Bryan Armstrong explains how incubators and lab techniques now keep premature infants and embryos alive earlier than ever. The unsolved problem: replicating how an embryo attaches to the uterine wall and builds placental blood vessels. He says breakthroughs will start in animals and could eventually make artificial wombs safer than natural birth, using the same safety logic as self-driving cars.
an embryo in a lab, I think people have been able to keep those alive longer. And then conversely, when babies are born prematurely, they can put them in these incubators and there's different technology. I'm actually not an expert on this, but the number of weeks that you can be born prematurely keeps getting earlier and earlier and still have survival, right? And so in some ways those things are getting closer and closer together. And then there's this gap in the middle, the embryo, I think it needs to attach to the wall of the uterus and this is where it gets the vasculature that nourishes it and then it has a placenta and all these kind kind of things, right? That part nobody, as far as I know, has figured out. And, you know, if they are able to figure that out, it'll start with animals and different things, as it always does in these studies. But eventually you could get it to a place where it's actually safer to do a birth that way than it is the natural way, so to speak. So it doesn't mean it has to be perfect. And it's just— it's kind of like self-driving cars. It's not that they need to have zero accidents ever. They just need to be better than human drivers.
