Women at 100 may give birth’: The Asian Age

      London, July 18: AS Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube baby, celebrates her 30th birthday in July, scientists have predicted that women as old as 100 years will be able to give birth within next three decades.

Making predictions about potential advances in reproductive medicine in the science journal, Nature, scientists said techniques, like the experiment to create sperm and eggs from skin cells and unite them to form embryos, are in the process of development.

      "It means every person regardless of age will be able to have children. Newborn children could have children and 100-year-olds could have children. It could easily happen in the next 30 years," Davor Solter, of the Institute of Biology, Singapore, said. "I have no idea if the technique will be used, but it means you could have millions of gametes that could be combined at will. Today you can’t experiment on human embryos because it’s considered morally repugnant — and they are difficult to get. If embryos could be grown in culture like any other cell line, this latter problem would disappear," he added.

      IVF pioneer Alan Trounson, who is director of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in San Francisco, said: "I think it will be possible that we’ll be able to extend the fertile period for women by producing germ cells from iPS technology, or by a variant of nuclear transfer, so somatic cells become germ cells and are refreshed genetically."

      Couples would also be able to opt for a "designer" baby, where they choose characteristics like hair colour, height, intelligence and disease-free genes. The scientists also predicted that ectogenesis, a process in which the foetus develops outside the body in an artificial uterus, is also possible in the next 30 years.

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