Call for a new social order : some activities of Charles Fremont Dight.

  • Dight, Charles Fremont, 1856-1938.
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Call for a new social order : some activities of Charles Fremont Dight. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    174 CALL FOR A NEW SOCIAL ORDER TEST TUBE BABIES Will Babies Soon Be Developed frosn the Ovum Stage Outside the Bodies of Their Mothers? Pipe Dreams Often Come True Some matters are speculative. This which I now dis¬ cuss is one of them ; but the device recently constructed by Surgeon Alexis Carrel and Col. Charles A. Lindbergh seems to justify answering yes to the above question. The device makes it easy to keep alive and functioning indefinitely the ovary, spleen, liver or other organs re¬ moved from a healthy animal. It is an artificial heart and lung which supplies the removed organ with oxygen, food ingredients, and removes waste products. A letter to me from Dr. A. Carrel, Director of The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where the device is in use, says that he is greatly interested in this problem. To the embryologist it seems quite possible to develop an animal from its ovum stage in a suitable re¬ ceptacle outside the body of the mother. It would be no greater departure from nature's method than flying through the air differs from the old time method of trans¬ portation afoot or on horseback. An ovum may be fertilized in an artificial uterus (even in a test tube) and its development go on there, no doubt, by securing the few essential conditions which nature fur¬ nishes in the mother's womb. These conditions are a uni¬ form temperature of about 98.6 Fahrenheit and a circu¬ lating fluid containing and supplying oxygen and nutri¬ tive ingredients to nourish the child's developing cells, which fluid while circulating would take up and remove from the blood of the fetus the waste matters from its cells. In this way a mass of tissue cells from a chick's heart, placed in a receptacle, have been kept alive and growing for more than twenty years. For the development of a child in nature's way a pla¬ centa—an intermediate organ—has to be formed to bring about transfer of the nutrient ingredients of the circulat¬ ing fluid (the mother's blood) into the body of the child and to excrete its waste products. It is an inherent func¬ tion of a fertilized ovum to form a placenta on the sur¬ face where it may be lodged, whether that be in the uterus or outside of it, in one of the fallopian tubes or on some organ in the abdominal cavity if it happens to get there as it sometimes does. Inside an artificial uterus the ovum would still possess its inherent capacity to form a placenta where it was