Loom Looms or breeding - engines were devices used by the Great House s of the Time Lord s to perpetuate their race . ( PROSE : " " , " The Book of the War " ) Unable to procreate sex ually , the Time Lords had to rely on these Rassilon - invented devices ( PROSE : " " ) to " weave " new life from base matter and biodata . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Description . Each Great House on Gallifrey had their own Loom which they used to create new members of their Family . ( PROSE : " " , " Lungbarrow " ) Each of these breeding - engines was kept outside the corresponding chapterhouse in a loomshed , where they would whisper to each other in the night . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) The breeding - engines were slightly prescient , but not enough to weave a newborn ' s entire life story into their biodata . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) During looming , childrene were primed with foreknowledge through memetic priming . ( PROSE : " Against Nature " ) The genetic relationship between people originating from each Family Loom was lateral rather than direct , meaning that people from the same Loom were " cousins " of each other . Gallifreyans were loomed as " full - grown adults " , albeit ones that began child - like and had to mature mentally . ( PROSE : " Lungbarrow " ) Members of a Great House were loomed to full physicality but lacked the experience of the elders , so they were called childrene . ( PROSE : " Against Nature " ) Leela felt pity for Gallifreyan s , saying that the Looms prevented " true children " from existing on their planet . ( PROSE : " Lungbarrow " ) According to one account , upon being Loomed into the House of Lungbarrow , the Doctor was physically in the form of a child . ( PROSE : " Human Nature " ) Looms also kept a tally of all the people they birthed , and could normally indicate how old each of its " offspring " was and how many regeneration s each had gone through . Data from all the Family Looms on Gallifrey was sent to the Bureau of Loomographic Records , which served as a central repository of gene tic information . Each Great House had a specified number of cousins which could exist in the Family at any given time . The House of Lungbarrow , for example , was allotted forty - five cousins . When a member of a Family died for the final time , the Loom would weave a new cousin into the Family . Cases did exist when an additional cousin was illegally woven , such as the Doctor ' s cousin Owis , but these were extremely rare . ( PROSE : " Lungbarrow " ) Remembrance tank s were " parodies " of breeding - engines . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Sontaran s were also created by looms . ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " ) History . In the time of the anchoring of the thread , ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Rassilon created the Looms to stabilise the Gallifreyan population after they were rendered sterile by Pythia ' s curse . One was given to each Great House . ( PROSE : " " ) These breeding - engines were designed to produce generations of flawless academicians and observers , and they did so for ten million years . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) However , there were instances of womb - born children during the period where Looms were in use . Rassilon passed a decree that " only the Loom - born shall inherit the Legacy of Rassilon " , and enforced this decree by wiping out the womb - born . ( PROSE : " Cold Fusion " ) However , some womb - born survived this persecution and hid among the general population for hundreds of centuries . ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " ) Despite their supposed infallibility , mutations began to appear in the breeding - engines twelve hundred years before the War . This resulted in a generation of renegade s that included the Imperator , Grandfather Paradox , and the War King . The Order of the Weal was interested in unstable bloodline s , and " The Book of the War " hypothesised that the Order made subtle alterations to the programme dynamics of the Houses ' engines . Loomstack s on Gallifrey Eight were used to mass - produce soldiers during the War . ( PROSE : " The Taking of Planet 5 " ) It was feared that the enemy ' s influence could retro - compromise the Houses ' soldiers and affect the nature of their breeding - engines ; this exact phenomenon may have caused the Sixth Wave to retro - annul itself at birth or to be born supporting the wrong side . In the Rivera Manuscript , the enemy ' s attack on the Homeworld made the breeding - engines continuously scream from the loomsheds . The enemy soldiers eventually attacked the engines directly , detonating themselves and leaving the looms intact but mutated . These mutations spread as a sickness throughout the survivors of the attack . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) When Rassilon and the Cybermen conquered Gallifrey , they used Looms to trap captured Time Lords in a state of perpetual regeneration , where the Looms could harvest the energy created . The Cybermen later linked it to the Cyberiad and the Eye of Harmony , where they planned to alter history . The Twelfth Doctor and Rassilon countered this plan by using the energy to regenerate the universe and return history to normal . ( COMIC : " Supremacy of the Cybermen " ) The Doctor . When he was only five years old , the Doctor boasted that he could remember existing in the House of Lungbarrow ' s Loom before being actually born : The Eighth Doctor remembered both being loomed and having parents and a childhood . ( PROSE : " Unnatural History " , " The Shadows of Avalon " ) He knew that one of these was a dream , but he could not recall which . ( PROSE : " The Shadows of Avalon " ) The boy from Faction Paradox suggested that the enemy was rewriting the Doctor ' s past " when he wasn ' t looking " . ( PROSE : " Unnatural History " ) In one universe , the Doctor believed he had been " born of the Loom , son of the greatest explorer of his age and a human woman . " ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " )