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. 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. The technique sounds less futuristic because 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. Current IVF practice startups like Overture and several others identified by MIT Technology Review, proclaim to make the process much cheaper and more accessible by increasingly automating parts of the process. Overture's engineers still had to manually load sperm cells onto the injector needles, which therefore means that is not yet robotic ICSI.
