In case you're wondering, the study's authors point out:
> Our goal is not to extend the current limits of viability, but rather to offer the potential for improved outcomes for those infants who are already being routinely resuscitated and cared for in neonatal intensive care units.
One of the biggest current problems with pre-term babies, the study notes, is a respiratory condition called bronchopulmonary dysplasia:
> an arrest in lung development secondary to premature transition from liquid to gas ventilation
So having the lambs (and, eventually, the preterm infants) remain in a liquid environment allows their immature lungs to continue developing, so that when they eventually transition to gas ventilation (breathing air), their lungs are able to function correctly.
>Our goal is not to extend the current limits of viability
In the interest of looking at thing squarely in the face, this can eventually (and therefore will) be used to extend the "current limits of viability".
It's important not to put blinders on because this has a very real impact on medical ethics. Is it ethical, for instance, to develop human embryos outside of the womb for convenience?
Because, over the long term, it would reduce the selective pressure on the ability to gestate embryos in vivo, unnecessarily increasing dependence on technology.
We should try to avoid adding extinction to the list of consequences of the collapse of technological civilization.
This is such a naive understanding of human history. The defining breaking point between the Homo genus and our ape ancestors is tool use 1-2 million years ago.
Those tools (and our subsequent use of fire) enabled us to dramatically reduce the size of our digestive tract. We get more energy from our food and spend less resources to digest it because of cooking, a technology.
We have thus evolved wherein we are not capable of surviving on an entirely non cooked diet that we would gather ourselves (the energy input to gather the food plus the energy to digest the raw food is too high -- cooking makes it feasible with our technologically adapted digestive tract).
Yet no one worries about us going extinct if we were to lose access to fire or cooking utensils -- because we can recreate them with ease.
Thus, the concern shouldn't be dependence on a technology but on the ease of us losing that technology. Nonetheless, I agree that this technology is much easier to lose than fire or cooking knowledge.
That's actually something I worry about. I'm blind without my glasses, seriously, debilitatingly blind. With them, of course, I have better-than-perfect (for some value of 'perfect') vision. Should I have children? Is it ethical to do so? I honestly don't know.
My view is anything we have technology to cure we shouldn't worry about.
The more problems we can treat with technology the smaller the genetic search space becomes. evolution can focus just on the things we can't easily solve.
What is your specific visual condition, if you don't mind my asking. Most people who I'd characterize as "debilitatingly blind" are lucky if they get any benefit from conventional eyeglasses, let alone "better-than-perfect" vision. I have a significant visual impairment myself (myopia, aphakia, and nystagmus) but I wouldn't put myself in that category.
Astigmatism and severe myopia. They're easily correctable, but without glasses I can't see more than about three inches from my nose. At normal viewing distances I simply cannot even see things other people can see, like letters, small animals or children &c.
Without glasses I'd be severely crippled. I've conducted a few experiments trying to move around in public without them, and it's beyond frightening.
Thanks for sharing, and forgive my sounding skeptical. I lucked out because the aphakia and myopia sort of cancel each other out, I still need glasses but they're primarily for near-distance. If I hadn't undergone cataract surgery as an infant, I'd probably have similar challenges.
How could "technological civilization" collapse, at this point? We have extremely well-distributed records—spoken, written, digital, and more—of all of our technology and how to use it. "We forgot how" worlds are just impossible at this point, unless we all get a disease that renders us incapable of tool-usage, reading, and speech. (At which point we're not human anyway.)
One good solid exchange of nuclear weapons would do it. Once the manufacturing chains are broken and international commerce is halted, the collapse of civilization would occur pretty quickly. Even among the survivors bent on preserving knowledge, most digital records are on ephemeral media and the components of most electronic devices have a rated operating lifespan of only a decade or less.
Though somewhat dated, James Burke covers this quite well in the first episode of his classic "Connections" documentary. If anything, the situation is far worse now.
To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.
† See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across. (And even that ignores the amount of "skipping ahead" that just the existing knowledge already loaded into people's heads would enable.)
Unless we all got amnesia at once, and all lost the ability to read (and those who can, to read braille), we'd be back to civilization before the generation was over—and back to simple longevity-extending practices like freezing sperm and ova long before that.
> To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.
In this case, any disaster that prevents the regular maintenance and operation of something like an advanced hospital for at least a few decades. This includes various types of war, energy crises, or the classic SF theme of a society stagnating to point where it can no longer build certain necessary technologies but only operate them.
There's also the related threat to societies/nations that require technology to reproduce. If they get in a war with rivals that can reproduce unassisted, they have extra weak points that can be attacked.
> † See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across.
Any scenario where you have to reconstruct knowledge like that will likely be accompanied by strife that will prevent the reconstruction for a time (of decades or more).
>To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself?
Technology onset: Grey-goo type scenario
Human onset: massive cultural shift to demonize knowledge.
It's happened before. It didn't wipe all technology away, but it slowed progress to a stand-still.
Do you think it'd be possible to choose to "demonize knowledge", in a world where we know that the only way to reproduce requires technology? I would expect our biological imperative to reproduce would get the better of that attempted social more quite quickly.
That mountain of evidence mostly says that the in vivo prenatal environment is kind of... awful, though. As in, mother and foetus competing for nutrients with better maternal genes resulting in better defenses against the placental "parasite", and thus worse developmental outcomes; and better foetal genes resulting in better parasitic strategies to penetrate the uterine wall, and thus worse perinatal health outcomes for the mother.
I'd honestly stake >$10k, at this point, on the hypothesis that "growing children from embroyos in vitro, hooked up to an unlimited nutrient drip" will result in children much healthier than "regular" children, along every axis we can think of. (Presuming, of course, that we first figure out every micro-nutrient such a drip would be required to provide.)
I've seen this in a bunch of movies but it just occurred to me that this may eventually happen to humanity. Birthing children is dangerous for the mother and child, and if given the choice many women may decide to have one "grown" instead.
That's not a situation "we" as a culture/civilization/species face, it's a situation they face. The rest of us are perfectly capable of doing what our bodies are designed to do without doctors and scientists and other forms of assistance.
IVF babies aren't guaranteed to be infertile, they just have a slightly higher chance of it (because of selection bias in the parents).
My wife and I might well have babies via IVF because she can't get pregnant while on chemotherapy - but that doesn't mean we carry any infertility genes. She just had the bad luck to have some cells mutate into cancer.
What is "naturally?" At some point in technological progress, we need to build machines to have children. But go a bit further along the line, and maybe we'd find the human body automatically building the machine that builds the human body—in effect, laying eggs.
Er, sorry, I just meant that as "at some [early] point along the timeline of the possible developments in biomedical technology, the world would look like one where—at least early adopters—would need a machine to make children." I didn't mean to imply that there's some sort of imperative to go toward that point.
But the continuation of the human "species" as a single entity would then assume/require class miscegenation to re-constrain the DNA from the in vitro-grown humans every few generations.
Otherwise, you'd now have two diverging human species, who might eventually not even be able to interbreed.
> Otherwise, you'd now have two diverging human species, who might eventually not even be able to interbreed.
It's a possible outcome in a few centuries. We might get one human species that would call themselves robot-overlords, those would be born in artificial wombs have artificially enhanced brains and have very prominent positions on Earth. The plebs would sleep on the stairs and drink their soylent green.
I'll bet against you. In fact, you inadvertently bring up the very undoing of your hypothetical bet when you say...
>presuming, of course, that we first figure out every micro-nutrient such a drip would be required to provide.
It's important to understand that these micro-nutrients and other chemical signalling-agents vary through time, and in response to such things as social environment, bodily movement of the mother, sensory input (sight, hearing, olfaction, the haptic senses, etc), occasional punctual stress, pleasure etc.
You're ignoring a huge source of complexity which is the systematic variation of these signals in response to the external environment.
Temporal dynamics of signaling pathways matter.
That's simply not the kind of thing we're even remotely close to being able to simulate in a synthetic system. Hell it's not even something we're remotely close to understanding.
What kind of infrastructure will this require? You'll need researchers to learn how such an object can be feasible, engineers to design it, people to construct it, parts must be ordered (some of which you might not even have the capability to make yourself), raw materials to make the parts must be mined, logistics must be done to make sure all of these parts are in the right place at the right time, enterprises must be constructed around building, selling, and marketing these devices.
What kind of power dynamics does that create? It involves the work of hundreds of thousands of people across every sort of country spanning the entire globe, many of whom hold a vast amount of power over you and the rest of whom have no obligation except financial to cooperate with you.
What exactly do we gain from giving so many people such vast power over us?
Assuming identical outcomes, perhaps there's no issue, but you don't make the leap to identical outcomes without first progressing through outcomes that are probably worse to begin with.
Having just had our first child, I see a lot of room for improvement.
Identical outcomes is a low bar, in the long-term. So then the question becomes, is the short-term pain worth a much safer future.
One of the interesting things about humans is we're all born preterm, because of our large heads and narrow hips. So you can potentially extended gestation by another term.
More interesting to me is the way it might change the abortion debate. If it were safe and not invasive for the mother to "donate" their not-yet-a-baby, is it moral to simply terminate the pregnancy? If there is a long waiting list of childless couples waiting to adopt, can donating an unwanted zygote be compared to postmortem organ donation?
You can't improve outcomes without altering the limits on viability, unless the technique happens to have a hard cutoff in utility at or after the point currently considered "viable". Viability is, after all, simply a characterization of where the combination of all relevant factors points to a certain level of expected outcome; improving any aspect of outcomes also expands viability, generally.
Just because you're doing X doesn't mean that you've set out to do X. Sometimes it's the goal, and not the action itself, that determines the ethical implications of an action.
No, the goal may determine someone's moral judgement of the actor, but the ethical implications of an action come from the outcomes (at a minimum, those that are reasonably foreseeable), not just the motivation.
> Our goal is not to extend the current limits of viability, but rather to offer the potential for improved outcomes for those infants who are already being routinely resuscitated and cared for in neonatal intensive care units.
One of the biggest current problems with pre-term babies, the study notes, is a respiratory condition called bronchopulmonary dysplasia:
> an arrest in lung development secondary to premature transition from liquid to gas ventilation
So having the lambs (and, eventually, the preterm infants) remain in a liquid environment allows their immature lungs to continue developing, so that when they eventually transition to gas ventilation (breathing air), their lungs are able to function correctly.