{"id":55591,"date":"2017-04-25T10:42:28","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T17:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/an-artificial-womb-successfully-grew-baby-sheep-and-humans-could-be-next"},"modified":"2017-04-26T12:55:07","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T19:55:07","slug":"an-artificial-womb-successfully-grew-baby-sheep-and-humans-could-be-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/an-artificial-womb-successfully-grew-baby-sheep-and-humans-could-be-next","title":{"rendered":"An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep \u2014 and humans could be next"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop \u2014 much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that takes the first step toward an artificial womb. One day, this device could help to bring premature human babies to term outside the uterus \u2014 but right now, it has only been tested on sheep.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s appealing to imagine a world where artificial wombs grow babies, eliminating the health risk<\/a> of pregnancy. But it\u2019s important not to get ahead of the data, says Alan Flake<\/a>, fetal surgeon at the Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia and lead author of today\u2019s study. \u201cIt\u2019s complete science fiction to think that you can take an embryo and get it through the early developmental process and put it on our machine without the mother being the critical element there,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Instead, the point of developing an external womb \u2014 which his team calls the Biobag \u2014 is to give infants born months too early a more natural, uterus-like environment to continue developing in, Flake says.<\/p>\n

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Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop \u2014 much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1495],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56133,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55591\/revisions\/56133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}