11 ms·

Fertility 'breakthrough' as human eggs grown in lab for first time

345 points by vezycash 9y ago

technotony 9y ago
This has several big implications: 1. Women will soon not need to go through the painful (and expensive) process of freezing eggs. (soon being when this is shown to be safe and equivalent to existing eggs). This will enable older women to have kids and solve some reproductive issues. 2. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs (as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo research and other genetic analysis of human germline 3. Potentially this could lead to gay couples being able to have genetically descended children (obviously male couples here, but similar work on sperm is being done that could potentially enable lesbian couples to have kids too). This can be done as skin cells can be turned into pluripotent stem cells, and then maybe into the eggs (still some missing pieces in this process)
- Zamicol 9y ago
  >gay couples being able to have genetically descended children What steps are missing? I'm extremely interested in this but I've had a hard time finding more information.
  - technotony 9y ago
    Producing the egg cells from pluripotent stem cells, then figuring out any immune response from growing them in the system described in this article.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
  > This will enable older women to have kids and solve some reproductive issues. AFAIK, there's far more problems to solve than just this before older women in general can just have kids like they're 20 again.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ehsanu1 9y ago
    Surrogate pregnancies?
    - garmaine 9y ago
      Other problems remain, such as genetic degradation and questions about epigentic content.
- gwern 9y ago
  > 2. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs (as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo research and other genetic analysis of human germline Don't forget embryo selection: if you can create on demand several dozen or hundred eggs, the estimates of gains from embryo selection go from ~0.5 IQ points to 5-10 IQ points (and similarly for any other trait you might want to select for). 0.5 points is pretty trivial and no one will be beating down doors for that; 10 points, however, is a different proposition. Perhaps more importantly, it's a step towards iterated embryo selection - fertilizing, selecting, then regressing to stem cells, and progressing to sperm/eggs - and doing so for multiple generations, getting +10 points each time, for largely unbounded gains.
  - bognition 9y ago
    Where are you getting the IQ boost from?
    - gwern 9y ago
      It's from my analysis of embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection). But you can do it without the complications by treating it as an order statistic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic): what is the expected maximum of a sample of 5 Gaussians (rough current average egg harvest) vs 20 or 100 Gaussians, where the Gaussian is N(0, 0.5 * sqrt(polygenic score))? (Since you are selecting on the polygenic scores, not the unknown adult scores, and 0.5 because you are selecting from embryos which are 50% related ie. siblings.) X_5 vs X_100 is a big difference. (To save you the trouble, it's +1.16SD vs +2.51SD; the difference is actually much bigger than it looks because you lose so many embryos in the IVF process, so it's really more like X_1 vs X_196 or +0.56 vs +2.48SD, but to be more precise, you need to go into the weeds of PGSes and per-stage losses in IVF etc. But the order statistics are a good starting point.)
  - scarmig 9y ago
    What's the reason for thinking the gains are unbounded? AFAICT we could reasonably suppose something like 50 IQ points is within reach via embryo selection, but what would a something like a 300 IQ even mean, and even if it does mean something tangible, why should we assume that's biologically reachable in the same way that a 150 IQ would be?
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  > This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. It will also mean a massive rise in the availability of human eggs for turning into embryos, which in turn will mean the ability to be much more selective about which embryos to to implant during IVF. Currently egg harvesting is such an arduous process that embryos can only realistically be selected for viability and a handful of generally fatal diseases. When you are choosing 1 out of 7-10 embryos, you can't be all that picky. But between having access to hundreds of eggs, sperm obviously not being an issue, the ever decreasing cost of genomic sequencing, and the ever increasing knowledge of how specific genes relate to traits, parents undergoing IFV could start to apply many selection criteria. That wouldn't be genetic engineering in the classic sense, nothing would be available that wasn't in one of the parent's DNA, but it would get a lot of the way there. Edit: If I was going to be beaten to the punch by anyone on this subject, I'm happy it was gwern.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcadam 9y ago
    And one day soon children conceived the 'natural' way will be at a disadvantage. Reminds me of Gattaca...
    - zerostar07 9y ago
      it's happening already
      - aldoushuxley001 9y ago
        No it's not. I don't know of any non-naturally born people who have an advantage. Currently, people born via IVF are more likely to be born prematurely and with increased risks of mental and physical problems. We may be there soon, but we're definitely not there yet.
        9y ago
- tropdrop 9y ago
  > Potentially this could lead to gay couples being able to have genetically descended children (obviously male couples here, but similar work on sperm is being done that could potentially enable lesbian couples to have kids too) I would actually argue that the latter (lesbian couple->kids) will become feasible first - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/25/lab-created-sperm-breeds-healthy-mice-raising-hopes-for-end-to-male-infertility https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/25/lab-created-...
- russdill 9y ago
  I don't think you read the article. The process is the growing of pre-existing egg cells from ovarian tissues into mature egg cells.
- jedberg 9y ago
  > This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research Depending on where you are, that's not really a problem. We did IVF, and we still have an embryo left over. When we asked about donating it to science, they told us not to bother because it would just be thrown away, since they already have too many in California (the embryos can't cross state lines apparently).
- mrfusion 9y ago
  Don’t you still have to do egg harvesting? Or where are these coming from?
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > This will enable older women to have kids and solve some reproductive issues. Under 35, the success rate for IVF is ~40%. Between 35 and 42, it's about 10%. After 42 it's about 4%. Each time you try it costs around 20k, albeit sometimes the first one or two tries are subsidized by insurance or state grants. And there are also all sorts of health risks to both the mother and baby. So even if you can safely create unlimited eggs at a nominal cost, I don't see this having any practical effect on family planning. (Other than as a treatment for certain infertility issues.) Given that it takes around two years to have a baby, pragmatically you're still going to ideally want to start having kids no later than 35 - 2 * (desired kids), at least for the foreseeable future.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    20k! Here in the UK, the NHS will pay for up to 3 attempts (only if you haven't been able to conceive naturally), but even if you pay privately the cost is around 4k USD.
    - adventured 9y ago
      More like $7,000. Your point still stands of course. US healthcare is typically twice as expensive as equally high income nations. Adjust the $7k UK figure up to US income levels, you get around $10k. So that 2x rate remains pretty accurate. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ivf/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ivf/
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- fastball 9y ago
  Do we really want to increase the human races ability to procreate? We already have enough children that have been abandoned or live in terrible conditions. The earth is overpopulated as it is. This has many implications, not the least of which that the simplest way to reduce carbon emissions is fewer people.
- appleflaxen 9y ago
  Using strips of ovarian tissue removed in a biopsy, it represents an advance on IVF (in vitro fertilisation), where a mature egg is fused with a sperm in the lab and the fertilised embryo is implanted. Eggs aren't frozen, but it still sounds like a painful and expensive process.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Which probably means we will reduce the combinations of genes we use, more and more. And hence, lessen the genetic diversity of our specie. What can go wrong ?
airstrike 9y ago
I can't wait for humanity to build an "unmanned" spaceship filled with human eggs that only get fertilized 1,000 years from now when it reaches [insert exciting destination] and then the babies are raised by AI and trained so they can populate other worlds.
- rubber_duck 9y ago
  Typically techie :) Babies die or have extreme developmental issues without physical contact https://www.google.hr/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/born-love/201003/touching-empathy%3famp https://www.google.hr/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bor...
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    Easy fix. We raise the first batch of babies with AI controlled robots built to mimic the physical properties of humans similar to how birds are raised in captivity by zookeepers with puppets. We spawn generation zero, selected to be intelligent, attentive, sterile, and nurturing, 50 years before arrival. They are raised by soft robots and AI. When they reach adulthood we start raising staggered cohorts of hardy and enterprising colonists. The colonists will have reached adulthood, raised by their nurturing, and perhaps developmentally disadvantaged, parents, and be ready to settle a new world.
  - betterbeehome 9y ago
    Perhaps we could also develop robots to simulate the parental senses of touch needed to grow healthy children?
  - vinchuco 9y ago
    Hey Alexa/Siri/etc? Please raise my baby colony.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- ASalazarMX 9y ago
spraak 9y ago
I feel like so much of these conversations lack the high level questioning around why IVF and related technology has become so prominent and increased in usage. Is the rate of fertility problems increasing? And why?
- Kluny 9y ago
  It's probably because women are waiting longer to have children and it's harder for older women to become pregnant.
- ereyes01 9y ago
  Maybe not in this particular article/thread, but it's been widely discussed how starting a family can be disruptive to a woman's career and professional development. The reasons it's disruptive could be due to companies / culture in general not being flexible and accommodating enough to motherhood. Taking time off from your career tends to be a very costly proposition in our current time. For these reasons, there's lots of pressure to delay starting a family, and it's no surprise that IVF has seen increased demand. Some companies (i.e. Facebook) even provide their female employees a benefit that covers freezing their eggs. This is somewhat controversial, as some would argue that Facebook (and other companies, and perhaps our culture in general) should instead focus on reducing the professional cost of starting a family. Therefore, these findings about growing human eggs could have great significance. I have friends grappling with this issue right now, so I understand how this discovery could be a great help to them. I hope that provides some useful context...
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    >>The reasons it's disruptive could be due to companies / culture in general not being flexible and accommodating enough to motherhood. That's a pretty critical view of things. I think a more objective view is that motherhood is costly for the mother in time and attention, and generally reduces the time and effort she puts into her career. Whether people operating in the business world should be encouraged or forced to give preferential treatment to mothers so that motherhood doesn't become a career disadvantage is an open question. One could argue it would be unfair to those women who choose to forego or forestall motherhood to dedicate more time to their careers.
bitL 9y ago
- human eggs - check - artificial uterus - check - human factory - pending
- pdx 9y ago
  - Soma - pending - Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon - negotiable
  - zynthax 9y ago
    - Make copy of human mind - Pending
- dgritsko 9y ago
  Community, Identity, Stability.
- ju-st 9y ago
  When will the technology be ready for economical mass production of meat (pigs/chicken/cows)? How to artificially speed up gestation and growth?
  - zanny 9y ago
    We already have lab grown meat, and a lot of the reasons it isn't feasible at scale right now have more to do with subsidies on meat production and sale that don't currently apply to lab grown than on any practical limitation. And its not that lab meat is cheaper in a vacuum right now, more that huge meat subsidies (either direct, guarantees and insurances from the state, and allowing meat producers to externalize a huge portion of their water / pollution costs) hamper investment into lab meat that would exist in a purely free market. Traditional meat is just artificially cheap.
    - rhaps0dy 9y ago
      Yes, but the lab meat you're talking about is not made like ju-st thinks it is. Current (expensive) lab-meat is made by directly growing tissue, without growing a full animal. In contrast parent ju-st talks about artificially fertilising livestock, perhaps with accelerated growth. In terms of ethics, the second procedures seems at least not worse than factory farming. The animals in the second one would need to live less long in order to produce the same amount of meat, and also you'd stop having some unwanted animals like male chicks. However I really hope that lab-grown tissue becomes the standard for meat production.
tathougies 9y ago
I wish doctors would spend more time figuring out why babies die instead of figuring out how to make more. I have a friend whose wife has had five full-term stillbirths, with no explanation. Babies all tested as perfectly healthy. My wife and I just lost a perfect baby boy mid-pregnancy, with no explanation. A few others I know have lost otherwise healthy infants in the first years of life, again no explanation, despite multiple doctors. It's wonderful we can make a human egg and all, but we still can't figure out why babies die, so forgive me if we're still not that impressed by medicine, and think we're misallocating resources.
- dgritsko 9y ago
  Just wanted to say that I'm sorry for your loss.
- gph 9y ago
  >so forgive me if we're still not that impressed by medicine. I get you're venting some pain here, but that's kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Modern medicine hasn't figured out every single mystery, but it's certainly impressive what we have figured out.
  - tathougies 9y ago
    There is no medical specialty dedicated to anyone who loses an infant or pregnancy, but there is a whole industry dedicated to creating new embryos and conceiving. Seriously, after our stillbirth we contacted UCSF, Stanford, and the Mayo Clinic and the receptionist on the phone that we spoke with did not know what kind of doctor we should see. Reproductive endocrinologists deal with infertility, and MFMs typically deal with diagnosed problems during a pregnancy. One of the nurses even told us that we 'needed to have a diagnosis' before we could see a particular MFM. I asked if he could run the diagnostic tests, and she simply said 'he doesn't do diagnosis'. So then what do they do? We called the REs and they told us they don't deal with late pregnancy loss. Studies on sudden infant death and pregnancy loss are actually few and far between compared to studies on helping older women with poor egg quality conceive. Both the friend I talked about and my wife and I are in our early 20s. The last 'breakthrough' with regard to stillbirth and late miscarriage was made in the 80s with the discovery of anti-phospholipid syndrome, but there has been no new conditions or treatments in the past 40 years. Most of this is due to a lack of research and funding, in comparison to infertility, which for some reason is incredibly well-funded. I'm just saying we should question if we're actually spending our resources equitably.
blackrock 9y ago
When can we grow babies in a pod? Matrix style. Note: This is a serious scientific question.
- wetpaws 9y ago
  "Asking for a friend"
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Actually, the question that interests me is when, if we allow couples+ to skip around infertility problems, will we have engineered in enough infertility that we can no longer maintain the population if artificial means fail/become unavailable?
ageofwant 9y ago
The ethics of enhancing human fertility is really questionable. We do not need more humans on this planet. Please. We are pushing 8000000000, there are 20000 lions left, there are more people in my suburb than lions left in the world. Look at this: http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/new-research-sheds-light-on-was-white-shark-population-20180209-h0vtvm.html http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/new-research-sheds-light-o... There are less than 1500 great whites in millions of square km of ocean of WA, and, then we get this extraordinary quote "Environmental ideology has been allowed to take over ... Human lives must come before fish" 7800000000 vs maybe 13000, I think we have got the human lives before fish thing down flat senator. If you have to have kids (and you don't) adopt. Everybody wins if you elect to adopt. Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life. To educate/self-radicalise yourself on this topic, please see: http://www.vhemt.org/ http://www.vhemt.org/
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Surprised that your comment is being pushed to the bottom. We need to look at the larger picture with any new technology and what it can enable, especially when pursued by multi-billion dollar corporations seeking to monetize it by creating demand. The environmental and ethical angles of our actions need to be gravely considered and not swept under the rug.
- stale2002 9y ago
  The world is doing better than it has ever been in human history. We are not running out of food. Hunger is DECREASING, not increasing. And quality of life is improving by every single metric, across the board. If you want to assert that there are to many humans, you have to provide real evidence. Such evidence would only include things like "Hunger is increasing" or "these quality of life metrics are decreasing", but that is absolutely not what is happening.
  - UnpossibleJim 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity
indescions_2018 9y ago
Of related interest. And to put the complexity of fertility into perspective. A recent study in fruit flies demonstrated the signalling, transcription and synthesis of a protein called "Hindsight". Which triggers the breakdown and rupture of follicle cells. Thereby releasing a single ovum to be fertilized. An amazing result is that the proteins humans produce for priming their follicles to release an egg. Can be transplanted into fruit flies. With an analogous priming of fruit fly follicles for ovulation. Suggesting that genes regulating fertility and reproduction are conserved across the full spectrum of Animal Kingdom phyla. Zinc-finger transcription factor Hindsight regulates ovulation competency of Drosophila follicles https://elifesciences.org/articles/29887 https://elifesciences.org/articles/29887
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yters 9y ago
Since I am not a pod baby, this means it is unlikely pod babies account for a majority of human population.
jedberg 9y ago
I wonder if the extraction of the ovarian tissue is less invasive than the process of harvesting mature eggs. Both my kids came from IVF, and we harvested eggs twice. Besides all the shots, which are painful enough, my wife had to have a very invasive procedure to collect the eggs that left her bruised for days. If the collection is easier, I can see doctors opting for this as a way of keeping the mother less stressed before implanting an embryo, increasing the chance for success!
throw7 9y ago
Excellent. Soon abortion will be totally illegal.
vitobcn 9y ago
For those interested, here's the actual paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gay002 https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gay002

345 points by vezycash 9y ago

This has several big implications: 1. Women will soon not need to go through the painful (and expensive) process of freezing eggs. (soon being when this is shown to be safe and equivalent to existing eggs). This will enable older women to have kids and solve some reproductive issues. 2. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs (as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo research and other genetic analysis of human germline 3. Potentially this could lead to gay couples being able to have genetically descended children (obviously male couples here, but similar work on sperm is being done that could potentially enable lesbian couples to have kids too). This can be done as skin cells can be turned into pluripotent stem cells, and then maybe into the eggs (still some missing pieces in this process)

Zamicol 9y ago
>gay couples being able to have genetically descended children What steps are missing? I'm extremely interested in this but I've had a hard time finding more information.
- technotony 9y ago
  Producing the egg cells from pluripotent stem cells, then figuring out any immune response from growing them in the system described in this article.
tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
> This will enable older women to have kids and solve some reproductive issues. AFAIK, there's far more problems to solve than just this before older women in general can just have kids like they're 20 again.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ehsanu1 9y ago
  Surrogate pregnancies?
  - garmaine 9y ago
    Other problems remain, such as genetic degradation and questions about epigentic content.
gwern 9y ago
> 2. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs (as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo research and other genetic analysis of human germline Don't forget embryo selection: if you can create on demand several dozen or hundred eggs, the estimates of gains from embryo selection go from ~0.5 IQ points to 5-10 IQ points (and similarly for any other trait you might want to select for). 0.5 points is pretty trivial and no one will be beating down doors for that; 10 points, however, is a different proposition. Perhaps more importantly, it's a step towards iterated embryo selection - fertilizing, selecting, then regressing to stem cells, and progressing to sperm/eggs - and doing so for multiple generations, getting +10 points each time, for largely unbounded gains.
- bognition 9y ago
  Where are you getting the IQ boost from?
  - gwern 9y ago
    It's from my analysis of embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection). But you can do it without the complications by treating it as an order statistic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic): what is the expected maximum of a sample of 5 Gaussians (rough current average egg harvest) vs 20 or 100 Gaussians, where the Gaussian is N(0, 0.5 * sqrt(polygenic score))? (Since you are selecting on the polygenic scores, not the unknown adult scores, and 0.5 because you are selecting from embryos which are 50% related ie. siblings.) X_5 vs X_100 is a big difference. (To save you the trouble, it's +1.16SD vs +2.51SD; the difference is actually much bigger than it looks because you lose so many embryos in the IVF process, so it's really more like X_1 vs X_196 or +0.56 vs +2.48SD, but to be more precise, you need to go into the weeds of PGSes and per-stage losses in IVF etc. But the order statistics are a good starting point.)
- scarmig 9y ago
  What's the reason for thinking the gains are unbounded? AFAICT we could reasonably suppose something like 50 IQ points is within reach via embryo selection, but what would a something like a 300 IQ even mean, and even if it does mean something tangible, why should we assume that's biologically reachable in the same way that a 150 IQ would be?
bradleyjg 9y ago
> This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. It will also mean a massive rise in the availability of human eggs for turning into embryos, which in turn will mean the ability to be much more selective about which embryos to to implant during IVF. Currently egg harvesting is such an arduous process that embryos can only realistically be selected for viability and a handful of generally fatal diseases. When you are choosing 1 out of 7-10 embryos, you can't be all that picky. But between having access to hundreds of eggs, sperm obviously not being an issue, the ever decreasing cost of genomic sequencing, and the ever increasing knowledge of how specific genes relate to traits, parents undergoing IFV could start to apply many selection criteria. That wouldn't be genetic engineering in the classic sense, nothing would be available that wasn't in one of the parent's DNA, but it would get a lot of the way there. Edit: If I was going to be beaten to the punch by anyone on this subject, I'm happy it was gwern.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jcadam 9y ago
  And one day soon children conceived the 'natural' way will be at a disadvantage. Reminds me of Gattaca...
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    it's happening already
    - aldoushuxley001 9y ago
      No it's not. I don't know of any non-naturally born people who have an advantage. Currently, people born via IVF are more likely to be born prematurely and with increased risks of mental and physical problems. We may be there soon, but we're definitely not there yet.
      - 9y ago
tropdrop 9y ago
> Potentially this could lead to gay couples being able to have genetically descended children (obviously male couples here, but similar work on sperm is being done that could potentially enable lesbian couples to have kids too) I would actually argue that the latter (lesbian couple->kids) will become feasible first - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/25/lab-created-sperm-breeds-healthy-mice-raising-hopes-for-end-to-male-infertility https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/25/lab-created-...
russdill 9y ago
I don't think you read the article. The process is the growing of pre-existing egg cells from ovarian tissues into mature egg cells.
jedberg 9y ago
> This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research Depending on where you are, that's not really a problem. We did IVF, and we still have an embryo left over. When we asked about donating it to science, they told us not to bother because it would just be thrown away, since they already have too many in California (the embryos can't cross state lines apparently).
mrfusion 9y ago
Don’t you still have to do egg harvesting? Or where are these coming from?
Alex3917 9y ago
> This will enable older women to have kids and solve some reproductive issues. Under 35, the success rate for IVF is ~40%. Between 35 and 42, it's about 10%. After 42 it's about 4%. Each time you try it costs around 20k, albeit sometimes the first one or two tries are subsidized by insurance or state grants. And there are also all sorts of health risks to both the mother and baby. So even if you can safely create unlimited eggs at a nominal cost, I don't see this having any practical effect on family planning. (Other than as a treatment for certain infertility issues.) Given that it takes around two years to have a baby, pragmatically you're still going to ideally want to start having kids no later than 35 - 2 * (desired kids), at least for the foreseeable future.
- GordonS 9y ago
  20k! Here in the UK, the NHS will pay for up to 3 attempts (only if you haven't been able to conceive naturally), but even if you pay privately the cost is around 4k USD.
  - adventured 9y ago
    More like $7,000. Your point still stands of course. US healthcare is typically twice as expensive as equally high income nations. Adjust the $7k UK figure up to US income levels, you get around $10k. So that 2x rate remains pretty accurate. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ivf/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ivf/
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
fastball 9y ago
Do we really want to increase the human races ability to procreate? We already have enough children that have been abandoned or live in terrible conditions. The earth is overpopulated as it is. This has many implications, not the least of which that the simplest way to reduce carbon emissions is fewer people.
appleflaxen 9y ago
Using strips of ovarian tissue removed in a biopsy, it represents an advance on IVF (in vitro fertilisation), where a mature egg is fused with a sperm in the lab and the fertilised embryo is implanted. Eggs aren't frozen, but it still sounds like a painful and expensive process.
sametmax 9y ago
Which probably means we will reduce the combinations of genes we use, more and more. And hence, lessen the genetic diversity of our specie. What can go wrong ?

airstrike 9y ago

I can't wait for humanity to build an "unmanned" spaceship filled with human eggs that only get fertilized 1,000 years from now when it reaches [insert exciting destination] and then the babies are raised by AI and trained so they can populate other worlds.

rubber_duck 9y ago
Typically techie :) Babies die or have extreme developmental issues without physical contact https://www.google.hr/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/born-love/201003/touching-empathy%3famp https://www.google.hr/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bor...
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  Easy fix. We raise the first batch of babies with AI controlled robots built to mimic the physical properties of humans similar to how birds are raised in captivity by zookeepers with puppets. We spawn generation zero, selected to be intelligent, attentive, sterile, and nurturing, 50 years before arrival. They are raised by soft robots and AI. When they reach adulthood we start raising staggered cohorts of hardy and enterprising colonists. The colonists will have reached adulthood, raised by their nurturing, and perhaps developmentally disadvantaged, parents, and be ready to settle a new world.
- betterbeehome 9y ago
  Perhaps we could also develop robots to simulate the parental senses of touch needed to grow healthy children?
- vinchuco 9y ago
  Hey Alexa/Siri/etc? Please raise my baby colony.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ASalazarMX 9y ago

spraak 9y ago

I feel like so much of these conversations lack the high level questioning around why IVF and related technology has become so prominent and increased in usage. Is the rate of fertility problems increasing? And why?

Kluny 9y ago
It's probably because women are waiting longer to have children and it's harder for older women to become pregnant.
ereyes01 9y ago
Maybe not in this particular article/thread, but it's been widely discussed how starting a family can be disruptive to a woman's career and professional development. The reasons it's disruptive could be due to companies / culture in general not being flexible and accommodating enough to motherhood. Taking time off from your career tends to be a very costly proposition in our current time. For these reasons, there's lots of pressure to delay starting a family, and it's no surprise that IVF has seen increased demand. Some companies (i.e. Facebook) even provide their female employees a benefit that covers freezing their eggs. This is somewhat controversial, as some would argue that Facebook (and other companies, and perhaps our culture in general) should instead focus on reducing the professional cost of starting a family. Therefore, these findings about growing human eggs could have great significance. I have friends grappling with this issue right now, so I understand how this discovery could be a great help to them. I hope that provides some useful context...
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >>The reasons it's disruptive could be due to companies / culture in general not being flexible and accommodating enough to motherhood. That's a pretty critical view of things. I think a more objective view is that motherhood is costly for the mother in time and attention, and generally reduces the time and effort she puts into her career. Whether people operating in the business world should be encouraged or forced to give preferential treatment to mothers so that motherhood doesn't become a career disadvantage is an open question. One could argue it would be unfair to those women who choose to forego or forestall motherhood to dedicate more time to their careers.

bitL 9y ago

- human eggs - check - artificial uterus - check - human factory - pending

pdx 9y ago
- Soma - pending - Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon - negotiable
- zynthax 9y ago
  - Make copy of human mind - Pending
dgritsko 9y ago
Community, Identity, Stability.
ju-st 9y ago
When will the technology be ready for economical mass production of meat (pigs/chicken/cows)? How to artificially speed up gestation and growth?
- zanny 9y ago
  We already have lab grown meat, and a lot of the reasons it isn't feasible at scale right now have more to do with subsidies on meat production and sale that don't currently apply to lab grown than on any practical limitation. And its not that lab meat is cheaper in a vacuum right now, more that huge meat subsidies (either direct, guarantees and insurances from the state, and allowing meat producers to externalize a huge portion of their water / pollution costs) hamper investment into lab meat that would exist in a purely free market. Traditional meat is just artificially cheap.
  - rhaps0dy 9y ago
    Yes, but the lab meat you're talking about is not made like ju-st thinks it is. Current (expensive) lab-meat is made by directly growing tissue, without growing a full animal. In contrast parent ju-st talks about artificially fertilising livestock, perhaps with accelerated growth. In terms of ethics, the second procedures seems at least not worse than factory farming. The animals in the second one would need to live less long in order to produce the same amount of meat, and also you'd stop having some unwanted animals like male chicks. However I really hope that lab-grown tissue becomes the standard for meat production.

tathougies 9y ago

I wish doctors would spend more time figuring out why babies die instead of figuring out how to make more. I have a friend whose wife has had five full-term stillbirths, with no explanation. Babies all tested as perfectly healthy. My wife and I just lost a perfect baby boy mid-pregnancy, with no explanation. A few others I know have lost otherwise healthy infants in the first years of life, again no explanation, despite multiple doctors. It's wonderful we can make a human egg and all, but we still can't figure out why babies die, so forgive me if we're still not that impressed by medicine, and think we're misallocating resources.

dgritsko 9y ago
Just wanted to say that I'm sorry for your loss.
gph 9y ago
>so forgive me if we're still not that impressed by medicine. I get you're venting some pain here, but that's kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Modern medicine hasn't figured out every single mystery, but it's certainly impressive what we have figured out.
- tathougies 9y ago
  There is no medical specialty dedicated to anyone who loses an infant or pregnancy, but there is a whole industry dedicated to creating new embryos and conceiving. Seriously, after our stillbirth we contacted UCSF, Stanford, and the Mayo Clinic and the receptionist on the phone that we spoke with did not know what kind of doctor we should see. Reproductive endocrinologists deal with infertility, and MFMs typically deal with diagnosed problems during a pregnancy. One of the nurses even told us that we 'needed to have a diagnosis' before we could see a particular MFM. I asked if he could run the diagnostic tests, and she simply said 'he doesn't do diagnosis'. So then what do they do? We called the REs and they told us they don't deal with late pregnancy loss. Studies on sudden infant death and pregnancy loss are actually few and far between compared to studies on helping older women with poor egg quality conceive. Both the friend I talked about and my wife and I are in our early 20s. The last 'breakthrough' with regard to stillbirth and late miscarriage was made in the 80s with the discovery of anti-phospholipid syndrome, but there has been no new conditions or treatments in the past 40 years. Most of this is due to a lack of research and funding, in comparison to infertility, which for some reason is incredibly well-funded. I'm just saying we should question if we're actually spending our resources equitably.

blackrock 9y ago

When can we grow babies in a pod? Matrix style. Note: This is a serious scientific question.

wetpaws 9y ago
"Asking for a friend"
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Actually, the question that interests me is when, if we allow couples+ to skip around infertility problems, will we have engineered in enough infertility that we can no longer maintain the population if artificial means fail/become unavailable?

ageofwant 9y ago

The ethics of enhancing human fertility is really questionable. We do not need more humans on this planet. Please. We are pushing 8000000000, there are 20000 lions left, there are more people in my suburb than lions left in the world. Look at this: http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/new-research-sheds-light-on-was-white-shark-population-20180209-h0vtvm.html http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/new-research-sheds-light-o... There are less than 1500 great whites in millions of square km of ocean of WA, and, then we get this extraordinary quote "Environmental ideology has been allowed to take over ... Human lives must come before fish" 7800000000 vs maybe 13000, I think we have got the human lives before fish thing down flat senator. If you have to have kids (and you don't) adopt. Everybody wins if you elect to adopt. Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life. To educate/self-radicalise yourself on this topic, please see: http://www.vhemt.org/ http://www.vhemt.org/

Santosh83 9y ago
Surprised that your comment is being pushed to the bottom. We need to look at the larger picture with any new technology and what it can enable, especially when pursued by multi-billion dollar corporations seeking to monetize it by creating demand. The environmental and ethical angles of our actions need to be gravely considered and not swept under the rug.
stale2002 9y ago
The world is doing better than it has ever been in human history. We are not running out of food. Hunger is DECREASING, not increasing. And quality of life is improving by every single metric, across the board. If you want to assert that there are to many humans, you have to provide real evidence. Such evidence would only include things like "Hunger is increasing" or "these quality of life metrics are decreasing", but that is absolutely not what is happening.
- UnpossibleJim 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity

indescions_2018 9y ago

Of related interest. And to put the complexity of fertility into perspective. A recent study in fruit flies demonstrated the signalling, transcription and synthesis of a protein called "Hindsight". Which triggers the breakdown and rupture of follicle cells. Thereby releasing a single ovum to be fertilized. An amazing result is that the proteins humans produce for priming their follicles to release an egg. Can be transplanted into fruit flies. With an analogous priming of fruit fly follicles for ovulation. Suggesting that genes regulating fertility and reproduction are conserved across the full spectrum of Animal Kingdom phyla. Zinc-finger transcription factor Hindsight regulates ovulation competency of Drosophila follicles https://elifesciences.org/articles/29887 https://elifesciences.org/articles/29887

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yters 9y ago

Since I am not a pod baby, this means it is unlikely pod babies account for a majority of human population.

jedberg 9y ago

I wonder if the extraction of the ovarian tissue is less invasive than the process of harvesting mature eggs. Both my kids came from IVF, and we harvested eggs twice. Besides all the shots, which are painful enough, my wife had to have a very invasive procedure to collect the eggs that left her bruised for days. If the collection is easier, I can see doctors opting for this as a way of keeping the mother less stressed before implanting an embryo, increasing the chance for success!

throw7 9y ago

Excellent. Soon abortion will be totally illegal.

vitobcn 9y ago

For those interested, here's the actual paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gay002 https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gay002