WHEN A FETUS reveals indicators of hassle within the womb, docs face a precarious job. They need to discover out what’s fallacious and the best way to assist with out jeopardising the being pregnant. Regardless of refined trendy genetic and imaging assessments, many questions are troublesome to reply—how extreme a malformation is, for instance, or how a fetus would possibly reply to remedy. However now scientists have developed a technique to create simplified variations of a fetus’s personal organs, outdoors the womb, giving docs the flexibility to prod and probe with out placing anybody in danger. “For the primary time, we are able to really entry the fetus with out touching the fetus,” says Mattia Gerli, a stem-cell biologist at College Faculty London (UCL).