--- title: "First Babies Born After Being Conceived By Robot" description: "A Spanish startup has built a sperm-injecting robot that can be controlled using a PlayStation controller." date: "2023-04-26" modified: "2023-04-26" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/babies-born-robot-ivf-conception" categories: - "Health & Medicine" tags: - "fertility" - "In vitro fertilization" - "IVF" - "robots" --- # First Babies Born After Being Conceived By Robot ![A Spanish startup has built a sperm-injecting robot that can be controlled using a PlayStation controller.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* A Spanish startup has built a sperm-injecting robot that can be controlled using a PlayStation controller. The team successfully used it to fertilize human eggs, eventually resulting in the birth of two healthy babies. As [*MIT Technology Review* reports](), one of the engineers working on the world's first insemination robot didn't have all that much experience in the field of fertility medicine — which was where the PlayStation 5 controller came into, well, play. Using the controller, a student engineer from startup Overture Life \[name after descriptor\] steered a tiny, mechanized in-vitro fertilization (IVF) needle to deposit single sperm cells into human eggs more than a dozen times. And the unusual technique appears to have worked. Two baby girls were born as a result of robotic fertilization this spring. "I was calm," Eduard Alba, the PlayStation controller-wielding student engineer, told *MIT Technology Review.* "In that exact moment, I thought, 'It’s just one more experiment.'" If the process sounds less futuristic than you were expecting, it's probably because it is. In essence, it's a robotic update to traditional IVF, which involves human specialists joining a woman's egg and a man's sperm in a dish using a special needle under a microscope, which sometimes — but not always — results in fertilization. Because the current IVF practice is so delicate and labor-intensive, it's very expensive, with each attempt at pregnancy in the US costing around $20,000, according to the report. That's where startups like Overture and several others identified by *MIT Technology Review* come in. They aim to make the process much cheaper and more accessible by increasingly automating parts of the process. Thus far, Overture has raised about $37 million, the most out of the lot, with backers including former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. According to the experts, it's only an incremental step towards fully automating the process. "The concept is extraordinary, but this is a baby step," Weill Cornell Medical Center fertility doctor Gianpiero Palermo, who developed the now-commonplace [intracytoplasmic sperm injection]() (ICSI) procedure in the 1990s, told *MIT Technolgy Review*. Palermo added that Overture's engineers still had to manually load sperm cells onto the injector needles, which means "this is not yet robotic ICSI." All the same, it's still an impressive step forward in fertility medicine — and to think, it was done with a PlayStation controller is amazing. **More on fertility:** [*Twins Born From Donated Embryos That Were Frozen in 1992*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()