Baby in a Box Half a world away, in the laboratory of Yosinori Kuwabara and his colleagues at Juntendou University in Tokyo, a fetal goat floats in a clear acrylic tank the size of a large toaster oven, bathed in eight quarts of artificial amniotic fluid kept at body temperature. Its umbilical cord is threaded to two machines that jointly perform the nuts and bolts of a placenta, pumping in blood, oxygen and nutrients and cleaning out waste. The fetus is almost 20 weeks old, weighs about six pounds and has been living in its eerie fishbowl of a universe since it was removed from its mother by caesarean section several days earlier. The creature behaves like any other prenatal goat, blinking its soft black eyes and kicking its slender white limbs. Should it survive to the full 21-week goat term, it will be "born": lifted out of the tank and its umbilicus cut. Dr. Kuwabara and his co-workers are striving to create a viable artificial womb, a system to sustain a developing infant when the real womb won't or can't do it. So far, the researchers have managed to keep their goats-on-a-rope alive for up to 10 days, and they are getting closer to understanding why the artificial environment eventually fails its charges. The scientists hesitate when asked when their experimental uterus will be ready for human use, but others happily speculate for them. "There are a lot of difficult technical problems to be overcome," says Malcolm Levene, professor of pediatrics and child health at the University of Leeds in England. "But I see them as being soluble in the next 5 to 10 years."