Word: wombs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mistakes. One out of every 130 conceptions ends before the mother even realizes she is pregnant because the defective zygote, or fertilized egg, never attaches itself to the wall of the uterus. Fully 25% of all conceptions fail to reach an age at which they can survive outside the womb, and of these, at least a third have identifiable chromosomal abnormalities. Still, as many as five out of every 100 babies born have some genetic defect, and Nobel-Prizewinning Geneticist Joshua Lederberg believes the proportion would be even higher were it not for nature's own process of quality control...
...test tube and then reimplanted in the uterus. By carefully scrutinizing the developing embryo in the test tube, doctors could spot serious genetic deficiencies and decide not to reimplant it, thus avoiding an abortion later on. If the embryo is normal, it could even be reimplanted in the womb of a donor mother and carried to term there, enabling the woman either unable or unwilling to go through pregnancy to have children that were genetically...
INDEED, ONLY development of an "artificial womb" capable of supporting life stands in the way of routine ectogenesis, or gestation outside the uterus, and now even this problem may yield to solution. Scientists at the National Heart Institute have developed a chamber containing a synthetic amniotic fluid and an oxygenator for fetal blood, and have managed to keep lamb fetuses alive in it for periods exceeding two days. Once their device is perfected, the baby hatchery of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World will be a reality and life without birth a problem rather than a prophecy...
...scientists, could one day clone (from the Greek word for throng), or asexually reproduce himself, in the same way, creating thousands of virtually identical twins from a test tube full of cells carried through gestation by donor mothers or hatched in an artificial womb. Thus, the future could offer such phenomena as a police force cloned from the cells of J. Edgar Hoover, an invincible basketball team cloned from Lew Alcindor, or perhaps the colonization of the moon by astronauts cloned from a genetically sound specimen chosen by NASA officials. Using the same technique, a woman could even have...
...complex a trait as intelligence may eventually come under the control of molecular biologists. Some scientists fantasize that super-geniuses will some day be produced by increasing brain size, through either genetic manipulation or through transplantation of brain cells to newborn infants or to the fetus in the womb. (Such cells might be synthesized in the laboratory or developed by taking bits of easily accessible tissue from a contemporary Newton or Mozart and inducing them to turn into brain neurons...