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Turning stem cells into human eggs
- idorosen 5y agoMillions of same-sex couples may benefit from this research in the future if it helps make it possible for them to conceive (directly biologically related) children. EDIT: Oh gosh, it's right there in TFA, that's what I get for skimming instead of reading deeply. All I saw were comments on the ethical implications of the biology work when I commented.
- pishpash 5y agoThat's explicitly mentioned at least two times in the article as a primary motive of the founder.
- ddoolin 5y agoIt's in the mission statement at the top of the link: > and potentially allow male-male couples to have biological children.
- klipt 5y agoOf course they'd still need a surrogate to gestate the baby. Which ain't cheap.
- mensetmanusman 5y agohttps://jpia.princeton.edu/news/lessons-ukraine-shifting-international-surrogacy-policy-protect-women-and-children https://jpia.princeton.edu/news/lessons-ukraine-shifting-int... And it’s getting more expensive, because the number of women who want to be surrogates and who are also not suffering from abject poverty is low.
- anonporridge 5y agoUntil we perfect artificial wombs. I wonder if it would make sense to use a surrogate to gestate the very early stages, and then transfer the fetus to an artificial womb for the later stages. There would probably be many more women willing to do this since it's the later stages of pregnancy and birth that creates the most wear and tear on the body, not to mention emotional trauma with immediately losing the baby you carried. Hell, even women having their own babies might choose this route if it becomes feasible, like many preemptively choose c-sections now.
- anonporridge 5y agoNICUs are basically artificial wombs that can keep a baby alive starting at a minimum of 22 weeks, out of 40 weeks for standard gestation. The minimum age, cost, and risk of NICUs is just going to keep dropping as the tech and experience improves.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoNo Ethics personnel on the team?
- WJW 5y ago> Our Mission > We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn’t be possible. What is so unethical about that?
- josephcsible 5y agoSure, that end is noble, but the ends don't always justify the means.
- jschwartzi 5y agoI don’t understand. Are you saying there’s some negative impact to allowing people to have children who otherwise couldn’t? What problems do you foresee?
- willmorrison 5y agoI commented above a few of the issues I see. For example, would Lebron James (or any celebrity or person that has genetics that are profitable) be afraid of giving blood for fear of someone making Lebron 2.0 without his permission?
- HPsquared 5y agoOr, literally some kind of false paternity fraud - such a child would come with certain legal rights and privileges.
- klipt 5y agoThat's not a new problem, in the USA even a man who is raped can be forced to pay child support to his rapist. Obviously these child support laws are in need of reform.
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- apsec112 5y agoSome more details are in this MIT Technology Review article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/28/1038172/conception-eggs-reproduction-vitro-gametogenesis/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/28/1038172/concepti...
- smoyer 5y agoMy cousin is an Ob/Gyn who was chased to the Midwest by the high cost of malpractice insurance for those who deliver babies. I can't imagine what the liability would be for something like this but I'd imagine you'd need both insurance and an ironclad waiver.
- anonporridge 5y agoThis raises an interesting point in general in any area where consciousness is taking more control over things that have always been subject to unconscious nature. In this case, when natural conception results in deformity, genetic illness, or just generally unfit offspring, there's no one to blame. I suppose you can get mad at God, but we have yet to figure out how to sue them. But when human actors start making choices that nature previously made, suddenly, we have someone concrete to blame when things go wrong, even if things go wrong much less often and less severely.
- kfprt 5y ago> I suppose you can get mad at God Do you think God has sovereign immunity?
- anonporridge 5y agoNo. It's just super hard to subpoena someone who doesn't exist.
- marcthe12 5y ago> I suppose you can get mad at God, but we have yet to figure out how to sue them. That is actually a plot of a Bollywood film "OMG: Oh my God" where after an earthquake demolished the protagonist's shop and denied insurance payment due an "Act of God" clause, he sues God in court.
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- The_rationalist 5y agowomen can already cryogenize their eggs, so what is the value proposition? Even if one could transform a stem cell into an egg, that would be extremely dangerous. The stem cell for a human of say 50/60 years old has accumulated many kinds of damage over time (oxidative stress, mitochondria bioenergetics, DNA, proteasomomal deficits, etc)
- willmorrison 5y agoSeems completely unethical to me. This would be more of an advancement for eugenics than anything else. Would people be scared of giving blood at blood drives? Could celebrities who don’t want to have children have cells taken from them and put through this process?
- Viliam1234 5y ago> Could celebrities who don’t want to have children have cells taken from them and put through this process? Later, they will be sued for child support, of course.
- sdhfjg 5y agoEugenics has obvious issues when applied to mature individuals or groups, but I'll need convincing that the same moral position is warranted if we're talking about cells.
- danuker 5y ago> We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn’t be possible. Sounds to me like those eggs are bound to become mature individuals.
- sdhfjg 5y agoI could have been more clear, the distinction is semantic. I was referring to culling/sterilization to prevent reproduction in the sexually mature. Unborn persons are not adults, even if they will be.
- dang 5y agoCould you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- arpa 5y agoethics aside, this is very, very cool, and very, very important research!
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- ravitation 5y agoFrom the MIT Technology Review article... >Some researchers sensed that the young entrepreneurs were in over their heads. The science of in vitro gametogenesis is dominated by a small cadre of university research groups who’ve been working on the problem for years. “When I talked to them, they had no clue, absolutely no clue, how to start a project,” says Albertini. “They were asking me what kind of equipment to buy. It was ‘How would you know if you made an egg? What would it look like?’” To be honest, this was my first thought. I don't work directly in the field, but in a tangentially related field at an R1 research university, and I read through their research team and definitely got the sense that they were... certainly ambitious. Obviously, I'm always in favor of more research in transformative technologies, in mostly whatever form that takes; but I do wonder about venture capital as the model for this type of research specifically.
- claytonius 5y agoOocytes are one of the most difficult cells to engineer as well... The mitochondria in Oocytes are turned off from birth because otherwise reactive oxygen species will damage the mtDNA. One would have to use CRISPR to re-build the mtDNA, use telomerase / crispr to get the telomeres to exactly the right length, fix any mutations within the genome, etc. There are many many technical challenges to overcome, requiring further development of multiple immature technology stacks, and the bar is much higher than it is for mice since you would want a baby with the cellular metabolism profile of a 30y/old.
- iammisc 5y agoOh goody. Now we don't need females /s Why does anybody think this is a good idea? The 'right' of same-sex couples to have children via gametes their own bodies cannot produce is not at all obvious. For centuries, the interdependence of the sexes for reproduction has formed the basis for human society. We should not be so willing to give this up because a small minority of people find the other sex distasteful for their sexual preferences.
- the-angry-dome 5y agoIt's not "giving up" heterosexual relationships / children. It is really, really odd that heterosexual people immediately think that their way of life will be eradicated because LGBT folk are getting more options to have happy lives. Do you think that, given the option to have a relationship with an individual of the same gender, that all heterosexual people will suddenly be unwillingly seduced into homosexuality? If so, might want to examine those feelings with a qualified professional.
- dragonwriter 5y agoFor some reason, “traditionalists” seem, implicitly from their arguments, to think that traditional heterosexual relationships are a horrible torture that no one (or perhaps just no one on a particular side of the asymmetrical relationship) would bear if they weren't the only option fully sanctioned by society.
- agumonkey 5y agoneurobiology is more involved than that, you'd be surprised :)
- CamperBob2 5y agoThe 'right' of same-sex couples to have children via gametes their own bodies cannot produce is not at all obvious And the 'right' of you or me to stop them is?
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- bradleyjg 5y agoMore realistically, because the technology could turn eggs into a manufactured resource, it could supercharge the path to designer children. If doctors can make a thousand eggs for a patient, they’ll also be able to fertilize all of them and test to find the best resulting embryos, scoring their genes for future health or intelligence. Better still you can do it iteratively. Take cells from one person and turn them into a few hundred eggs. Take cells from a second person and turn them into sperm (or conceivably the same person.) Fertilize the eggs with the sperm, grow them out to blastocysts, biopsy, and sequence. Pick the embryo with the most desirable genotype score, turn the rest of the blastocyst’s cells into sperm and eggs. Rinse and repeat. You’ll end up converging towards the highest genotype score possible given the parental material. Edit: you probably want to use two embryos in each round to avoid a local maxima. I’m sure someone will work out the math when the time comes.
- Nevermark 5y agoAll that work, when you could just print the optimal (given current knowledge) genome? [1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whole-genome-synthesis-will-transform-cell-engineering/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whole-genome-synt...
- bradleyjg 5y agoI’d guess synthesizing a fertilized egg from scratch is further away than in vitro gametogenesis. Could be wrong of course.
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- KorematsuFredt 5y agoYes. That would be the day. I would love to have many children but I hate the notion of pregnancy. Once we can also grow them in labs I think it would be really great day for humanity. You could ship only embroyos to Mars and then let them grow into babies. (You will still need people to take care of them but we can ship only few hundred people with few million embroyos to colonize a distant planet.
- MayeulC 5y ago> We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn’t be possible. I'm going to preemptively address a point that I often come across when discussing that kind of topic: some are going to say that it's going against "natural selection", and it might undermine our future ability to reproduce naturally. This is true. However, that also considerably expands the gene pool. Lots of children who would have died in the past are alive and well, have (grand)children of their own. This is great for genetic diversity. And should our technology level suddenly regress to the stone age, the selection will be swift and hard, especially on the first generations. However, a more diverse gene pool makes for better survival odds.
- DemocracyFTW 5y agoIf you want to contribute to genetic diversity, stop killing species. Right now what humans do is impoverishing the global biodiversity by burning and cutting down forests, building houses, streets and plants, polluting the seas, and being the one major driver for the climate getting warmer instead of cooler which would be the natural course of events. It's not like the human diversity is really challenged with ~8 billions humans being alive.
- pakius 5y agoif they ever succeed what would happen with the failure tests over the process ?
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago> "We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn’t be possible." get over it, adopt a child already. there's plenty of them.
- tempestn 5y agoIt's very natural to want to have one's own biological child. You can say people shouldn't want that, but it doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of potentially good parents out there who wouldn't choose to adopt, but would do a good job raising children given the chance to have their own.
- wyager 5y agoThis is an absurd dismissal even if we ignore the reasons people often prefer having a biological child. There are few children up for adoption who don’t require special support. Some random couple is probably not equipped to deal with the special requirements of the children who don’t get adopted quickly.
- barbazoo 5y ago> There are few children up for adoption who don’t require special support. Do you have any source to back this up?
- wyager 5y agoThe problem creating demand for later-in-life fertility services for women is that the current structure of our society heavily penalizes women who don’t career-optimize during the years in which child-rearing would be (physically and mentally) least taxing and difficult. Long-term, I suspect the best answer will involve changing this structure rather than relying on complex medical interventions. One scheme I think might make sense for the modern life trajectory is to have child-rearing skip a generation. This has a lot of medical, social, professional, and economic upside, and I suspect it more closely mirrors the way humans evolved to manage family groups.
- k__ 5y agoTo be fair, I would rather have me at 40 instead of 20 raising my own kids, instead of relying on my parents.
- wyager 5y agoWhy’s that? NB You’d also have your spouse’s parents.
- mcculley 5y agoYou think pre-historic humans skipped generations?
- wyager 5y agoMore like the older people would probably be less likely to be out hunting elk or whatever physical activities and more likely to be watching the children. I doubt it would have been codified or anything.
- mcculley 5y agoI still don't understand the distinction you are making. At first I thought that you meant that literally a generation would not procreate. But now I think you are trying to say that young adults would not be doing child rearing. Are you suggesting that mothers would return to physical labor right after birth to defer child rearing to elders, or after breast-feeding? That mothers would somehow not be present as much as elders?
- bth 5y agoThere are already too many people on this planet.