8 ms·

Science Is Getting Us Closer To The End of Infertility

37 points by sethbannon 9y ago

haZard_OS 9y ago
This portion of the article must have a typo: > "What if there are parents who wanted to select for Tay-Sachs disease?" I doubt there are any would-be parents out there who want a child with a 5-year death sentence. Judging by the sentence immediately following: > "There are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who are somewhere on the spectrum, and some of them will want children who are neuro-atypical.” ...I suspect the author intended "Tay-Sachs" to be "Autism".
- nwah1 9y ago
  And that entire paragraph touches on random fears about fertility technology that have almost nothing to do with the subject of this article, which is gametogenesis.
  - patall 9y ago
    Yes and no because the article is also about the future possibilities of getting kids with desired traits (as you can generate those much better when you have a truly unlimited potential of egg cells). And there was for example recently a court case that (deaf) parents in Germany won so that thier (also deaf) child wont get a hearing implant.
- Notorious_BLT 9y ago
  Or their editor didn't like the implication of the author's sentence, and modified "Autism" to "Tay-Sachs" without carefully reading the followup sentence that made the removal obvious. Tay-Sachs doesn't have a community that tries to put an identity and positive spin on it the way autism does, and I could see an editor making this mistake
Alex3917 9y ago
Wired is definitely overselling the safety of IVF. Right now the oldest IVF baby, using the first generation technology, is less than 40 years old. So it will be several more decades until we really know even approximately how safe it is. So far it doesn't seem to be excessively dangerous, but we really just don't know.
- klipt 9y ago
  IANAD, but I believe that even after implantation, there's a lot of natural selection going on that helps remove unhealthy embryos. "30% to 40% of all fertilized eggs miscarry, often before the pregnancy is known" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#First_trimester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#First_trimester
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    That's a good point. But as we say when determining how fast a given piece of software will execute, "tools, not rules." In other words, the fact that something should logically be safe certainly counts for something, but not as evidence.
    - ewjordan 9y ago
      Ok, but...is there any particular reason to think IVF is not safe, other than a superstitious ookiness about the methodology of the thing? 40 years without any such indication is fairly strong evudence, IMO.
      - Alex3917 9y ago
        1) There are a lot of studies showing an increased risk of various conditions, e.g. heart problems for babies conceived with ICSI. 2) It stands to reason that while some infertility is caused by issues that having nothing to do with the genetics of the sperm or egg (e.g. vitamin E deficiency), other cases may be caused by genetic conditions that have coevolved to cause fertility issues to prevent them from being passed along. 3) You'd have to completely rule out the possibility of sexual selection at the gamete level, even though this idea has been gaining traction in the last few years.
      - neolefty 9y ago
        Good point. Here's my try at it: IVF: Seems logically sound, since it is doing the same thing that happens in natural conception, just outside the body. But in vitro gametogenesis (IVG)—the technique the article talks about—could logically have similar issues to cloning. For example, telomere shortening & accumulated DNA damage come to mind, but I'm no expert.
dmitrygr 9y ago
Great, just what our overpopulated planet needs...more people.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Git off me planet! Mars got plenty of spaces.
  - Asdfbla 9y ago
    Either we make life on Earth sustainable before that or we won't have enough time to develop the technology to settle on Mars anyway, so thinking of Mars as a backup Earth does not seem like a particularly good idea.
    - justherefortart 9y ago
      I think we should be on spaceships out of this solar system personally. Let's infect the rest of the Universe with people!
      - ovao 9y ago
        The universal availability of Taco Bell must invariably be the prime directive.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Just crash Ceres into Mars. Boom, geoengineered to be much nicer for us.
      - magduf 9y ago
        You have to have the power of the Q to do something like that. There's no way for humans to move Ceres that way, at least until we become a Kardashev Class II civilization.
- jbob2000 9y ago
speg 9y ago
As someone who went through multiple IVF cycles I am very happy to hear news of a less invasive process. The idea that you might be able to create gametes from adult cells is the stuff that makes me wish I took more biology in school. (Our son is now 16 months old and amazing.)
- aogl 9y ago
  Congratulations, it is a very tiring process
- tempsfj1 9y ago
  Having gone through multiple rounds of unsuccessful IVF, and now being too late, this is bittersweet for me. I'm very happy that things are likely to get better in future and others are less likely to suffer, but stories like this constantly bring back the memories of the building hopes and crushing disappointments each time we tried. It's a very stressful and emotional rollercoaster that I wouldn't wish on anyone else.
aaavl2821 9y ago
This is really amazing. We can take skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and turn those into viable eggs. The science behind the first step won the 2012 nobel prize in medicine [1] This advance, combined with our ability to rapidly and precisely genetically engineer zygotes with CRISPR, has some incredibly amazing and some incredibly scary implications. We can already generate viable eggs from cells in mice's tails, fertilize those eggs, and edit the genomes of those zygotes precisely to produce custom genetically engineered mice (genetically engineered mice are a core tech in the biopharma research industry). These technologies enable an unprecedented advance in the precision and throughput of this process and it seems very likely we will be able to do this in humans in 10-15 years. Factory-scale generation of zygotes and high throughput editing of those zygotes. I'd argue this topic deserves the same level of ethical scrutiny as AGI, if not more, as at least to me it seems that this tech is far closer to becoming a reality. My imagination may be getting away from me, but industrial scale human zygote editing seems like it could be the most significant (for good or evil) technological advance in our lifetime [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2012/press.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2...
- magduf 9y ago
  This is great news. Before long, we can stop having kids naturally and just create them artificially in factories, like in the prescient 1949 novel "Brave New World", and let governments raise them in institutions run by professionals. Having amateurs raise kids has had mixed results at best, with many people proving to be absolutely terrible parents, and usually the people who are the worst parents having more kids than those who are actually good at it. Finally, we're now finding that when people are financially comfortable and busy with fulfilling lives and careers, they don't want to have kids, or very many of them (not enough to maintain the population). Outsourcing reproduction and child-rearing to the state will fix all of this.
  - CodeCube 9y ago
    I honestly can't tell if you're saying all of this sarcastically
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Lionsion 9y ago
Infertility is terrible, but I worry that technologically-assisted reproduction is a mistake that could cause far worse problems. It will remove selective pressures that keep human reproduction viable without technology. That's true for any step of it: from gametogenesis to birth. If that happens, a whole host of nasty problems erupt: * What happens to humanity when technological civilization has a hiccup, if it can only reproduce with access to advanced technology? * What happens to human rights when reproduction can only occur with the assent of the authority that controls the technological means of reproduction? * etc. Perhaps the research should be focused on diagnosing and permanently curing the underlying causes of infertility, than on trying to work around them?
- coding123 9y ago
  That second point could happen without tech.
  - Lionsion 9y ago
    It could, but it would be a much weaker form of control that could be bypassed (by fleeing the city to the hills to reproduce freely, etc.). If you need an IVF lab to reproduce, it'd be much harder, perhaps impossible to escape the controls.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    The first point could too - modern technology has turned a number of conditions that were extremely serious in the wild into mere annoyances. Myopia, asthma, newborn jaundice, hernias, both high & low birth weight, obesity - all of these could easily be fatal if you (or your mom) needed to outrun a lion, but they're easily taken care of with modern medical technology, and hence have become extremely common in the general population.
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      And yet, the population isn't exploding in developed countries. This implies that something else must be receiving the selection pressure instead. I wonder what it could be?
Simulacra 9y ago
What I fear is when science gets us to the point that humans are no longer necessary for reproduction
chiefalchemist 9y ago
The earth doesn't have an infertility problem. The First World does. This research and solutions are a function of affluence, a market that can afford to pay for them. The population is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.
- decebalus1 9y ago
  Your comment reminds me both of a Chomsky opinion piece [1] and a Swift essay [2]. I couldn't agree with you more. The same can be said about 'food shortages' but in that case it's the other way around. [1] Recognizing the “Unpeople” - https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/ https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/ [2] A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    I should probably add that empathy, and perhaps the understanding of the true meaning of love is also unevenly distributed. It would be interesting to see long terms studies of the families of IF or similar technology driven conceptions. If Mother Nature is speaking, how wise it to ignore her?
bobthechef 9y ago
Treating infertility through technological means is not necessarily wrong. For example, taking a safe medication that corrects for some defect of the reproductive system is fine. But this, and IVF, are no such medication. "Yet a funny thing happened, or didn’t, in the decades that followed: Millions of babies were conceived using IVF." This doesn't address everything. Certainly, the health of the baby is important, but that's not the only problem. Another problem is the destruction of fertilized human embryos that IVF currently entails. However, even if we assume that we can perfect the technology to such a degree that none of this is an issue. We still have to contend with things like the commodification of human beings and the transformation of human beings into products to be made and sold, and made the subjects of economic transactions. Our acceptance and aggressive defense of such reproductive technologies may be another example of consumerism's hold on our values. [0] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8d/eb87bcc3e610b8ff51b9f15017b5ac3f0c24.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8d/eb87bcc3e610b8ff51b9f1...
JohnClark1337 9y ago
Great, now that people don't want to have kids because of over population and a negative impact on the environment, it's easier than ever to have kids.

37 points by sethbannon 9y ago

This portion of the article must have a typo: > "What if there are parents who wanted to select for Tay-Sachs disease?" I doubt there are any would-be parents out there who want a child with a 5-year death sentence. Judging by the sentence immediately following: > "There are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who are somewhere on the spectrum, and some of them will want children who are neuro-atypical.” ...I suspect the author intended "Tay-Sachs" to be "Autism".

nwah1 9y ago
And that entire paragraph touches on random fears about fertility technology that have almost nothing to do with the subject of this article, which is gametogenesis.
- patall 9y ago
  Yes and no because the article is also about the future possibilities of getting kids with desired traits (as you can generate those much better when you have a truly unlimited potential of egg cells). And there was for example recently a court case that (deaf) parents in Germany won so that thier (also deaf) child wont get a hearing implant.
Notorious_BLT 9y ago
Or their editor didn't like the implication of the author's sentence, and modified "Autism" to "Tay-Sachs" without carefully reading the followup sentence that made the removal obvious. Tay-Sachs doesn't have a community that tries to put an identity and positive spin on it the way autism does, and I could see an editor making this mistake

Alex3917 9y ago

Wired is definitely overselling the safety of IVF. Right now the oldest IVF baby, using the first generation technology, is less than 40 years old. So it will be several more decades until we really know even approximately how safe it is. So far it doesn't seem to be excessively dangerous, but we really just don't know.

klipt 9y ago
IANAD, but I believe that even after implantation, there's a lot of natural selection going on that helps remove unhealthy embryos. "30% to 40% of all fertilized eggs miscarry, often before the pregnancy is known" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#First_trimester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#First_trimester
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 9y ago
  That's a good point. But as we say when determining how fast a given piece of software will execute, "tools, not rules." In other words, the fact that something should logically be safe certainly counts for something, but not as evidence.
  - ewjordan 9y ago
    Ok, but...is there any particular reason to think IVF is not safe, other than a superstitious ookiness about the methodology of the thing? 40 years without any such indication is fairly strong evudence, IMO.
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      1) There are a lot of studies showing an increased risk of various conditions, e.g. heart problems for babies conceived with ICSI. 2) It stands to reason that while some infertility is caused by issues that having nothing to do with the genetics of the sperm or egg (e.g. vitamin E deficiency), other cases may be caused by genetic conditions that have coevolved to cause fertility issues to prevent them from being passed along. 3) You'd have to completely rule out the possibility of sexual selection at the gamete level, even though this idea has been gaining traction in the last few years.
    - neolefty 9y ago
      Good point. Here's my try at it: IVF: Seems logically sound, since it is doing the same thing that happens in natural conception, just outside the body. But in vitro gametogenesis (IVG)—the technique the article talks about—could logically have similar issues to cloning. For example, telomere shortening & accumulated DNA damage come to mind, but I'm no expert.

dmitrygr 9y ago

Great, just what our overpopulated planet needs...more people.

justherefortart 9y ago
Git off me planet! Mars got plenty of spaces.
- Asdfbla 9y ago
  Either we make life on Earth sustainable before that or we won't have enough time to develop the technology to settle on Mars anyway, so thinking of Mars as a backup Earth does not seem like a particularly good idea.
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    I think we should be on spaceships out of this solar system personally. Let's infect the rest of the Universe with people!
    - ovao 9y ago
      The universal availability of Taco Bell must invariably be the prime directive.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Just crash Ceres into Mars. Boom, geoengineered to be much nicer for us.
    - magduf 9y ago
      You have to have the power of the Q to do something like that. There's no way for humans to move Ceres that way, at least until we become a Kardashev Class II civilization.
jbob2000 9y ago

speg 9y ago

As someone who went through multiple IVF cycles I am very happy to hear news of a less invasive process. The idea that you might be able to create gametes from adult cells is the stuff that makes me wish I took more biology in school. (Our son is now 16 months old and amazing.)

aogl 9y ago
Congratulations, it is a very tiring process
tempsfj1 9y ago
Having gone through multiple rounds of unsuccessful IVF, and now being too late, this is bittersweet for me. I'm very happy that things are likely to get better in future and others are less likely to suffer, but stories like this constantly bring back the memories of the building hopes and crushing disappointments each time we tried. It's a very stressful and emotional rollercoaster that I wouldn't wish on anyone else.

aaavl2821 9y ago

This is really amazing. We can take skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and turn those into viable eggs. The science behind the first step won the 2012 nobel prize in medicine [1] This advance, combined with our ability to rapidly and precisely genetically engineer zygotes with CRISPR, has some incredibly amazing and some incredibly scary implications. We can already generate viable eggs from cells in mice's tails, fertilize those eggs, and edit the genomes of those zygotes precisely to produce custom genetically engineered mice (genetically engineered mice are a core tech in the biopharma research industry). These technologies enable an unprecedented advance in the precision and throughput of this process and it seems very likely we will be able to do this in humans in 10-15 years. Factory-scale generation of zygotes and high throughput editing of those zygotes. I'd argue this topic deserves the same level of ethical scrutiny as AGI, if not more, as at least to me it seems that this tech is far closer to becoming a reality. My imagination may be getting away from me, but industrial scale human zygote editing seems like it could be the most significant (for good or evil) technological advance in our lifetime [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2012/press.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2...

magduf 9y ago
This is great news. Before long, we can stop having kids naturally and just create them artificially in factories, like in the prescient 1949 novel "Brave New World", and let governments raise them in institutions run by professionals. Having amateurs raise kids has had mixed results at best, with many people proving to be absolutely terrible parents, and usually the people who are the worst parents having more kids than those who are actually good at it. Finally, we're now finding that when people are financially comfortable and busy with fulfilling lives and careers, they don't want to have kids, or very many of them (not enough to maintain the population). Outsourcing reproduction and child-rearing to the state will fix all of this.
- CodeCube 9y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you're saying all of this sarcastically

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Lionsion 9y ago

Infertility is terrible, but I worry that technologically-assisted reproduction is a mistake that could cause far worse problems. It will remove selective pressures that keep human reproduction viable without technology. That's true for any step of it: from gametogenesis to birth. If that happens, a whole host of nasty problems erupt: * What happens to humanity when technological civilization has a hiccup, if it can only reproduce with access to advanced technology? * What happens to human rights when reproduction can only occur with the assent of the authority that controls the technological means of reproduction? * etc. Perhaps the research should be focused on diagnosing and permanently curing the underlying causes of infertility, than on trying to work around them?

coding123 9y ago
That second point could happen without tech.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  It could, but it would be a much weaker form of control that could be bypassed (by fleeing the city to the hills to reproduce freely, etc.). If you need an IVF lab to reproduce, it'd be much harder, perhaps impossible to escape the controls.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  The first point could too - modern technology has turned a number of conditions that were extremely serious in the wild into mere annoyances. Myopia, asthma, newborn jaundice, hernias, both high & low birth weight, obesity - all of these could easily be fatal if you (or your mom) needed to outrun a lion, but they're easily taken care of with modern medical technology, and hence have become extremely common in the general population.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    And yet, the population isn't exploding in developed countries. This implies that something else must be receiving the selection pressure instead. I wonder what it could be?

Simulacra 9y ago

What I fear is when science gets us to the point that humans are no longer necessary for reproduction

chiefalchemist 9y ago

The earth doesn't have an infertility problem. The First World does. This research and solutions are a function of affluence, a market that can afford to pay for them. The population is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.

decebalus1 9y ago
Your comment reminds me both of a Chomsky opinion piece [1] and a Swift essay [2]. I couldn't agree with you more. The same can be said about 'food shortages' but in that case it's the other way around. [1] Recognizing the “Unpeople” - https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/ https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/ [2] A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  I should probably add that empathy, and perhaps the understanding of the true meaning of love is also unevenly distributed. It would be interesting to see long terms studies of the families of IF or similar technology driven conceptions. If Mother Nature is speaking, how wise it to ignore her?

bobthechef 9y ago

Treating infertility through technological means is not necessarily wrong. For example, taking a safe medication that corrects for some defect of the reproductive system is fine. But this, and IVF, are no such medication. "Yet a funny thing happened, or didn’t, in the decades that followed: Millions of babies were conceived using IVF." This doesn't address everything. Certainly, the health of the baby is important, but that's not the only problem. Another problem is the destruction of fertilized human embryos that IVF currently entails. However, even if we assume that we can perfect the technology to such a degree that none of this is an issue. We still have to contend with things like the commodification of human beings and the transformation of human beings into products to be made and sold, and made the subjects of economic transactions. Our acceptance and aggressive defense of such reproductive technologies may be another example of consumerism's hold on our values. [0] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8d/eb87bcc3e610b8ff51b9f15017b5ac3f0c24.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8d/eb87bcc3e610b8ff51b9f1...

JohnClark1337 9y ago

Great, now that people don't want to have kids because of over population and a negative impact on the environment, it's easier than ever to have kids.