You may have seen the stunning viral film called “EctoLife” recently.
With a professional voiceover and a detailed CGI tour of the baby-growing facility, you might think the enterprise of growing designer babies outside a mother’s womb is here. While it is not yet reality, scientists have been making progress on the technology in recent years.
Artificial wombs in themselves could save premature babies. Rather than promote that unequivocal good, however, the vision of “EctoLife” is a tangle of concepts foreseen in famous dystopian science fiction stories like Brave New World and “Gattaca,” made to seem like a positive revolution in care and convenience.
Consider EctoLife a peek at the playbook of reckless amoral revolutionaries. Use it to prepare. Synthetic wombs and genetic engineering will soon become serious matters of public policy.
The video’s creator, Hashem Al-Ghaili, is a self-described “science communicator” with a background in microbiology. Al-Ghaili created multiple positive videos on the topic of artificial wombs and designer babies before releasing “EctoLife,” which differs from his other videos in that its realism and detail position it between vision and hoax. The video could be used to attract potential investors to the horrific project.
The pitch begins by promising to solve an issue everyone agrees is a problem. EctoLife, a sleek facility with rows and rows of artificial womb pods gestating “lab-grown” babies, is a way to make premature births and C-sections “a thing of the past” and “a perfect solution for women who’ve had their uteruses removed due
