From babies in bottles to life-saving advances for premature infants, the scientific and cultural history of ectogenesis offers a fascinating glimpse of changing attitudes to reproductive progress.

By Dr Zoe Bolton, published 22nd March 2023 (updated 9th August 2024)

It is  over 100 years since the Cambridge biologist J B S Haldane first coined the term ‘ectogenesis’ to describe the development of fetuses wholly outside of the human body. Haldane’s use of the term was new but references to ectogenesis can be found as far back as 400 BCE and have continued to occupy the scientific and cultural imagination ever since.

Babies in bottles

Whilst most histories of ectogenesis have tended to come from a Western perspective, one of the earliest known references to this idea can actually be found in the Mahābhārata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. In this Hindu epic, dated around 400 BCE, the Princess of Gandhara gives birth to a ball of flesh which is cut into 101 pieces. Each piece is stored in its own container of ghee (clarified butter) to gestate and, after a month, 100 sons and one daughter have been formed. This early narrative prefigures the, now much more familiar, trope of ectogenesis as babies gestating in bottles: an idea that was explored in earnest in the sixteenth century by the alchemists who were trying to unlock the secrets of the creation of life.

One of the most famous of these alchemical works is the 1537 book De Natura Rerum (Of the Nature of Things) attributed to Paracelsus. In that book, he describes his recipe for creating a homunculus or ‘little man’. If, Paracelsus suggests, the sperm of a man is sealed in a glass flask with horse dung and fed with man’s blood, after forty weeks ‘it will become a true, and living infant’.

This idea might seem far-fetched now but was in keeping with the natural philosophies of the age. In fact, the influence of alchemists like Paracelsus continues to be felt in the preformationist thinking that dominates throughout the 1600s, and which situates the homunculus as a preformed individual in the head of each sperm. The idea of the homunculus also endures well beyond the seventeenth century. It appears in fictional works, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust (1808) and, over a century later, in Homunculus (1916) the first cinematic representation of ectogenesis.

‘A workshop of filthy creation’

Although not often considered as a work featuring ectogenesis, at the heart of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818, is a scientist who  creates his own, larger scale, version of the homunculus. Victor Frankenstein assembles his creation from body parts found in charnel houses (buildings where corpses are stored) and, while the creature does not gestate as such because it is fully formed by Frankenstein, the makeshift laboratory where it is created and stored is described in womb-like terms. Frankenstein refers to it as ‘a solitary chamber’ and a ‘workshop of filthy creation’ with the latter phrase, in particular, registering the perversity of Frankenstein’s unnatural actions.

Although ectogenesis is not the central preoccupation of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley does offer an early dystopian critique on the dangers of a man of science seizing control of the reproductive process. In doing so, she articulates some of the anxieties that can also be found in later fictional narratives featuring ectogenesis – Brave New World (1932), Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) – that grapple with potential advances in disruptive reproductive technologies.

Infant incubators on tour

Leaving fiction aside for now, a significant scientific development in ectogenesis technology occurred some forty years after the publication of Frankenstein when, in the mid- to late-1800s, the first infant incubators were introduced. These incubators were designed with the aim of providing support to premature babies to increase their chances of survival. The most famous of these early incubators is Dr Stephane Tarnier’s 1884 model, which was inspired by an egg-hatching incubator being used at Paris Zoo. The then director of the zoo, Odile Martin, went on to build a modified incubator for Tarnier, which could hold up to four infants. This model, which was improved by one of Tarnier’s students, became the preferred model for use on Paris maternity wards.

Tarnier’s early incubator was very basic: essentially a wooden box heated with warming pans which required significant input from nursing staff to maintain the temperature. It was another French physician, Dr Alexandre Lion, who developed the first temperature-regulating metal and glass incubator which is more like the incubators that are used today. Lion’s incubator was an expensive machine so he came up with an enterprising way of funding the technology. He set up ‘incubator charities’ throughout France charging visitors to view the premature babies in his care. Lion went on to exhibit his incubators at the 1896 Berlin Industrial Exposition again charging visitors to see the exhibit, der Kinder-Brutanstalt, which translates as ‘The Child Hatchery’. It wasn’t long before Lion’s incubator, and his novel way of funding it, crossed the Atlantic to America.

Following Lion’s lead, an enterprising American, Martin Couney, decided to raise money for his neonatal research by developing an attraction called ‘The Infantorium’. It is possible that Couney was an associate of Lion and supported him in Berlin but, as there is scant historical evidence of Couney’s early career, it is difficult to know exactly where he got the idea for exhibiting incubators. What is known, is that Couney toured his exhibit around shows and fairgrounds, initially in Europe, and then in America, charging 25 cents for visitors to view babies displayed, and cared for, in Lion’s incubators. ‘The Infantorium’ attracted the attention of The Lancet medical journal, when it was exhibited in England at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Celebrations in 1897, and went on to become the most successful visitor attraction at America’s famous Coney Island.

Couney, who toured his exhibition for more than 40 years, is a controversial figure because it is thought that he was masquerading as a medical doctor. Nonetheless, he claims to have saved the lives of around 6,500 premature babies and is now recognised as an early pioneer of the lifesaving neonatal care that is commonly used in hospitals worldwide today to treat premature infants.

Daedalus, or, Science and the Future

While scientific developments in incubator technology were progressing at pace, Haldane was thinking even more radically about the reproductive possibilities of the future. In his 1923 paper, Daedalus, or, Science and the Future, which was presented at a meeting of the Cambridge Heretics society, Haldane famously introduced the term ‘ectogenesis’. Haldane’s paper, which was subsequently published as part of the ‘To-day and To-morrow’ series, had its origins in an essay he wrote as an undergraduate and includes extracts from a fictional essay which, Haldane says, will be ‘read by a rather stupid undergraduate member of this university to his supervisor during his first term 150 years hence’.

The framing of the section of the paper on ectogenesis, as a piece of science fiction, is used as a rhetorical device to project Haldane’s techno-positive view of the future. Haldane’s narrator writes that ‘ectogenesis is now universal, and in this country [the UK] less than 30 per cent of children are now born of woman’. The narrator also describes the ‘fully developed’ ectogenesis technique:

We can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.

In this description, in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which would not become a scientific reality for human reproduction until the birth of the first ‘test-tube baby over 50 years later, is the first stage in a process of ectogenesis that results in the cycle of conception, gestation and birth occurring wholly outside of the human body. It also pre-dates the first patent for an artificial uterus which was granted to Emanuel M. Greenberg in 1955. The process of ectogenesis is presented, in Daedalus, as being progressive and, overall, the essay is optimistic about the technology. The narrator, a proponent of eugenics (Haldane was also an early supporter of eugenics, although he subsequently rejected the racist basis for eugenics), is particularly fulsome in their praise of ectogenesis for saving civilisation from the vagaries of natural reproduction:

Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubt that civilisation would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.

The positive presentation of eugenics in Daedalus is clearly problematic: it is classist and posits a world where science can be used as a form of control over who has the right to reproduce. In fact, the science fiction writer Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Haldane’s, was so unsettled by Daedalus that it inspired him to write Brave New World.

The Hatchery

In the opening chapters of Brave New World, Haldane’s optimistic view of the reproductive science of the future has been transformed into a dystopian nightmare. The reader is introduced to the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, ‘a squat grey building of only thirty-four stories’, where the whole reproductive process is managed, from conception to birth, on a factory production line: ‘the principle of mass production at last applied to biology’.

Huxley’s decision to call the factory a ‘Hatchery’ has interesting echoes of Lion’s incubator exhibition ‘The Child Hatchery’ and, here again, is the ectogenesis trope of babies in bottles: embryos are transferred into bottles in the ‘Bottling Room’ and are sent down to the ‘Embryo Store’ to gestate. Huxley’s vision of ectogenesis on a large industrial scale is, in itself, disturbing enough but, at the Hatchery, all embryos are not created equal and there is also a system in place to precondition the embryos to belong to a certain class: ‘making people like their unescapable social destiny’.

In an article in Nature, written to mark the 50th anniversary of Huxley’s death, Philip Ball describes Brave New World as ‘a perceptive revision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, which tuned into contemporary ‘wariness about eugenics and scientific triumphalism’ – an antidote, then, to Haldane’s Daedalus. Brave New World, Ball suggests, ‘can be read as a turning of the tide in terms of perceptions of what science would bring: from optimism to foreboding’. Although it was published more than 90 years ago, Huxley’s novel is still evoked today to express fears about the disruptive potential of reproductive technologies. Its influence can be felt in films like The Matrix (1999), with its famous depiction of baby farms, and more recently in Hashem Al-Ghaili’s controversial online video Ectolife (2023) which, although fictional, was reported in The Metro as if it was real.

A Feminist Revolution?

While there is no shortage of dystopian visions of ectogenesis, in the 1970s, an alternative, and more cautiously optimistic, view of its emancipatory potential emerged in Shulamith Firestone’s feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). Taking the lead from Simone de Beauvoir, Firestone located the roots of women’s oppression in their biology calling for an alternative system and for ‘the freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available’. For Firestone, the potential of artificial reproduction offered a ‘more distant solution’ to emancipate women but it was with a sounding note of caution: ‘in the hands of our current society and under the direction of current scientists (few of whom are female or even feminist), any attempted use of technology to “free” anybody is suspect.’

Firestone’s vision of an alternative reproductive future for women, finds expression in Marge Piercy’s landmark feminist novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). The novel centres around Connie Ramos, a 37-year-old Mexican American who is unjustly incarcerated in a mental hospital. During her incarceration, Connie time-travels to a future, utopian world called Mattapoisett where babies are conceived and gestated in artificial wombs called ‘brooders’. Unlike the Hatchery in Brave New World, where reproductive technology is used as a form of oppression, in Woman on the Edge of Time it is presented as a means of liberation:

There was that one thing we had to give up too […] The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males would never be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding.

In Piercy’s novel, then, Firestone’s ambition for a society where childbearing and childrearing roles are equally shared between men and women becomes a fictional reality. However, Piercy, like Firestone, Huxley and Mary Shelley before her, also registers an anxiety about scientific progress ending up in the wrong hands. In the novel, this threat is represented by ‘The Shapers’: the scientists who created the community in Mattapoisett and who want to push their genetic experiments further in the name of improving humanity.

Improving outcomes for extremely premature babies

Uneasiness about the consequences of scientific progress continues to play a significant role in discourses about ectogenesis today. Yet, the current scientific developments have much more in common with the pioneering first infant incubator technologies than they do with dystopian visions of baby farms: the stated aim of the current research is to improve outcomes for extremely premature babies to reduce the risk of infant mortality and morbidity.

There are several international research teams pioneering fetal life-support systems that have the potential to sustain the life of an extremely premature infant in a womb-like environment. Teams in the US, Australia and Japan have developed biotechnologies – the Biobag and the EVE platform – that have reported successes with extremely premature lamb fetuses; and a team in the Netherlands is currently working on a perinatal life support (PLS) system using simulation technology. While these technologies do rely on ectogenesis – on the fetus being transferred from the maternal womb to an artificial one to complete gestation – they are not yet viable for human fetuses. Although in September 2023, the first step toward clinical trials involving human fetuses was taken when US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisors met to discuss the ethics of moving research on artificial wombs from animals to humans.

There are many valid and complex issues that need to be addressed as science continues to push the boundaries of what is technologically possible. However, we are still a long way from realising Haldane’s vision of a future where ectogenesis has almost entirely replaced human biological reproduction. This brave new world, to borrow the title of Huxley’s novel, for now remains a fiction rather than a reality.