The world welcomes its first babies conceived through robotic technology
The birth of the first babies conceived by robots marks a significant milestone in the field of fertility medicine. A Spanish startup called Overture Life has developed a sperm-injecting robot that can be controlled using a PlayStation controller. The team successfully used it to fertilize human eggs, resulting in the birth of two healthy baby girls.
The robotic process is an update to traditional in-vitro fertilization (IVF), which involves human specialists manually joining a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm using a special needle under a microscope. The current IVF practice is delicate and labor-intensive, which makes it very expensive. In the US, each attempt at pregnancy through IVF costs around $20,000.
To make the process cheaper and more accessible, startups like Overture are automating parts of the process. Thus far, Overture has raised about $37 million, with backers including former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. According to experts, this is only an incremental step towards fully automating the process.
While the concept of robotic IVF is extraordinary, it is still a baby step toward complete automation. Overture’s engineers still manually load sperm cells onto the injector needles, which means that this is not yet robotic intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). But the fact that the process was successful using a PlayStation controller is impressive.
One of the engineers working on the insemination robot, Eduard Alba, steered a tiny, mechanized IVF needle using the PlayStation 5 controller to deposit single sperm cells into human eggs more than a dozen times. “I was calm,” he told MIT Technology Review. “In that exact moment, I thought, ‘It’s just one more experiment.'”
The successful birth of the two baby girls is a significant achievement for Overture and the field of fertility medicine. However, there are still questions about the long-term effects of the robotic process on the babies and their mothers.
There is also the question of whether the automation of IVF will lead to a decrease in human expertise and a rise in errors. According to Dr. Gianpiero Palermo, who developed the now-commonplace intracytoplasmic sperm injection procedure in the 1990s, the robotic process is still in its early stages. While it is an impressive step forward, it is still a far cry from fully automating the process.
Despite the concerns, the automation of parts of the IVF process has the potential to make the process more accessible and affordable to people who would not have been able to afford it before. With the rising costs of fertility treatment, the development of robotic IVF could provide a more affordable and effective alternative for those struggling to conceive.
Furthermore, automation could help alleviate the burden on fertility specialists, who often work long hours and have to manage multiple cases simultaneously. The automation of certain aspects of IVF could allow them to focus on more complex cases and provide better care to their patients.
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The birth of the first babies conceived by robots is a significant milestone in the field of fertility medicine. While the automation of parts of the IVF process is still in its early stages, it has the potential to make the process more accessible and affordable for people struggling with infertility. As technology advances, it will be interesting to see how the field of fertility medicine evolves and how the role of robotics will change the way we approach reproduction.
