[extropy-chat] "Artificial" Womb

[Robert Bradbury]

On 10/19/06, spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:

> Ja, wildly oversimplifying.  The mother-baby system is unimaginably
> complicated, with hormonal feedback control systems that are poorly
> understood to this day.


It isn't unimaginably complicated.  There are only ~38,000 genes in the
human genome.  Only a small subset of those produce secreted proteins in the
bloodstream (I'd guess perhaps 10% or less).  Limit this to known hormones
and one is talking less than 100 different molecules.

Compare this to ~10 million parts in CVN-76.  I'm surprised Spike to hear a
person in your position, considering some of the things your company has
built, making an argument that the delivery of a moderately complex mixture
of materials from source to destination with a few feedback loops as being
"unimaginably complicated".

 Consider that no mammal has been gestated in anartificial womb, living
> subjects upon which can be experimented freely.  We could theoretically take
> a mammalian fetus out of the womb and surgically arrange an external
> umbilical cord.  Of course the animal rights people wouldn't like it one
> bit.  But as far as I know it has never been done.  We are a long ways off
> from artificial wombs for humans methinks.


Oh, I don't think we would be that far away if someone wanted to throw a
couple of billion $ at it (the price of aircraft carriers).  The problem of
course is that natural wombs are a much "cheaper" source of the desired
product and people don't take the need for artificial wombs (e.g. jump
starting humanity elsewhere) very seriously.

That said, I heard a number of years ago that the Japanese were working on
the problem due to the decline in population in Japan which was due in part
due to women apparently wanting to have fewer children and in many cases
only one child.  I've not heard whether or not they ran into difficulties --
but I believe that was before human genome completion and more modern
methods of tissue bioengineering -- now it would be a much different
ballgame.

Robert
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