Leading the Future of Human Reproduction (FoHR) project has been a huge privilege. I have learnt so much and being part of such a wonderful team has been a career highlight.

The project was funded by a £1 million Wellcome Research Development Award and ran from 2022 to 2026. Its focus was on three areas of emerging reproductive biotechnology:

• ectogenesis, or artificial womb technology;
• in vitro gametogenesis, the creation of eggs or sperm from non-reproductive bodily cells; and
• genome editing in reproductive contexts.

These technologies are at different stages of development, but all raise questions that are already worth asking: about who counts as a parent, what counts as a human being, the proper extent of parental choice, the wellbeing of future generations, and what fair and effective regulation should look like.

One of the most distinctive things about the project was its disciplinary breadth. The team brought together colleagues from bioethics, law, design, English literature, linguistics, and psychology, alongside a wider network of collaborators and small grant holders. The Wellcome scheme was explicitly designed to support teams trying to create new research agendas and new methods in humanities and social sciences research applied to health. That made it very different from most of my previous work, which had centred on bioethics and philosophy, and involved a narrower range of cross-disciplinary collaboration: predominantly with clinical or scientific practice or law. For this project, we needed to take seriously the idea that working with different disciplines might fundamentally change the questions we ask and how we go about answering them.

Interdisciplinary work is often lauded in the abstract but can be hard in practice. By ‘hard’, I don’t mean unpleasant - far from it. I mean that making progress, and even agreeing on what counts as progress, does not always come naturally when working across disciplines. Interdisciplinary working requires time, patience, trust, and a willingness to accept being a novice, who is not automatically ‘good at doing’ another discipline.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that lawyers, philosophers, designers, literary scholars, linguists, and psychologists do not always mean the same thing by key terms. The early work of the project therefore involved building enough shared understanding to make collaboration possible. For example, we allocated many hours to simply explaining to each other what we normally do in our home disciplines. Over time, the project became less a collection of parallel disciplinary contributions and more a space in which people could test ideas with colleagues who saw the world differently, and over time a pleasing esprit de corps emerged within the team. That said, while we came a long way together, much remains undone and a further period of collaboration would be needed to fully realise the potential that has been unlocked.

Another notable aspect of the project was the use of speculative design. This involved creating artefacts relating to possible reproductive futures: posters, exhibits, objects, and scenarios that made abstract questions more concrete. Our speculative design work was positive in several distinct ways. It was usually great fun and an excellent team building activity. It allowed us to picture different future scenarios in much more depth and detail than in traditional academic thought experiments. And it was a great way of engaging wider audiences with the ideas and questions it generated.

The artefacts were used in public engagement and policy-facing contexts, including the ESRC Festival of Social Science, work with the Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics, and workshops with the Museum of Science and Industry. The point was not to persuade people that any particular future was desirable or undesirable. It was to create better conversations and more informed speculation.

Engagement with policy was another important aspect of the project, and this is an area where I think the team can be rightly proud of what it achieved. For example, the team put together some fascinating events on IVG in London and in Leiden in The Netherlands, established an IVG Network, and co-produced, with colleagues from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a comprehensive report on the ethical and policy issues raised by IVG.

Even a quick glance at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Horizon Scan shows that biotechnologies and social developments related to health and medicine will continue to raise important cultural, ethical, policy, and social issues. There therefore remains a great deal for bioethics and law to do using their more familiar specialist methods. But the project convinced me that these methods are enriched when placed alongside other ways of thinking. I very much hope that the Future of Human Reproduction team can stay in contact and, in one form or another, undertake further work together over the coming years.

Finally, I would like wholeheartedly to thank the team, and all of our collaborators, partners, and friends, for helping make this such a special project – as well as of course our funders, Wellcome, for enabling it to happen in the first place.

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