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Dubrovnik, Croatia

Europe’s data center markets need more energy. Demand for energy to power the data centers is projected to grow from 10 gigawatts in 2024 to 35 gigawatts by 2030. The only place on the Continent with the power and political will to meet that demand is one most people haven’t thought of—and the war in the Gulf has reinforced the urgency to secure artificial-intelligence infrastructure for the U.S. and our allies.

With Iran threatening “complete and utter annihilation” of data centers in Abu Dhabi and calling American tech companies legitimate military targets, the question is no longer whether the West should rethink where to build its crucial AI infrastructure, such as data centers. The question is where they should go.

Croatia is geographically removed from every active conflict zone. As part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the Schengen Area and the eurozone, Croatia delivers regulatory predictability and political durability that institutional capital requires. A data center in Croatia is infrastructure protected by our sacrosanct collective defense guarantee.

Croatia’s grid is among the cleanest in Europe: Renewables supplied more than 52% of all electricity consumed in 2025, with a further 15% from nuclear. Electricity prices run significantly below the European average. The climate and access to natural water resources provide thermal management advantages that reduce energy consumption and operating costs, alongside high-voltage grid capacity that congested Western European hubs can’t offer.

European digital infrastructure investment is projected to reach €100 billion by 2030. EU data sovereignty rules are compelling major U.S. technology companies to store European data within EU borders—creating demand for U.S.-owned, EU-based capacity that doesn’t yet exist.

I have spent my career betting on overlooked infrastructure. The underlying logic is always the same: Find the structural gap, understand why it exists, and build first.

This is why I am in Croatia to announce Project Pantheon: a next-generation 1-gigawatt data-center campus on 310 acres. The campus will host 800 megawatts of usable IT load—enough to power the city of Baltimore. The facility is designed to be more resilient than most data centers in operation today, reaching 99.99999% uptime just as hyperscalers need facilities that can run massive workloads continuously and draw huge amounts of power without interruption.

Croatia sits between key areas of the EU, opening corridors to regions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Greece and Turkey. Pantheon Atlas LLC’s total initial investment in the project is $13.5 billion with the potential to grow to beyond $50 billion.

This is the largest single private investment in Croatian history. No U.S.-led gigawatt-scale AI-optimized facility currently exists in Central or Eastern Europe. Pantheon will be accessible to European defense, intelligence and commercial users, thereby helping the EU reach its goal of tripling European data center capacity within five to seven years.

The war in the Gulf has revealed that concentrating AI infrastructure in jurisdictions where a single strike can take a $30 billion investment offline is a strategic liability. Croatia offers the advantage of a collective defense guarantee that no insurance premium can match.

Mr. Rich is managing partner of Pantheon AI and founder of 24 Ventures, a venture firm headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y.

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“We stand alongside Lebanon in disarming Hezbollah,” Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa declared last month. No other Arab head of state has called for taking away Hezbollah’s weapons. Until Sharaa overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, Syria was helping to arm Hezbollah. Now, Syria finds itself unexpectedly sharing an adversary with Israel.

On April 19, Syria’s Interior Ministry announced that it had thwarted a sabotage plot in Quneitra province orchestrated by a cell linked to Hezbollah. According to Syrian authorities, the operatives had disguised a civilian transport vehicle to conceal rocket-launching equipment for a surprise attack. The rockets reportedly bore the slogan “Victory for our brothers in Lebanon and Palestine.” Days earlier, Syrian authorities announced that they had also disrupted a plot targeting a religious figure in Damascus, arresting suspects who the Interior Ministry said were linked to Hezbollah. The reported target, Rabbi Michael Khoury, is one of numerous Jewish communal leaders to have visited Syria following the fall of Assad and in December had been part of a delegation of Syrian American Jews attending the reopening of the Elfrange Synagogue in the Syrian capital.

Syria’s leadership, despite its constraints, is beginning to show a measurable willingness to curb Hezbollah’s footprint on its territory. The state has interdicted hundreds of weapons and rockets destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon since Shaara took power. The shift may be gratifying to Israel, but it is less about any sort of alignment with Israel than it is about converging interests. On the contrary, Syria and Israel have clashed repeatedly, especially over the status of the former’s Druze minority. Yet Shaara understands that allowing Hezbollah to exploit Syrian territory as a smuggling route would entrench the group’s presence and perpetuate instability inside a state struggling to reassert control. Sharaa himself has framed his actions as an attempt to “save the region” by preventing Syrian territory from becoming a launchpad for Hezbollah attacks.

This convergence of interests hardly erases the deep mistrust between the two countries. But it does create an opening for cooperation based on concern about a common threat. Sharaa has avoided naming Hezbollah explicitly as an adversary, yet Syria’s own security apparatus has warned that the group’s presence on the border with Syria “has become a threat.” It has also linked Hezbollah’s local networks to “sabotage cells” aimed at “undermining stability.” In practice, that cooperation could take the shape of deconfliction channels and intelligence sharing through intermediaries, particularly when it comes to the smuggling routes that Hezbollah uses in Syria to rearm.

For many Syrians, hostility toward Hezbollah goes much deeper than a concern about weapons trafficking. Syrians consider the group inseparable from the late Assad regime, sharing its complicity in massacres carried out during the civil war. That anger is spilling into public life. At a recent basketball game in Damascus between the Syrian and Lebanese national teams, what began as a show of reconciliation turned into a venting of enmity. Sharaa himself was in attendance and spoke of “putting an end to the tragedies” of both countries, yet thousands in the stands erupted into a chant of “God curse your soul, Nasrallah,” a direct rebuke of former Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and a reminder that, for many Syrians, the wounds of the group’s role in the conflict remain far from healed.

Under Assad, Hezbollah embedded itself deeply inside the Syrian state. At its peak in 2017, the group maintained an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 fighters in Syria. Hezbollah also recruited Syrians and cultivated local auxiliaries, including formations such as the so-called Golan File in southern Syria, positioned near the Golan Heights to threaten Israel.

After Assad fled to Moscow in December 2024, Hezbollah shifted from overt military entrenchment to a shadowy model built on covert local cells such as the Islamic Resistance Front in Syria, which have since claimed attacks against Israel launched from southern Syria and framed Sharaa as a “puppet for the Turkish, American, and Israeli security apparatuses who wants to bury the resistance identity in Syria.”

In one account carried by the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, an Iraqi official described a quiet exchange with Iranians over a shipment of weapons. The Iraqi was told that the Iranians and Hezbollah “have smuggling networks they rely on. … There are those who can deliver the shipments all the way to Damascus.” The official described a network stitched together from the remnants of the Assad regime and veteran traffickers—“individuals from different sectarian backgrounds and nationalities … some with long experience along smuggling lines.” If pockets of resistance to Sharaa’s government persist, this ecosystem has room to breathe and to aid Hezbollah’s rearmament and regeneration.

Hezbollah appears to recognize that restoring the old order may be out of reach. Its objective now is more pragmatic, focused on preserving access and ensuring that Syria remains usable as a conduit—even in a hostile political environment.

The new Syrian state holds territory in fragments—present in many places but in firm control of only a few. Units cycle from one flashpoint to the next, chasing Islamic State cells in the center, maintaining tense lines with the Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast, and navigating friction with Druze factions in the south. These thinly spread forces are not sufficient to fully control Syria’s porous borders.

What complicates matters for Syria, and by extension Israel, is Lebanon’s inaction against Hezbollah. Syrian outlets aligned with Sharaa have continuously reiterated that “the Lebanese government must be firm and serious” in disarming Hezbollah. On social media, the language is less diplomatic. Syrian analysts have pointed to Hezbollah’s rearmament to argue that cooperation with Beirut is futile and that the “Syrian army needs to advance into Lebanon and disarm Hezbollah itself.”

This is where Israeli and Syrian interests most clearly converge, but so far convergence has not translated into cooperation. Over the past year, efforts to bridge the gap between the two countries “have stalled,” according to Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani. This tension has eroded what had been a tentative opening, particularly during the period when Sharaa publicly hinted at normalization with Israel.

Israel’s distrust stems from Sharaa’s militant past and fears that foreign jihadis still operate within his ranks, all compounded by his backing from Turkey. Israel, for its part, has waged a sweeping campaign across Syria—launching hundreds of strikes and stepping in to back Druze factions in Suwayda against the government. Damascus has cast these moves as an attempt to fracture the state through armed proxies. That divide has fueled deepening animosity where even Syrian soldiers have been filmed chanting slogans tied to Hamas, revealing how, for both sides, the situation remains fragile and combustible.

Despite this, Israeli media and defense reporting suggest that at least some Israeli officials view Syria’s leadership favorably on the issue of interdicting Hezbollah’s weapons smuggling. Reportedly, the Israeli military had given Sharaa and his forces “very high marks” for preventing Iran and Hezbollah from smuggling arms into Lebanon.

Moving forward, Isreal would like to see Damascus pursue Hezbollah more aggressively, moving beyond episodic seizures toward a sustained effort to dismantle the group’s smuggling networks. This would involve targeting the facilitators, financial channels, and local intermediaries that continue to enable Hezbollah operations. Israel, for its part, will continue to act against high-value threats in Syria. But it should avoid steps that could prove destabilizing to the Syrian state. The issue of the Druze, for example—while critical to Israel—should be addressed through the September 2025 U.S.-backed arrangement in which Israel plays a supportive role, rather than through independent Druze armed factions.

If there is to be further progress, it depends on Washington. Over the past year, U.S.-mediated mechanisms have emerged to manage friction and prevent escalation. Now, the United States could help pressure both sides to work together more effectively. Indirect coordination or tacit understandings about red lines could significantly reduce friction while tightening constraints on Hezbollah’s movement in Syria. Crucially, Israel could provide Damascus with intelligence that would help it crack down on Hezbollah-linked networks, particularly those tied to weapons transfers and cross-border operations.

Even limited alignment between Israel and Syria can begin to narrow the space that Hezbollah has exploited. Over time, sustained coordination and small demonstrations of good faith could lay the groundwork for something more durable. Normalization may be distant, but incremental progress can gradually expand the constituency willing to consider it.

How Trump Is Running the Most Aggressive Geopolitical Play in a Generation—and Why It Has to Be This Way

From 1973 to 1977 the National Hockey League was the wild west, and Bob “Gasser” Gassoff—a 5’10”, 190-pound wrecking ball who skated for the St. Louis Blues—was one of the best enforcers in the game. His job was not to score. It was to protect the players who did. High-stick, slash, board or manhandle a Blues skill player and Gasser would drop the gloves and answer the bell, over and over, until somebody turtled or a referee had the stones to break it up. He skated to the penalty box bloodied and sometimes missing his jersey, then flashed a trademark toothless grin that thrilled Blues fans and infuriated every opponent in the building.

Gassoff loved to fight. But he loved winning more. He never worried about being liked. He worried about winning. Sound familiar?

Fast forward to 2026. The United States is engaged in titanic—and very risky—battles of its own, not on a rink but across the global stage. The liberal rules-based order that governed international behavior for the better part of seven decades is over. Not struggling. Not fraying at the edges. Over. The country is tired of policing the world while receiving debt and ingratitude in return. The majority voted for change, and the Trump administration has delivered it with a ferocity that has stunned allies and adversaries alike.

The north star is America First: put American interests—especially national security—ahead of the globalist commitments that hollowed out the middle class, offshored the industrial base, and left the Pentagon dependent on a rival power for critical supply chains. The 2026 National Defense Strategy puts it plainly: “Out with utopian idealism; in with hardnosed realism."

What looks like chaos—the tariffs, the strikes, the ultimatums, the Greenland threats, the trolling of Canada—is not chaos. It is a deliberate, historically grounded power play aimed at a single strategic objective: containing China’s rise before the window to do so closes permanently.

The Rulebook Got Shredded

Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital offers the clearest summary: Trump has done more to dismantle the rules-based order in 12 months than the BRICS nations did in 12 years. He didn’t just bend the rules. He dropped his gloves and hit the referee. But Johnson is equally insistent on something most observers miss: the system was already dying. The pendulum had been swinging toward globalization for decades, and COVID rang the bell at the top. It is now swinging back hard and would have done so regardless of who won in 2024. Trump is a uniquely blunt instrument for an era that demands one—not the cause of the disruption but its most forceful expression.

Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank, frames what has replaced the old order. The world has shifted from economic policy to economic statecraft. Economic policy asks: what is inflation, what is the deficit, how do we hit a 2% growth target? Economic statecraft asks a more fundamental question: what is GDP for? Once you start answering that, every move the Trump administration has made snaps into focus—not random, but in service of a clearly defined national interest.

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls Trump’s approach “Jacksonian preemptive deterrence." It is neither isolationism nor empire-building. It is a focused strategy to weaken adversaries and strengthen friends before a larger confrontation—one nobody wants but everyone is preparing for—has to be fought. The Obama and Biden administrations projected weakness and paid for it: four major theater conflicts, from Crimea in 2014 through the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Middle East theater war of 2024–25. Anemic deterrence invites aggression. Trump’s approach is designed to make the cost of testing America so prohibitive that adversaries think twice.

Locking Down the Backyard First

In hockey, before you launch a power play you control your own zone. You don’t scramble to clear your crease while trying to set up a scoring chance at the other end. You lock it down at home first.

Venezuela. Cuba. The Panama Canal. The cartel designations. The deportations. The “51st state” pressure on Canada. The Greenland campaign. The January 2026 removal of Nicolás Maduro—accomplished in less than 48 hours. To most observers these look like random provocations. They are neither random nor unrelated. They are all aimed at the same target: China. While America spent the 2000s consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan, Beijing was methodically rewriting its relationship with Latin America—one infrastructure loan, one port deal, one oil-for-credit arrangement at a time. By 2024, China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies and had signed Belt and Road agreements with more than twenty Latin American nations. Nobody in Washington had a serious plan to stop it.

Johnson is direct on Venezuela: it was never going to be allowed to keep its oil fields—the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere—in Chinese hands indefinitely. The only question was when. The answer turned out to be January 2026. This was not about stealing oil. It was about denying China a strategic asset in America’s own backyard. The same logic governs the Panama Canal—built by America, given away for a dollar under Carter, and now strategically reclaimed after Chinese companies moved aggressively to control it. The NSS calls the framework the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The strategy is two words: Enlist and Expand.

Hanson does not mince words on the fentanyl front: 75,000 Americans die every year, much of it deliberately laced into other substances. The precursor chemicals come from China. They flow through Mexican cartels. Designating those cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and going after them with military tools is not cruelty. It is triage on a mass casualty event—and it simultaneously squeezes Chinese influence out of the Americas by severing a critical revenue stream.

It Was Always About China

Johnson states it plainly: even when it isn’t about China, it is still about China. The number that should stop every American cold: in 2000, China manufactured 6 percent of the world’s goods. On its current trajectory, by 2030 that share reaches 45 percent. Extended further, there is a point at which China makes effectively everything—at which point it can do whatever it wants, because the rest of the world cannot function without it. America has a closing window to reverse this trajectory.

Hanson dissects the old bipartisan fantasy with surgical precision. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations operated on the same assumption: the more American money invested in China, the more a prosperous Chinese middle class would demand freedom, and China would gradually liberalize. This was catastrophically wrong. Those trade dollars funded the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history. American consumers made China rich. China used that wealth to build a military capable of challenging American power on every front. The NSS calls the old trade relationship “free but not fair," and the results are now impossible to ignore.

Every frames the strategic response through economic history. What Trump is doing is not radical departure—it is a return to American roots. Alexander Hamilton built American industry behind tariff walls. The post-war era of open markets was the exception, not the rule. When it stopped serving American interests—when it hollowed out the industrial base and handed China the supply chains that underpin American military power—the model had to change. The tariffs are not primarily an economic instrument. They are a weapon: forcing American allies to stop trading with China on terms that sustain Beijing’s industrial and military expansion.

Why Trump Is Hitting the Allies—and Why It's Working

Sometimes you take a penalty on purpose. A strategic foul slows the other team’s momentum and accepts the two minutes because the disruption is worth the cost. This is the logic behind Trump’s treatment of allies—the part of the strategy that confuses even supporters and enrages critics.

Why alienate the very partners you need to build a coalition against China? Because Trump uses predictable opposition as a mechanism. European and Canadian elites have a reliable reaction function: they reflexively oppose anything he proposes. So rather than ask them politely—which has never worked—he provokes them into doing what he needs while they believe they are resisting him.

The proof is in the results. During his first term, Trump pleaded with European NATO members to increase defense spending. Defense budgets barely moved. Then he threatened to pull out of NATO entirely. The response was dramatic: Germany hit 2% of GDP for the first time in decades, Poland is building one of the largest armies in Europe, and NATO members collectively committed to 5% in total defense and security spending—a number that would have been considered fantasy five years ago. He did not persuade them. He provoked them.

Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, laid out the underlying logic in The Strategy of Denial. Preventing Chinese regional dominance in Asia is the non-negotiable core American interest. But the United States cannot concentrate forces in the Pacific while simultaneously babysitting Europe and maintaining commitments around the globe. The math only works if allies handle their own regions—Europe handles Russia, Asia-Pacific allies handle their piece of the Chinese containment line, and America pivots to the decisive theater when needed. Either allies step up or Trump creates conditions in which the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action.

The Power Play: Risks and Rewards

Power plays fail. More often than people remember. The penalty killer breaks free, catches the defense napping, and buries a shorthanded goal. Everything described here could go wrong, and an honest assessment requires saying so.

Johnson identifies the most dangerous near-term threat: the bond market. The U.S. government will not stop spending—no administration ever does—but if interest rates spike hard enough to make refinancing America’s debt load unmanageable, the entire strategic apparatus collapses. You cannot fund a military renaissance, an industrial revival, and a campaign against China if Treasury yields are blowing out and borrowing costs are crushing the economy.

Every raises a more structural risk—what he calls the Gorbachev parallel. Trump is attempting a reverse transformation of the American economy: shifting it from financialization and consumption toward production, industry, and military capacity. Gorbachev attempted something analogous in the 1980s—introducing market mechanisms into the Soviet command economy to reform it from within. The result was catastrophic collapse. The system could not be reformed piecemeal. Pull one leg of the table and the whole thing falls over. Trump faces a version of the same problem: he needs enough state direction to rebuild American manufacturing without destroying the market dynamism that makes America innovative. The margin is narrow. The state directing capital in the name of necessity rarely gives that power back.

The risks abroad are equally real: a miscalculation over Taiwan; a hot war in the Middle East that draws in Russia; a fracturing of the allied coalition that leaves America genuinely isolated rather than strategically freed. And there is the domestic risk few want to say aloud: all of this requires competent execution. Big plays require big talent.

But if it works—even partially—the rewards are historic. American energy dominance becomes real and lasting, fueling the AI race that will define the 21st century’s commanding heights. Re-industrialization brings blue-collar jobs home and rebuilds the defense industrial base. China gets contained without a shooting war. The alliance that looked like it was fraying emerges more durable because everyone is finally pulling their share. Hanson’s bottom line: it’s not Fortress America in isolation. It’s Fortress America better equipped to help its friends, punish its enemies, and remain the dominant power in the world.

Conclusion

The thesis of this piece is not that Trump’s power play will succeed. It is that the play is real, coherent, and historically grounded in ways the daily news cycle obscures. Beneath the provocations and the bluster, there is a strategy—aimed at preventing China from achieving the kind of dominance that would make American power irrelevant for a generation. Whether it succeeds depends on factors no analyst can predict: the resilience of American institutions, the competence of execution, the choices of adversaries, and the tolerance of Americans for the short-term pain that any serious power play requires.

Bob Gassoff died in a motorcycle accident in 1977. He was 24. He never saw the Stanley Cup. He never got to find out whether all those fights, all that blood, and all those penalty minutes added up to the championship everyone in St. Louis was convinced he would help deliver. That is the nature of power plays. You commit to them fully or not at all. You put the extra man on the ice, you turn the game in your favor, and then you either bury it or you don’t. There is no halfway. No hedging. No playing it safe.

What we are watching in real time is the most consequential power play attempted by any nation in living memory. America—battered, indebted, politically fractured, and tired of subsidizing a world that kept taking and rarely gave back—has pulled the extra man off the bench and sent him onto the ice. Whether it ends with Gasser skating off bloodied and grinning with the game-winner on the board, or face-down on the ice after a shorthanded goal breaks the wrong way, we will know soon enough. The clock is running. The gloves are already off.

Christopher J. Little is a writer and essayist based in St. Louis. “Power Play” is his first work of geopolitical analysis.

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Over the past decade, I have made some bold predictions about the future of sex. One that’s been easy is that people will still be having sex for years to come, but for different reasons: they simply won’t do it so much to make babies.

That’s not to say that making babies will become obsolete, but, rather, that technology will change the ways we do it. There could be a much safer and easier way to reproduce – and sex as we know it could end.

Until about a century ago, humans always created embryos and babies in the same old, largely random way – through sex. Then some started using artificial insemination and, 45 years ago, in vitro fertilisation. Important as these technologies have been, they still involve human eggs and sperm.

Thanks to stem cell technologies, though, that will shift.

The step change will be in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) – turning skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, then turning those into eggs and sperm. IVG is tremendously exciting to millions of couples, but it does raise some tricky questions.

For example, if we could make eggs from skin cells, 90-year-olds could become genetic parents. So could nine-year-olds, miscarried foetuses or people who have been dead for years, but whose cells were frozen.

Also consider this: what if we could make sperm from women’s skin cells, or eggs from men’s? It could soon be a reality. In 2023, Japanese scientists announced that they had made eggs from a male mouse’s skin cells and, using ‘normal’ mouse sperm, had produced mouse pups.

To take this idea further, what if we made both eggs and sperm from the same person and used them to make embryos?

Your ‘unibaby’ wouldn’t be a clone, but closer to you than your siblings. An even more radical idea called ‘multiplex parenting’ could involve making embryos from four people that would then be used to make eggs and sperm.

Turn that fertilised egg into a baby and you’ve got a child with roughly equal genetic contributions from four parents – or eight, or sixteen, or more.

Developing technology

Another technology that could end reproduction as we know it is the power to modify an embryo’s DNA. Targeted editing of particular sequences in a cell’s DNA has become possible thanks to a revolutionary tool, invented in 2012, targeting CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) DNA sequences (below).

In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of two girls whose embryos he had ‘CRISPRed’ earlier that year. Unfortunately, he did this work in secret, in ways that violated both human research ethics and Chinese law.

A Chinese court sentenced him to three years in prison, and the court of international opinion condemned him as a renegade. (Those first two babies are now over five years old, but China has released no information about their health or genetic makeup.)

When you edit DNA in an early embryo, you edit the DNA in what will become all of its cells – including its eggs and sperm. You therefore make a change that can be passed on to that embryo’s descendants indefinitely.

The most plausible use of this DNA-editing technology is to prevent diseases or disabling conditions in children. The most frightening, though implausible, use is to use it to create ‘super babies’ who would not only have greater abilities, but would also pass them on to their offspring.

Some think that we should never be allowed to change the DNA of our descendants, potentially forever; others think that we shouldn’t use it now, because it’s not proven safe or effective.

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Another technology that could make sex for reproduction further redundant is the development of artificial wombs. Over 90 years ago, in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted ‘hatcheries’ in which human foetuses would develop in bottles.

In 2017, researchers reported keeping neonatal lambs born a week or two early alive in fluid-filled plastic bags. More recently, the US Food and Drug Administration held a public meeting to consider whether, when and how to run trials with such artificial wombs on babies.

These devices are, in effect, early incubators. They might push back viability for premature infants a week or two, from (at best) about 22 weeks of pregnancy to nearer 20, but that baby would still need to have spent four and a half months developing inside a woman.

This advance could be wonderful for premature infants and their parents, but would not make much difference for most of us.

What about a ‘true’ artificial uterus – one that could take a six- or seven-day embryo and help it develop over nine months into a healthy newborn? That would remove not only the sex from making babies, but pregnancy as well. Some might welcome it. Others would, no doubt, be concerned.

All this might not be implausible in the far future. A major area of long-term research today is using stem cells to grow human organs. The focus is on vital organs for transplants – kidneys, livers, hearts – but if they can be grown, why not a uterus?

Imagine that organ, grown from a woman’s stem cells, hooked up to a machine that would provide blood, sugar, oxygen and all the necessary hormones, as well as waste treatment – then add in an embryo. Such a ‘womb in a box’ could, in theory at least, take the place of a womb in a woman.

But should it? Our children and grandchildren will likely need to make that decision.

This is an amazing time to be involved in medicine and biology. Our knowledge is expanding astonishingly. Our ability to make good use of that knowledge is growing more slowly, but steadily. Our understanding of the consequences of using new technologies – and our agreement on what limits, if any, should be placed on it – are growing more slowly still.

Making babies artificially is not an exception, though it is special in one important way. I am able to consent to an experimental procedure, agreeing to the risks in return for potential benefits to myself or to science. Babies can’t consent; nor can embryos.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ever use new technologies in reproduction, but it does mean that we should be especially careful to test the technologies to make sure that they are safe and effective – for the babies.

We need to emphasise their welfare first, then the broader effects on our societies.

Read more:

• We're having less sex because we're too busy, not because of social media
• Do babies have nightmares?
• Is porn bad for you?