In the classic fairy tale movie “The Wizard of Oz”, the “Tin Man” is remembered for his inability to love others because he had no heart. While the little “Tin Man” is certainly pitiful, modern science and technology can indeed install an “artificial heart” in people. A patient in the UK who had a metal heart implanted passed away at the age of 68 after seven years of peace. Nowadays, life science is so amazing that human beings can not only create organs such as heart, liver, kidney to extend life, but even the birthplace of life – the womb can also be artificial! The “metal heart” turns two weeks into seven years According to the British “Daily Mirror” reported on December 3, without a “heart that never dies”, perhaps the family of British heart patient Peter Horton had to endure the pain of life and death seven years ago. 2000, Peter was diagnosed with a fatal heart attack. Peter was diagnosed with a fatal heart attack and had only two weeks left to live. To save him, doctors at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, transplanted a titanium device into his heart – the “Jarvik 2000 Heart. It is actually a titanium pump, used to help the patient’s heart pump more blood. Doctors implanted this artificial “metal heart” into Peter’s left ventricle. The “metal heart” is powered by an external battery pack, which is connected by a wire sticking out of Peter’s chest and a rechargeable battery hanging from Peter’s waist. Peter was the world’s first experimental patient to receive a “Jarvik 2000 heart” transplant, and doctors intended for the “metal heart” to play a transitional role until a suitable donor heart was available. Surprisingly, Peter has been living for 7 and a half years, becoming the world’s longest survivor by “metal heart”. The artificial “titanium pump” not only saved Peter’s life, and allowed him to travel around with his wife Diane, he even participated in a 150-kilometer charity walk. Peter’s old age was peaceful and happy, he once said, after the installation of the “metal heart”, life returned to normal, the only regret is afraid to swim in the water, for fear of electrocution. Peter was the first person in the world to be implanted with a metal heart. Since the world’s first heart transplant on December 2, 1967, approximately 170,000 heart transplants have been performed worldwide. However, because traditional transplants require waiting for a matching organ and are prone to infection due to rejection, many heart patients still pass away with regret, such as the patient who received the first heart transplant and survived for only 18 days after surgery. The artificial metal heart, however, does not need to consider mating, rejection and other problems, and the requirements for the patient’s physical condition are not demanding, bringing hope for many patients with heart failure to extend their lives. Finding a home for fertilized eggs outside the body According to the November issue of the British science magazine New Scientist, Japanese scientists have successfully impregnated female rats with a special “womb chip” and have begun implanting it in humans. The greatest expectation of an artificial uterus is that it will be “in vitro reproduction”, allowing the embryo to grow completely outside the body in a mock womb environment. However, due to legal and technical constraints, scientists are still far from this step in their research. The scientific community is currently developing a total of two types of artificial womb: one is to create an artificial womb in the biological sense outside the body, where the uterine wall, amniotic fluid, etc. are the same as the mother’s womb; the other is a “Petri dish” form of womb, that is, in the Petri dish injected with amniotic fluid, with a fully automated control system to achieve the embryo’s The other is the “petri dish” form of uterus, in which amniotic fluid is injected into the petri dish and a fully automated control system is used for the supply of nutrients and excretion of waste. As early as the 1990s, Professor Toshio Fujii of the University of Tokyo’s Industrial Science Association focused his research on the “artificial womb”. Since Japanese law prohibits such experiments, Fujii and his research team came up with the idea of using a miniature “artificial womb” to grow fertilized eggs. Their research was interesting because the survival rate of fertilized eggs in the microdroplet environment of conventional in vitro fertilization was still low. However, the research was unsuccessful, and they experienced numerous failures. Fujii and the research team finally learned from their failures after detailed discussions. It turned out that the uterus had evolved over a long period of time to a point of considerable perfection, and the simulated environment created by humans with nutrients, growth hormones and other chemicals would always have its own flaws, and embryos in the growth phase were very fragile. The only way out is to create a biological uterus, i.e. the embryo must be wrapped in a layer of endometrium so that the basic nutrients it needs can be provided by the endometrial cells. After several attempts, Fujii and his research team finally created endometrial tissue inside a small “chip”-like structure, and the fertilized egg finally found a warm home outside the human body. “At first, Fujii thought he was just one step away from success, and he conducted a mouse fertilization egg culture experiment with a trial-and-error attitude. As a result, most of the fertilized eggs died during the cultivation process, and those that developed into blastocysts failed to meet the requirements for implantation into the mother’s uterus. Fujii, who had just seen hope, was at a dead end again. At this difficult moment, Fujii immediately thought of his “Lab on a chip”. In biology, “Lab on a chip”, also known as “micro-analysis system”, is a technology that integrates the basic units of operation involved in biology and chemistry on a chip of a few square centimeters to accomplish different biological or chemical reactions. “The biological and chemical reactions on the chip can be fully automated, so that the “production process” will be automated and intelligent. The first thing Fujii wanted to do was to make the energy nutrition system of the “chip” intelligent. Fujii then learned that a foreign colleague’s research may help solve his dilemma, he is the United States Illinois State University professor Matt Weller. In familiar with the automated control of the Weiler proposal, the final miniature artificial womb in appearance and the chip is very similar. It is rectangular in shape, 2 mm wide and 0.5 mm high, with a circular groove in the middle where the fertilized egg is laid and the endometrium inside. The rest of the “chip” is laid flat with a double layer of silicone, and the three channels in the corners are used to put in sperm, eggs and nutrient solution. In terms of automation alone, this is a flawless system. Then they started to do animal experiments. The team implanted the microchip-cultured embryos into female rats, and 44% of them developed into healthy fetuses, compared to the 40% success rate of embryos developing into healthy fetuses with conventional in vitro fertilization. This animal experiment was a complete success! Babies can be born in an assembly line factory? Fujii then worked with Weller to fine-tune the chip’s control system several times, further expanding the advantages of the “uterine chip” over traditional in vitro fertilization. They conducted similar experiments with goats, rabbits, and other animals, all of which yielded satisfactory results. Most importantly, after confirming that the technology has no side effects through multiple tests on animals, Fujii and his research team successfully implanted the uterine chip into humans, and so far the embryos are developing well. In July this year, Fujii presented his latest research results at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lyon, France, which immediately caused a sensation. For the scientific community, the success of this human trial is the first time that human beings have successfully grown early human embryos in an artificial womb, and the significance of this womb chip, which is a miniaturized womb, for artificial womb research is self-evident. Scientists have long imagined that an artificial womb could replace the mother’s uterus, allowing the embryo to “live” in it throughout the pregnancy. In the history of human civilization, there have been scholars and science fiction writers who have proposed similar bold ideas. One of the most famous is the “Beautiful New World” written by the famous British writer Aldous Huxley in 1932. The book envisioned a future utopian society in which every human being was raised from an embryo in a bottle, a finished product produced in a factory. For humans in the real world, Huxley’s “assembly line production of babies” is undoubtedly the most attractive. Every year, thousands of women around the world are unable to become mothers due to uterine deformities or removal, and more women want to save the pain of “October pregnancy”, “artificial womb” will give them hope.