Recently, I was sent an article by a friend. It was called “The Artificial Womb Is Born And The World of the
Matrix begins.”
The article was about
Japanese research into artificial womb technology. It talked about how some researchers had transferred
a premature goat fetus into an artificial womb for 10 days.
As it went on, the author talked about Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) performing its first intrauterine surgery in
May of “this year”…since this surgery happened while I was in middle school, I
became a bit skeptical of the other information in the article. I searched artificial womb on Google and
found something very interesting.
The exact article came up about six times on the front
page of my search. It appears that the original
article was published in the New York Times in 1996. Sometime in the fall of 2013 however, this
article was plagiarized and republished on several blog sites. The article received many hits and was listed
as one of the most popular reads on several of the sites. Panicked comments were plentiful; readers
were clearly concerned about this impending technological breakthrough.
From a quick search however, it looks like this “new”
tech is going nowhere fast. Not much
research has been done on the artificial womb for several years. The most recent information I could find was a
2002
article in the Guardian that delves into some of the ethical
implications of an artificial womb and some of the good that could come from
its development.
The artificial womb project has seen no news worthy
developments in several years, so the buzz this article started is completely
superficial. Just goes to show, you can’t
believe everything you read. Also, a
quick search of the facts never hurts.
This
week’s public service announcement: Be a conscientious reader,
check the facts, and think it through before you react and respond. Imagine if everyone would do this when
reading/posting on the internet…or just in life in general? What a wonderful world that would be…
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