely preterm human fetus “with better results than standard neonatal care available today.” The reason, disappointing as it seems, is that these signals are still too poorly understood — a recognition prompting some researchers to prefer the term “artificial placenta” in acknowledgment that their devices are really only providing mechanical life-support functions rather than replicating the complex chemical environment of a natural womb.

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