Video presenting fictional 'artificial womb facility' taken out of context
Video presenting fictional 'artificial womb facility' taken out of context
(Reuters) - A video presenting a facility purportedly able to “incubate up to 30,000 lab-grown babies per year” is conceptual and has been taken out of context by some online users. The video’s concept creator, Hashem Al-Ghaili, told Reuters that the project, called EctoLife, is not currently a genuine existing facility or company.
Examples of social media posts that appear to believe EctoLife is a real, functioning facility or company are viewable and Twitter.
The snippets come from a longer 8:39-minute video that displays animations of “growth pods or artificial wombs” on Al-Ghaili’s YouTube channel.
In a press release about his concept, he describes himself as a “producer, filmmaker, and a science communicator.”
Contacted by Reuters, Al-Ghaili confirmed that the EctoLife facility “doesn’t exist right now.”
“This is a concept and not a real-life company,” Al-Ghaili said via email.
Scientists have studied the possibility of developing a life outside of the womb. One such example was researched with extremely premature lambs by neonatologists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who in 2017 described how they created a womb-like environment in an extracorporeal device to fully develop the fetal lambs
VERDICT
Missing context. The facility described in this video does not exist and pertains to a concept developed by science communicator Hashem Al-Ghaili.
