Baby in a Box
By Natalie Angier
Published: May 16, 1999
A month shy of giving birth to her first child, Laura Pouzer, a college chemistry teacher, reclines on a padded table at Johns Hopkins University, the luxuriousness of her belly and her wit on equal display as she takes the infamous Stroop stress test. Lists of words flash on a screen, each of them specifying a color -- blue, yellow, white, purple -- but each printed in a color other than the color it signifies. It is Pouzer's assignment to call out, as quickly as possible, the colors the words appear in, rather than the color they specify. I look at the slides over her shoulder and feel my brain lurch and creak. I see the word ''blue,'' I think the word ''blue,'' the tint it's written in be damned.
Pouzer, though, is acing the Stroop, flying through the lists without missing a beat or flubbing a shade. ''Perfect, perfect,'' says Kathleen Costigan, a researcher and obstetrical nurse. ''You're awesome.'' As Pouzer barrels along, transponders taped to her belly reveal two things: first, that she is enviably relaxed, her heart rate slow and skin-conductance response flat; and second, that the 36-week-old male fetus within her is sleeping soundly. It is as though the purity of the mother's mental concentration has lulled the baby into long-wave bliss.
The test over, the 28-year-old Pouzer nudges her eyeglasses up her nose and shrugs. ''That wasn't too bad,'' she says to Costigan and Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist. ''Much easier than the last time.'' A moment later, thump, jab, squirm. Her fetus is awake. Something about his mother has changed, and he is practically knocking on the door of her uterine chamber to find out what it is.
Half a world away, in the laboratory of Yosinori Kuwabara and his colleagues at Juntendou University in Tokyo, a fetal goat floats in a clear acrylic tank the size of a large toaster oven, bathed in eight quarts of artificial amniotic fluid kept at body temperature. Its umbilical cord is threaded to two machines that jointly perform the nuts and bolts of a placenta, pumping in blood, oxygen and nutrients and cleaning out waste. The fetus is almost 20 weeks old, weighs about six pounds and has been living in its eerie fishbowl of a universe since it was removed from its mother by Caesarean section several days earlier. The creature behaves like any other prenatal goat, blinking its soft black eyes and kicking its slender white limbs. Should it survive for two more weeks, to the full 21-week goat term, it will be ''born'': lifted out of the tank and its umbilicus cut.
Dr. Kuwabara and his co-workers are striving to create a viable artificial womb, a system to sustain a developing infant when the real womb won't or can't do. So far, the researchers have managed to keep their goats-on-a-rope alive for up to 10 days, and they are getting closer to understanding why the artificial environment eventually fails its charges.
The scientists hesitate when asked when their experimental uterus will be ready for human use, but others happily speculate for them. ''There are a lot of difficult technical problems to be overcome,'' says Malcolm Levene, professor of pediatrics and child health at the University of Leeds in England. ''But I see them as being soluble in the next 5 to 10 years.''
In vivo, in vitro, the womb in two views: one, the mother's belly, the sum of humanity's yesterdays, the umbilicus the original apron string that yokes us all to the body's throbbing loneliness and joy; and the other, the acrylic baby bumper, an embryonic technology that has the seductive flash of the eternal tomorrow, of the airplane foil, the computer screen, the crystal ball. Yet as polarized as the two vignettes of the uterus initially appear, they are both, in the end, about the future. Tales of reproduction and birth have always been about the future, about extending the shelf life of your longings and fantasies beyond your personal expiration date. Maybe my child will revolutionize art; maybe my child will help colonize Mars. People have always dreamed of consorting with gods and bearing immortal progeny, or suckling at the breast of the Virgin Mary to attain eternal salvation.
Being the natural currency of tomorrow, the topic of human fertility lends itself to the wildest sci-fi spasms and millennial speculations. And as though to oblige our fixation on big round numbers, our high priests and priestesses of fecundity, our reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists, gynecologists and geneticists, lately have pipetted up an unceasing supply of millennialist material. Postmenopausal women have gestated their daughters' eggs and given birth to their own grandchildren. Congenitally infertile men can have their dysfunctional sperm mechanically rammed into the body of an egg, and thus sire sons who inherit the once uninheritable: the fathers' sterility. An older woman's fading egg, and the chromosomes it enfolds, can be rejuvenated through the addition of the rich, viscous cytoplasm from a younger woman's egg. If that chimeric gamete is then fertilized and transferred into the womb of a third woman for gestation, the resulting child can claim three biological mothers: chromosomal mom, cytoplasmic mom and gestational mom. Once a little couplet said it all: mother's baby, father's maybe. Now DNA tests can pretty well settle the question of biological paternity, while the issue of biological maternity has been sufficiently muddied to demand the regular intercession of judges.