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artificial womb fluid, some bacteria, and other elements. After a normal period of gestation, the pups were ‘born’ through a tube that connected the grey box with another one containing ocean water, similar to that which would be found where naturally developed pups would be born. The pups were reluctant to leave this rudimentary ‘womb’, even trying to swim back into the womb tank after making their initial exit, but they eventually entered their new tank before being transferred into a more natural habitat. Proud as any new father, Otway said he was relieved, pleased, and even amazed that everything had worked.

Next, Otway would focus on removing the embryos from the mother’s womb earlier and earlier – a move that would add layers of surgical complexity to the process, since the scientists need to ensure that the delicate external yolk sac, as an essential source of nutrition, remains connected to the embryos as they are removed. Once this is accomplished, the embryos will also have to be tethered to the artificial womb in some way, to stop them from detaching themselves and swimming away from their nourishment. If possible, Otway hopes to extract the embryos so early that one day they might gestate completely in the artificial womb.

Otway’s artificial womb may be a novel idea for shark conservation, but bypassing a woman’s body is no new ambition when it comes to human reproduction. In 1924, evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane coined the term ectogenesis to describe how pregnancy in humans could be provided through an artificial womb. In a fictional account, he had two future scientists describe the birth of the world’s first ectogenic child. ‘Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years,’ one of the characters announced. This, by the character’s calculations, would result in ‘a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months’, at which point they could be ‘brought out into the air’. Haldane imagined that artificial wombs might become so popular by 2074 that only a small minority, ‘less than 30 percent of children’, would then ‘be born of woman’.

Otway and Ellis finally reported the successful ‘artificial’ birth of their sharks late in 2011. But they had started the project early in 2008, and it had been a turbulent process, with design failures along the way. Many embryos had perished. If creating such a device for a shark has been challenging, could an artificial womb be viable for humans?

In some ways, the female grey nurse shark’s reproductive system is similar to a human’s, as eggs are produced in ovaries and pass down tubes towards the womb (whichever womb that may be). As we saw, the pups first develop while still inside these eggs, surviving on the egg yolk, before the cycle of cannibalism begins.

But, in most ways, the grey nurse shark nurtures its foetuses in a far less complicated manner than humans; for whom getting nutrition is not as simple as ingesting egg yolk (or siblings). For a start, the shark does not have a placenta – the complex, specialized organ that is created from the fertilized mammal’s egg in order to sustain the embryo. Because the placenta is made from the fertilized egg, it contains both the mother’s and the father’s DNA. Very early in the pregnancy, the placenta sends out a system of blood vessels to penetrate and dock into the mother’s womb, through the umbilical cord. The foetus acquires oxygen and food – gets rid of its wastes – through the placenta, which should provide life support for forty weeks, until the foetus grows and develops to a stage where it is able to perform these functions on its own. A human artificial womb would need to replicate all of the placenta’s functions, not just the womb’s fluids, bacteria, and other stuff essential to the making of life.

Still, babies born prematurely have, for more than a century, been reared through several weeks of life despite being unable to live completely on their own. In 1975, Kim Bland became the first child to survive after being born just six months into pregnancy. He weighed little more than a couple of hundred paperclips – and had he been born ten years earlier, there would have been no medical efforts to keep him alive, because at that time, babies who weighed less than a kilogram (thirty-five ounces) were not considered to be viable outside of the womb. And on 24 October 2006, Amillia Sonja Taylor was born after less than twenty-two weeks in the womb, the youngest birth yet to survive. Born in Miami, Florida, where the law does not support the revival of a foetus less than twenty-four weeks, she owed her resuscitation to some ambiguity around her size (she appeared to be a bit older in the sonograms), and to the fact that her parents, Sonja and Eddie, were liberal with the truth surrounding her conception (the hospital was under the impression that Sonja was twenty-one weeks pregnant when she arrived for emergency delivery). At birth, though, Amillia was clearly tiny: weighing less than three hundred grams (ten ounces) and measuring only twenty-four centimetres (9.5 inches) long. Her body was a snug fit in the palms of an adult’s hands, and her feet were the size of one of the phalanges of an adult’s finger.

Both Amillia Taylor and Kim Bland were only able to survive because they were nurtured in an artificial environment already within our reach – the incubator. Like the stories of an artificial womb, the technology and benefits of the earliest incubators were a genuine marvel to the public when they initially came into use. But then again, they were brought to