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Imagine a company capable of raising human babies. A kind of mechanical farm with hundreds of containers and inside each one someone’s child floats. Its name is Actolife and over the past week it has managed to go viral with a video showcasing its features. In it, he talks about his 30,000 artificial inseminations and promises a solution for couples who can’t get pregnant a baby. But Actolife doesn’t stop there. As the video progresses, the company highlights how committed it is to the environment and claims to use energy that comes entirely from renewable sources, such as the sun and wind. In fact, it recycles its waste, turning it back into nutrients to feed the fetus. Yet Actolife may seem like a lot milestone In the history of humanity, there’s only one problem: none of it is real.
The video is a 3D animation, but therefore this fact should not surprise us too much, since its technical quality is more typical of the last decade than the present. It wouldn’t be the first time that a project in development decides to take advantage of 3D animation to show itself to the public. The difference is that Actolife isn’t even a development project. It’s just a concept, with the same rigor and development that any science fiction movie could have. The man in charge of the video is Yemeni science communicator Hashem al-Ghaili, whose training in biotechnology hasn’t deterred him from dreaming of a company that, right now, is scientifically and technologically impossible. We may think that this is nothing more than a science fiction game, but as Ghily’s statements make it clear, we already have the necessary technology for them and, in fact, the engineers have already achieved it. , but boundaries Morality stunts their growth. Is this bold claim true?
Gilly’s invention
The community of experts in reproductive medicine is abundantly clear: We do not have the technology or scientific knowledge necessary to develop an artificial womb that allows human embryos to be incubated from conception to birth. There’s not much about it, it’s against the entire community of experts. However, if we don’t rely on the scientific consensus, we can see if, by any chance, there are specific studies that have achieved anything similar to what Gilly promises. The answer is again negative. For example, a study published in Nature in 2017 hit the media. In it, some researchers managed to design an artificial uterus called a “biobag”, in which they were able to keep an embryo alive. Of course, the embryo was from a sheep and had spent the last 4 weeks of its gestation in the biobag. If we can do this with human embryos and during 40 weeks of pregnancy, it is a huge leap forward.
Other interesting studies on the artificial uterus have been published since then, though none are quite as spectacular. Therefore, we are talking about a technology that does not even exist in animals, its adaptation to humans and, above all, its commercial acceptance may take decades (in the best of cases). Some have defended the accuracy of the video, arguing that we have been able to see a premature baby live to 21 weeks and complete its gestation in an incubator. But although it may seem so, it has nothing to do with the challenge of designing an artificial womb. It’s not about doubling the time we can keep embryos in the incubator. have specific complexities of the first moments of evolve embryos that don’t present during those last weeks and we need technology Completely different from the present to deal with these specifications.
A sign of loose ends, wrongness and utopianism
So, we are in front of a complete legend. In fact, it doesn’t even suggest how it might work. technology Revolutionary, they only embellish it with peripheral details that don’t explain much. They indicate that they have 75 laboratories, each with 400 growth pods, which they call artificial wombs. They talk about how there will be two tanks per lab, one with nutrients that will go into the pod and one with waste that will come out of the pod, but by magic from an unknown enzymatic reaction, the waste will turn back into nutrients. Being an element We know that embryonic development is a highly complex process where an infinity of substances and stimuli come into play. We haven’t been able to identify all of them and know their true effect, so it is pointless to imitate or collect them in the name of “nutrients”.
This becomes clear when the announcer promises that the Growth Pods are completely sterile. We now know that microbes live in the womb. What’s more, we know that they are important for the correct development of the embryo and, for example, of its intestinal villi. They also say that babies learn words in the womb and that the pod will have speakers to talk to the fetus. The first statement is simply false, the second (as they call it) can alter the normal development of the child’s ear. However the real problem is not theoretical obscurity, technical utopianism or lack of rigor, but the ethical aspects.
highly renewable, but eugenic
There is a psychological effect whereby the first symptoms we see in a person interfere with further exploration. If someone makes a good first impression on us, we’ll assume they’re more attractive, intelligent, and likeable than they are, and that can make us more forgiving of their behavior. Its name is the “halo effect” and it is what is achieved as the video begins, when it says that EctoLife is powered entirely by renewable energy. It broadcasts a series of moral values to us in the 11th second of a video that goes on for more than 8 and a half minutes. Maybe that’s why many have ignored the other affirmations somewhat more controversial.
For example, referring to biological parents as “real parents” is what it would mean for adoptive parents. But the really serious stuff comes when they rage Design à la carte embryos, with physical characteristics that their parents prefer: eye color, height, physical strength, etc. We are talking about eugenics, with all its ethical implications. This is a debate that is in academia, both in the faculties of philosophy and in the faculties of the life sciences, without doubt, but a leap from controversy to professional generalization, which is now and should be insurmountable. All of these proposals to personalize your child are accompanied by a particularly disturbing expression in which they refer to the organism as a “genetically superior embryo”. In fact, the video ends with Actolife’s tagline, which is revealed to be “resuming growth”.
We can go on about how far we are from being able to use the CRISPR-Cas gene editing tools in humans in the manner described in the video. Or, perhaps, we can explain why today we do not have the most far The idea of how a person’s height is determined genetically. The list of errors, problems and doubts would be endless and after all, EctoLife is nothing more than an animated short. Because the problem is not Ghali’s doing, rather it may be a good reflection of the hasty direction our society is headed.
Don’t get it:
- It may seem that such a fuss is completely inappropriate for an uninspiring animated video. Hashem al-Ghaili does not intend to sell anything, he does not ask for money, he has not said that these pictures are real. However, we live in a time where technology is advancing at an enormous pace and ethics and law should not be left behind, as has happened on other occasions. The popular response to this video is an interesting social thermometer. Do new generations continue to see eugenics as a threat? Or have we let our guard down now that the last century’s demons of logic have persisted? Actolife is not a reality, but it invites us to ask ourselves whether we wish it could one day.
Reference (MLA):
- World’s first ‘artificial insemination facility’ a creepy glimpse of future pregnancies (no date) The Economic Times. Available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/worlds-first-artificial-womb-facility-is-a-creepy-glipse-of-pregnancy-in-future/articleshow/96203552. cms (Accessed: December 14, 2022).
- Partridge, E., Davey, M., Hornik, M. (2010). and others. An extra-uterine system for physiologically supporting the extremely premature lamb. net common 8, 15112 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15112
- Aguilera-Castrejon, A., Oldak, B., Shani, T. and others. Pre-uterine mouse embryogenesis from pre-gastrulation to late organogenesis. nature 593, 119–124 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03416-3
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