While creating chimeras - the name for creatures that are a mix of organisms - might seem like the more ethically fraught of these two advances, ethicists think the medical benefits far outweigh the ethical risks. and Chinese team announced that it had successfully grown, for the first time, embryos that included both human and monkey cells in plates to a stage where organs began to form.Īs both a philosopher and a biologist I cannot help but ask how far researchers should take this work. Until this experiment, no one had grown a mammal embryo outside a womb this far into pregnancy. On March 17, an Israeli team announced that it had grown mouse embryos for 11 days - about half of the gestation period - in artificial wombs that were essentially bottles. Two recent scientific developments suggest that Huxley’s imagined world of functionally manufactured people is no longer far-fetched.
In the novel, technicians in charge of the hatcheries manipulate the nutrients they give the fetuses to make the newborns fit the desires of society. Instead, embryos are grown in artificial wombs until they are brought into the world, a process called ectogenesis.
In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “ Brave New World,” people aren’t born from a mother’s womb.
0 kommentar(er)
