Using a cow uterus to raise a human fetus

[Coach]

I've got one for you.
About 15 or so years ago there was a little show called Picket Fences.. one of the episodes dealt with cows being used as surrogate wombs for women..about a month or so later, I got an Omni magazine that said about the same thing, that is possible to do at the time ...so.......aside from all the BEASTMASTER jokes... why do we not have it now as a commonplace thing?

(did I ask this before)

[Dr Steve]

I've got one for you.
About 15 or so years ago there was a little show called Picket Fences.. one of the episodes dealt with cows being used as surrogate wombs for women..about a month or so later, I got an Omni magazine that said about the same thing, that is possible to do at the time ...so.......aside from all the BEASTMASTER jokes... why do we not have it now as a commonplace thing?

(did I ask this before)

Damn, you remember "Omni" magazine? Ha, you're old.

I searched the medical literature looking for even a HINT of this and could find nothing. The uterus isn't just a sack you can toss any old fetus into and make it grow; the differences in cow proteins vs human proteins would be a huge immunology problem (the uterus likely rejecting the human placenta and vice-versa) and cow blood nutrition is likely to be not optimal for human fetal growth. There are a lot of feedback loops and hormonal regulators between mother and fetus that would be totally out of whack in the bovine-human model.

Now, there's nothing in the laws of physics that states that this would ultimately be impossible, so it's do-able with the right technology. We just don't have it. I think an artificial placenta is more likely to occur before you ever see a human baby bloop out onto the ground from a cow vagina.

your pal,



steve

[opie's twisted balls]

but just think of the possibilities of a cow/human hybrid!

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/uploads/human_cow.jpg

[sr71blackbird]

Could a human fetus grow within a chimpanzee?
Could a human womans uterus handle a monkey fetus?

[instrument]

Where's seinfez already?

[A.J.]

Don't have a cow, Man.

[TheMojoPin]

It already happened...and it was awful:

http://www.webwiseforradio.com/site_files/244/Image/mancow%20wist%20logo.jpg

[TooCute]

Cows have completely different placentas than people do.
To simplify it, more or less in cows they have these "buttons" (placentomes) where the mom's blood and the fetus's blood sort of meet up, and it's spread all over the sac the fetus is hanging out in. In people, there's sort of a big band where the fetus is like totally invasive and actually pushes its own blood supply into the mom's. The blood is not mixing, but if you can imagine that the fetus's blood vessels have sort of pushed right into the mom's so that the outsides of the blood vessels are being bathed in mom's blood, that's how it is. In the cows, it's more like mom and baby's blood vessels just push up real close to each other.

[Coach]

Damn, you remember "Omni" magazine? Ha, you're old.

I searched the medical literature looking for even a HINT of this and could find nothing. The uterus isn't just a sack you can toss any old fetus into and make it grow; the differences in cow proteins vs human proteins would be a huge immunology problem (the uterus likely rejecting the human placenta and vice-versa) and cow blood nutrition is likely to be not optimal for human fetal growth. There are a lot of feedback loops and hormonal regulators between mother and fetus that would be totally out of whack in the bovine-human model.

Now, there's nothing in the laws of physics that states that this would ultimately be impossible, so it's do-able with the right technology. We just don't have it. I think an artificial placenta is more likely to occur before you ever see a human baby bloop out onto the ground from a cow vagina.

your pal,



steveI was like 12