A lot my analysis of the future of pregnancy and the artificial uterus is based on my concern for the health and well-being, for the bodies of those who gestate babies. If you are women of childbearing age, the most likely reason for you to end up needing medical treatment is pregnancy and childbirth. The project we are working on, which is often called 'artificial womb', but we call it mostly perinatal life support.
Our goal is to help to extremely preterm babies. I think it's very easy to be led off track by the slightly Matrix nature of this technology. To be fair, I don't think that's a very accurate representation of what anyone's trying to do. I think there is always an ethical price. My job as a scientist is to make the technology and put it on the table. We are going to be capable of creating an external womb within a generation or two. And we all are going to have a completely different reaction to what it means for us and for our lives. Well, essentially what we do is we connect some very thin tubes or catheters to the umbilical cord, and we're able to reroute blood through that. And that allows us to provide gas exchange to the fetus, it's driven by the fetal heart. We're able to oxygenate the fetus without needing to use the lungs to do that. We used the heart of the perinate itself to pump around the blood, so it must be a very dedicated small device, which is, from a technological point of view, quite complex. So our project is dedicated to simulations. We do computer simulation, so we mimic the perinate by developing robot mannequins. The reason for that, if you're going to introduce something new clinically, it's got to be manifestly better than what's already available.
If you look at 23 weeks your survival rate per say is probably 40, maybe 50 percent. So you've got to be punching, well, well above that. We are already trying to work on other animals that have similarities in the shape of the embryo to humans. And one of those is the rabbit actually. And I can report that we are very, very successful with very minor adaptation to do that in rabbits. So that is all encouraging, suggesting that there is viability to do this in humans. I would predict that it is possible with the same system and this is something that we and other labs are trying to pursue. I imagined an alternate reality where the invention of a portable external womb has been widely accepted throughout society. I worked as a bio engineer myself, so my background is as a scientist, and I suggested this as a solution. It can save the lives of premature babies. It can be life changing for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to have a child in all sorts of ways. But there are also some huge questions.
If technology replaces traditional pregnancy and childbirth, then who owns that technology? Who controls its use? Who is it going to be for? Is there something that could be forced on people? People with the uterus are generally expected to be the ones that carry pregnancies. If artificial uteruses are available to everyone. Yes, I think it could really make a difference to sort of gender roles. On the one hand, maybe we would just see a much greater fluidity. But I do think it's possible that we might see things go the other way. We still live in societies where women come under heavy pressure to fulfil certain social norms and expectations. But what makes the revolution is not the scientific development in itself, it's the social response to that. A technology like this, if it's developed to the point where we can gestate a baby for the full length of term outside the human body, then viability begins at conception. And that's quite a huge shift. In the 1970s, when the first IVF baby was born, there was a lot of concern and antipathy for the idea of scientists being so involved in reproduction.
Quite often when people say: 'Oh, this is far too risky.' They might not necessarily change their view if it turned out to be safe. It's more something to do with the unnaturalness, with the idea that we're being against the sort of biological design of our species. Is there justification that the benefit is so big that we are willing to pay some ethical price? You don't ban nuclear physics to some crazy person can make a nuclear bomb. You don't ban virology research because someone who's crazy would make a dangerous virus. The same thing here, we should be very thoughtful and have open discussions because again, there is huge benefit involved. We also have to have to be mindful of the incredibly complex nature of running one of these systems. You need a large number of extremely highly trained individuals and fairly vast resources to run the system. You would be much better spending money on things like education and access to all sorts of medical support and child care, and all of those other things that are fundamentally important. I think every woman you ask would probably feel quite differently about that question. For me personally, I think it would be great. For a lot of women, it would be a heartbreaking lost. One of the things that's really important is that women play an essential role in the development of this technology, so that it doesn't become the patriarchy choosing what's going to happen to women's bodies. It has to be about individual choice.
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