China has built a conveyor-incubator for the mass rearing of newborns

An artificial womb for fetuses to safely grow in, and a robotic
nanny to monitor and take care of them (https://bit.ly/3AOHOAl).
All within the realm of possibility, say Chinese scientists, in what
could be a breakthrough for the future of childbearing in a country
facing its lowest birth rates in decades.
That is, once the law allows the use of such technology. Researchers
in Suzhou, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, say they have
developed an artificial intelligence system that can monitor and
take care of embryos as they grow into fetuses in an artificial womb
environment.
This AI nanny is looking after a large number of animal embryos for
now, they said in findings published in the domestic peer-reviewed
Journal of Biomedical Engineering last month.
But the same technology could eliminate the need for a woman to
carry her baby, allowing the fetus to grow more safely and
efficiently outside her body, the paper says.
The artificial womb, or “long-term embryo culture device”, is a
container where they have mouse embryos growing in a line of
cubes filled with nutritious fluids, says the team led by professor
Sun Haixuan at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering
and Technology, a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Earlier, the development process of each embryo had to be observed,
documented and adjusted manually – a labour-intensive task that
became unsustainable as the scale of the research increased.
The robotic system or “nanny” now created can monitor the embryos
in unprecedented detail, as it moves up and down the line around the
clock, the research paper says.
AI technology helps the machine detect the smallest signs of change
on the embryos and fine-tune the carbon dioxide, nutrition and
environmental inputs.
The system can even rank the embryos by health and development
potential. When an embryo develops a major defect or dies, the
machine would alert a technician to remove it from the womblike
receptacle.
Current international laws prohibit experimental studies on human
embryos beyond two weeks of development.
However, research on the later stages is important because “there
are still many unsolved mysteries about the physiology of typical
human embryonic development”, Sun and his colleagues say in
their paper.
The technology would “not only help further understand the origin
of life and embryonic development of humans, but also provide
a theoretical basis for solving birth defects and other major
reproductive health problems”, they add.
This comes as China faces a sharp decline in birth rates, with the
number of newborns nearly halving in the five years from 2016.
Net population growth last year was the lowest in six decades,
according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Artificial womb technology is not new, and has developed rapidly
in recent years.
In 2019, a research team with the Institute of Zoology in Beijing
took a fertilised monkey egg to the organ-forming stage in a
synthetic uterus, the first time a primate embryo had gone this
far outside the mother’s body.
The same year, scientists in the Netherlands told the BBC that
they were within 10 years of building an artificial womb to save
premature babies.
Another team in Israel brought a batch of over 100 mouse embryos
to half-grown fetus stage in March last year.
“I don’t think technology would be a problem,” a researcher with
the Capital Institute of Paediatrics in Beijing said.
The issue would be legal and ethical challenges in China and beyond,
said the researcher who requested not to be named due to the
sensitivity of the issue.
Surrogacy is banned in China by law. Artificial womb technology
would turn a hospital into a surrogate parent. “I don’t think any
hospital would want to bear this responsibility,” the researcher
said.
Mass production of babies in an artificial womb plant might help
maintain the population in a country where citizens are not keen to
bear children. But what might be the social or psychological
implications?
“If everyone is born this way, fair enough. But if some children
are given birth to by parents, and some by the government, there
will be a big problem.”