Two babies have been born after a sperm-injecting robot directed by a PlayStation5 controller inseminated the eggs.
The children, two girls, were born in Spain after the project from Overture Life, which is effectively a new version of in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
The Barcelona-based firm has seemingly moved the traditional process forward, which sees sperm and eggs mixed together by specialists to inject the former into the latter.
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NHS data suggests a round of IVF treatment costs about £5,000 with no guarantee that they will work. Firms are therefore working to find a way to make the treatment cheaper and easier – the overall aim being greater affordability and more healthy children through greater use of automation.
Eduard Alba, a student engineer, used a PlayStation5 controller to move the minuscule needle of the IVF device – carrying a single sperm cell – into the egg.
This is understood to have been done around 12 times.
The project has been a success and Overture is the first outfit to create healthy human life conceived by a robot.
Alba toldMIT Technology Review: "I was calm. In that exact moment, I thought, 'It’s just one more experiment'."
The technology, however, is seemingly still a long way from being rolled out in the mainstream though.
The inventor Gianpiero Palermo, creator of the world's first intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), said it was “extraordinary,” a “baby step” but added: "This is not yet robotic ICSI, in my opinion.”
Some think the idea is still a long way off.
"You pick up a sperm, put it in an egg with minimal trauma, as delicately as possible. [At the moment] humans are far better than a machine,” said the director of Columbia University's fertility clinic, Zev Williams.
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