Netherland's Plan to create Artificial Wombs, improve invitro-fertilization and eradicate Genetic Diseases

“..... allow the creation of embryos for scientific research – and under very strict conditions to give people the possibility of (healthy) children....... The research has to do with infertility, artificial reproduction techniques and hereditary or congenital diseases”

Dutch Health Minister, Edith Schippers on changes coming to Netherlands law relating to embryonic research

Human cloning may be happenings sooner than we thought. The need to improve invitro-fertilization may be driving us towards this lofty goal.

The Government of the Netherlands has announced changes on its laws on embryonic research as reported in the article “Netherlands gives green light for growing human embryos”, published Saturday 28 May 2016, Agence France-Presse.

Up until now, most embryonic research has been conducted on leftover embryos from invitro-fertilization. The new rules mean that researcher can now growing human embryos “under strict and limited conditions” for scientific research.

Possibly too, they may also be able to solicit embryos from sources other than those leftover from invitro-fertilization such as from women who submit their ova for experimental trials under contract.

Effectively, ova submitted from a ova bank much the same way Jamaican men can donate sperm to a Sperm bank as explained in my blog article entitled “How US$1500 monthly from HWFMU helps College Jamaican Males impregnate Professional Women” for research purposes.

Netherlands and CRISPR-Cas9 - Prevent hereditary or congenital diseases by editing DNA

It would also allow them leeway to do research into combating hereditary disease, most likely via using CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat).

 CRISPR-Cas9 is a protein that is derived from a bacteria, Cas9 which can be used to splice in a new DNA strand at a specific point in DNA molecule in a Genome. The video below explains it a bit better.

Already, since January 2016, Britain has given permission to Dr. Kathy Niakan and her team at the Francis Crick Institute to edit the human genome using CRISPR-Cas9 as I'd reported in my blog article entitled “Why Dr. Kathy Niakan of Francis Crick Institute Gene Editing means Automated Human Birth”. 

The Netherlands also has similar aims and may even use CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the human genome to prevent hereditary or congenital diseases. So why are the Dutch interested in reducing infertility and research into artificial reproduction techniques?

Dutch law and Genetic Research – Improvements needed to make invitro-fertilization more efficient

First, the decision for changing Dutch law to allow the growing human embryos “under strict and limited conditions” for scientific research.

That means no embryos under experimental conditions surviving beyond 14 days, a preset arbitrary limit that can be overcome by accelerating the growth of the fertilized ovum using time-warping technology…more on that in another article. For now, scope out this Ted-Ed Video on Invitro-Fertilization.

The reason for the Dutch decision is that it'll give scientists access to the freshest ova and sperm possible to conduct research onto invitro-fertilization, as those left-over from invitro-fertilization may be damaged during the freezing process. The use of leftover ova was always possible, ironically due to the poor success rate of invitro-fertilization.

During the first week after fertilization, the sperm-ova amalgam forms a blastocyst, the 200- to 300-cell structure critical to human development. However only 50% of fertilized ovum becomes blastocysts after invitro-fertilization.

Of that number, only 50% can be implanted into the womb of the egg donor. Even after that, only 50% make it past 3 months. To put that in numbers, of 100 ovum used in invitro-fertilization, only 13 ever have the potential to become babies.

This means a lot of ova contributed form a single woman are wasted because the science to fertilize ova outside of the womb, invitro-fertilization, is nowhere near as perfect at simulating the conditions within the womb for the storage of ova.

Scientists suspect that may be the reason why invitro-fertilization has such a high failure rate among geneticists, as no-one genetics lab experimenting with leftover ova has ever managed to get them to live beyond the stipulated 14 day rule imposed by medical science researchers.

Dutch and CRISPR-Cas9 – Humans in the future to be grown artificially out of the womb

For this reason, research into simulating the perfect conditions for invitro-fertilization may lead to the creation of artificial wombs as argued in my blog article entitled “University of California CRISPR-Cas9 Human Organs in Pigs means Human Chimeras Possible”.

This research using CRISPR-CaS9 is not just aimed at improving the success rate of invitro-fertilization. In the long run, it aims to eliminate hereditary or congenital diseases and ushering in the developement of artificial wombs to grow babies outside of the womb.

Thus in the Future, humans would not be born....they could be grown and ordered, prefect and free of genetic defects.