EXPIRES: 1951

Annotation

Haldane — geneticist, polymath, future communist, future defector to India — wrote this essay as if narrated by a Cambridge undergraduate in the year 2073, looking back at the major scientific breakthroughs of the past century. His fictional timeline places the first baby grown entirely outside the womb in 1951. By 1968, in his imagined history, France alone was producing 60,000 ectogenetic children annually. The essay coined the term 'ectogenesis' and predicted that religious authorities (a Papal Bull and a Khalif's fetwa) would oppose it — a social prediction as striking as the biological one.

What Actually Happened

No human ectogenesis has been achieved as of 2026. Partial ectogenesis research (artificial womb technology for extremely premature infants) has advanced significantly, with biobag experiments on lamb fetuses reported in 2017. The religious and ethical opposition Haldane predicted has indeed materialized around adjacent reproductive technologies like IVF.