Lab–grown Embryos and Human–monkey Hybrids: Medical Marvels or Ethical Missteps?

By Prof. Sahotra Sarkar (via Global Research)

In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World,” people aren’t born from a mother’s womb. Instead, embryos are grown in artificial wombs until they are brought into the world, a process called ectogenesis. 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. Two recent scientific developments suggest that Huxley’s imagined world of functionally manufactured people is no longer far-fetched.

On March 17, 2021, 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. Until this experiment, no one had grown a mammal embryo outside a womb this far into pregnancy. Then, on April 15, 2021, a U.S. 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.

As both a philosopher and a biologist I cannot help but ask how far researchers should take this work. 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. However, ectogenesis could have far-reaching impacts on individuals and society, and the prospect of babies grown in a lab has not been put under nearly the same scrutiny as chimeras.

Mouse embryos were grown in an artificial womb for 11 days, and organs had begun to develop.

Growing in an artificial womb

When in vitro fertilization first emerged in the late 1970s, the press called IVF embryos “test-tube babies,” though they are nothing of the sort. These embryos are implanted into the uterus within a day or two after doctors fertilize an egg in a petri dish.

Before the Israeli experiment, researchers had not been able to grow mouse embryos outside the womb for more than four days – providing the embryos with enough oxygen had been too hard. The team spent seven years creating a system of slowly spinning glass bottles and controlled atmospheric pressure that simulates the placenta and provides oxygen.

This development is a major step toward ectogenesis, and scientists expect that it will be possible to extend mouse development further, possibly to full term outside the womb. This will likely require new techniques, but at this point it is a problem of scale – being able to accommodate a larger fetus. This appears to be a simpler challenge to overcome than figuring out something totally new like supporting organ formation.

The Israeli team plans to deploy its techniques on human embryos. Since mice and humans have similar developmental processes, it is likely that the team will succeed in growing human embryos in artificial wombs.

To do so, though, members of the team need permission from their ethics board.

CRISPR – a technology that can cut and paste genes – already allows scientists to manipulate an embryo’s genes after fertilization. Once fetuses can be grown outside the womb, as in Huxley’s world, researchers will also be able to modify their growing environments to further influence what physical and behavioral qualities these parentless babies exhibit. Science still has a way to go before fetus development and births outside of a uterus become a reality, but researchers are getting closer. The question now is how far humanity should go down this path.

Human-monkey hybrids

Human–monkey hybrids might seem to be a much scarier prospect than babies born from artificial wombs. But in fact, the recent research is more a step toward an important medical development than an ethical minefield.

If scientists can grow human cells in monkeys or other animals, it should be possible to grow human organs too. This would solve the problem of organ shortages around the world for people needing transplants.

But keeping human cells alive in the embryos of other animals for any length of time has proved to be extremely difficult. In the human-monkey chimera experiment, a team of researchers implanted 25 human stem cells into embryos of crab-eating macaques – a type of monkey. The researchers then grew these embryos for 20 days in petri dishes.

After 15 days, the human stem cells had disappeared from most of the embryos. But at the end of the 20-day experiment, three embryos still contained human cells that had grown as part of the region of the embryo where they were embedded. For scientists, the challenge now is to figure out how to maintain human cells in chimeric embryos for longer.

Regulating these technologies

Some ethicists have begun to worry that researchers are rushing into a future of chimeras without adequate preparation. Their main concern is the ethical status of chimeras that contain human and nonhuman cells – especially if the human cells integrate into sensitive regions such as a monkey’s brain. What rights would such creatures have?

However, there seems to be an emerging consensus that the potential medical benefits justify a step-by-step extension of this research. Many ethicists are urging public discussion of appropriate regulation to determine how close to viability these embryos should be grown. One proposed solution is to limit growth of these embryos to the first trimester of pregnancy. Given that researchers don’t plan to grow these embryos beyond the stage when they can harvest rudimentary organs, I don’t believe chimeras are ethically problematic compared with the true test–tube babies of Huxley’s world.

Few ethicists have broached the problems posed by the ability to use ectogenesis to engineer human beings to fit societal desires. Researchers have yet to conduct experiments on human ectogenesis, and for now, scientists lack the techniques to bring the embryos to full term. However, without regulation, I believe researchers are likely to try these techniques on human embryos – just as the now-infamous He Jiankui used CRISPR to edit human babies without properly assessing safety and desirability. Technologically, it is a matter of time before mammal embryos can be brought to term outside the body.

While people may be uncomfortable with ectogenesis today, this discomfort could pass into familiarity as happened with IVF. But scientists and regulators would do well to reflect on the wisdom of permitting a process that could allow someone to engineer human beings without parents. As critics have warnedin the context of CRISPR-based genetic enhancement, pressure to change future generations to meet societal desires will be unavoidable and dangerous, regardless of whether that pressure comes from an authoritative state or cultural expectations. In Huxley’s imagination, hatcheries run by the state grew a large numbers of identical individuals as needed. That would be a very different world from today.

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The WEF’s Great Reset – Euphemism for a WWIII Scenario?

By Peter Koenig (via Global Research)

Let’s make no mistake, we are already in WWIII. A more noble term is “The Great Reset” – the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) eloquent description of a devastated worldwide economy, countless bankruptcies and unemployment, abject misery, famine, death by starvation, disease and suicide. Hundreds of millions of people have already been affected by this “collateral” damage of the “covid-19” fear-propaganda bio-war, with a death-toll maybe already in the tens of millions, but which in reality cannot even be assessed at this time.

And this only one year into this criminal madness, a diabolical elite of multi-multi billionaires has pushed upon us, We the People. We are only in the first year of the war which by the Reset’s plan is to last the entire decade 2020-2030. The agenda is supposed to be completed by 2030 – it’s also called UN Agenda 2030.

See this.

The WEF is, in fact, nothing more than an NGO, registered in a lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland. Its members are, however, a collection of dirty-rich people: High-ranking politicians, heads of corporations, banking gnomes, artists and Hollywood personalities – none of them are people’s elected officials with a mandate to rule the world.

Yet, they are effectively ruling the world, by coopting, coercing, or threatening the entire UN system and its 193 member countries into their obedience. Because they think they have all the money in the world, and they can. Mind you, money acquired in a fraudulent system designed by them. – But more importantly, because We, the People, let them.

The Great Reset has three major goals, all of equal importance

(i) massive depopulation,

(ii) shifting all assets from the bottom and the middle to the top; following the motto for the masses, at the end “You will own nothing and be happy”. That is Klaus Schwab’s conclusion for the completion of The Great Reset; and

(iii) a complete digitized control over everything – money, mind, personal records and behaviors – a combination of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, and George Orwell’s “1984”. See this.

As we can see, the WEF is involved at every level in the Plandemic and its consequences, especially the consequences that favor the Great Reset. As Klaus Schwab in the Great Reset so revealingly says, the pandemic opens a “small window of opportunity” during which these consequences (meaning the reshaping of the world) have to be realized. Everything has to work like clockwork.

So far, it seems to be on track. Though, as more people are waking up and scientists consciousness make them leaving their straight-jacketed matrix-jobs, resistance is growing exponentially.

The NGO, trillion-dollar members-powerhouse, WEF, is outranking the world’s peoples designed and implemented UN system by far. Recently the WEF, now in association with Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was warning of a cyber-attack on the western monetary system. To emphasize their point, they said, it is “Not a Question of If but When.“

According to the Last American Vagabond (LAV), a “report published last year by the WEF-Carnegie Cyber Policy Initiative, calls for the merging of Wall Street banks, their regulators and intelligence agencies as necessary to confront an allegedly imminent cyber-attack that will collapse the existing financial system.”

The LAV article goes on saying

“In 2019, the same year as Event 201 took place (Event 201 – 18 October 2019, in NYC, simulating the current SARS-CoV-2 plandemic and destruction of the world economy), the Endowment launched its Cyber Policy Initiative with the goal of producing an “International Strategy for Cybersecurity and the Global Financial System 2021-2024.” That strategy was released just months ago, in November 2020 and, according to the Endowment, was authored by “leading experts in governments, central banks, industry and the technical community” in order to provide a “longer-term international cybersecurity strategy”, specifically for the financial system.”

The Cyber Policy Initiative emanating from the joint venture’s WEF- Carnegie Endowment report of  November 2020, is contained in a paper titled

“International Strategy to Better Protect the Financial System.”

It begins by noting that the global financial system, like many other systems, are “going through unprecedented digital transformation, which is being accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.” It concludes with the warning that:

“Malicious actors are taking advantage of this digital transformation and pose a growing threat to the global financial system, financial stability, and confidence in the integrity of the financial system. Malign actors are using cyber capabilities to steal from, disrupt, or otherwise threaten financial institutions, investors and the public. These actors include not only increasingly daring criminals, but also states and state-sponsored attackers.”

A fully digitized monetary system has been on the WEF’s and IMF’s agenda for years. They cannot wait to implement it. So, if indeed, a cyber-attack on the western monetary system actually will take place, there is no question, who has planned and implemented it.

The drive for total digitization of everything, but foremost the (western) world’s monetary system, is an integral part of The Great Reset. It is supported, of course, by the banking and finance sector, including western central banks. Its implementation is to be accelerated by the covid-fraud, but encounters fierce resistance in many countries, especially in the Global South but also in the western industrialized countries, where intellectual groups realize what this means for the resources and assets worked for and owned by the people – it will be easily ‘expropriated’ so to speak, for example, for disobedience, as the control will be fully with the banks.

And this leads to the conclusion of the nefarious Great Reset – “You will own nothing and be happy”.

Luckily, the East, led by China and Russia, has gradually withdrawn from the western monetary system and are largely independent, monetary-sovereign countries. Therefore the western digitization drive does not apply to the East which is further enhanced by the China-Russia led Shanghai Cooperation Organization – SCO – accounting for about half the world’s population and a third of the world’s economic output – GDP.

See here for the full LAV article.

If Klaus Schwab and the WEF’s “Illuminati” would have their way, by 2030 the grand flock of humans will be transformed into “transhumans” – a kind of semi-robots that responds to AI signals controlled by The Great Reset’s masterminds (sic), which by then will have become the leaders of a tyranny, called the New or One World Order – OWO.

We, the People, would then have become the new AI-directed serfs. Or, as per Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the “epsilon people”.

Let that not happen.

Let’s unite and resist with all our powers.

We are still 7.8 billion people against a few pathological soulless multi-billionaires.

Shape Shifting Liquid Metal Could Revolutionize Robotics

This technique can be applied to many operations in the future, including soft robotics and even flexible computer displays.

By Danielle De La Bastide (via Interesting Engineering)

Shape-shifting metal likely brings to mind images from Terminator 2 or even Avatar: The Last Airbender. But this futuristic-sounding premise is a lot more fact than fiction.

From self-healing robots to reconfigurable electronic circuits, the applications of liquid metal are only limited by the imaginations of the scientists working with them. Let’s take a look at some of the latest revolutions, discoveries, and innovations in this material. 

2D morphing metal

In 2017, scientists at the University of Sussex and Swansea University invented a way to morph liquid metal into 2D shapes using an electrical charge. Though still in the early stages of development, this team’s research could open up new possibilities in soft robotics, smart electronics, computer graphics, and flexible displays. 

Because the electric fields used to shape the liquid are programmed by a computer, the position and shape of the liquid can be programmed and controlled dynamically.

“Liquid metals are an extremely promising class of materials for deformable applications; their unique properties include voltage-controlled surface tension, high liquid-state conductivity, and liquid-solid phase transition at room temperature,” said Professor Sriram Subramanian, head of the INTERACT Lab at the University of Sussex, in a press release. 

Carnegie Mellon Metal Alloy

That same year, research engineers at Carnegie Mellon University created a metal alloy that exists in a liquid state at room temperature and can capacitate liquid metal transistors, flexible circuitry, and perhaps even self-repairing circuits in the far-flung future.

Created at the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon by researchers Carmel Majidi, Michael Dickey, and James Wissman, this alloy is the result of a combination of indium and gallium. It would only take two drops of this liquid metal to form or break a circuit thereby opening or closing an entry, similar to a traditional transistor. Better yet, it only requires a voltage of 1 – 10 volts.

Floating bots

In early 2020, a team of researchers at Tsinghua University in China created a liquid metal material so light that it can float on water. The researchers believe it could be used to construct lightweight exoskeletons and shape-shifting robots, as per New Scientist’s report.

Like the researchers at Carnegie Mellon, those at Tsinghua University used a mixture of gallium and indium for their material. To make it float, the team stirred air-filled glass beads of glass into the liquid. 

Despite its extremely low density, the liquid metal material “still maintains excellent conformability, electric conductivity, and stiffness variety under temperature regulation” according to the paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

It will likely take some time before we see shape-shifting floating robots or self-repairing circuits in our daily lives. But in a few decades, these innovations could revolutionize how we think about metal.