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Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
- gardenfelder 4y agoThis really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, thinking it's possible to get out a chemistry set and just make a living thing. To be clear, they started with stem cells, and teased them into doing the right thing - they did not create a new living artifact from scratch; > Instead, they used stem cells - the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type - and then mimicked natural processes in the lab.
- xwdv 4y agoWouldn’t the living artifact that results from this embryo just be horribly incompatible with life and die quickly or at best live for a brief time before expiring?
- saxonww 4y agoPossibly? I expect we'll figure out how to do this with a high chance of success within the next few decades if not sooner, unless for some reason every country capable of supporting the research bans it.
- tsimionescu 4y agoHuman cloning research has similarly been banned, and quite successfully, hasn't it?
- Firmwarrior 4y agoWhat's the point in cloning people? I'm pretty clueless about biology, but as I understand it the process to generate new semi-randomized humans using a woman is fairly well understood and straightforward
- implements 4y ago> What's the point in cloning people? Medical treatment (availability of 100% immune-compatible spare parts) and in a possible future, life extension.
- Tozen 4y agoI suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist. The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do with them, might be wilder than we could imagine.
- tsimionescu 4y ago> Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. People always say this, and yet the universal ban on human cloning has, at least so far, held strong and prevented further research more or less entirely.
- nomel 4y agoPrimates have been cloned [1], human embryos have been cloned (supposedly) [2], and there are confirmed gene edited babies [3]. But, I doubt the existence of a ban means humans haven't been cloned, because I have trouble believing that a group that would successfully clone a human would be dumb enough to tell the world, state sponsored or not. 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/these-monkey-twins-are-first-primate-clones-made-method-developed-dolly https://www.science.org/content/article/these-monkey-twins-a... 2. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-02/04/content_7443166.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-02/04/content_7443166... 3. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/08/cloning-crispr-he-jiankui-china-biotech-boom-could-transform-lives-destroy-them/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/08/cloning-crispr-he-jiank...
- tsimionescu 4y agoPrimates are not humans, cloning embryos for stem cell research is different from creating human clones, and the scientist who produced the two CRISPR-edited children went to jail, and he and his associates are banned for life from working in this type of research or even providing care in this area.
- fsckboy 4y ago> to the uninitiated, there's a dark side to the initiated I wish there was a dark side! > they did not create a new living artifact from scratch that is where this is headed, that is where they want to go, that is not what they've done... till they do it. That is the dark side. Humans in a competition with one another are not capable in a broad sense of reining in every worst impulse, as we saw with recent "gain of function" experiments.
- parineum 4y agoWhy is that the dark side?
- b112 4y agoNot sure why the parent thinks so, but my only concern is with new lifeforms. We constantly mess up the ecosystem, merely by introducing existing species into environments which cannot handle them. Soon we will be able to engineer exotic forms of life, yet we cannot currently control, reign in, or manage current, naturly evolved forms of life. For example, we have to spray deadly chemicals on crops, to kill fungus, bacteria, etc. Of we have a pest problem, we have to entice them to eat poison, or trick them into traps. Our control of existing orgamisims is essentially non-existent. The above methods just reduce population, often very ineffectively. This means that almost certainly, when things we create end up free, we will be incapable of removing them from the ecosystem. We could literally destroy the biosphere more readily than nukes, or global warming ever could. And things will get free.
- hidroto 4y agoaside from bad actors, i think that safe guards could prove effective. synthetic organisms would have no natural predators, but the would also have no natural defenses. we could make them without an immune system or make it depend on a molecule that does not exist in the wild. so they would quickly die out.
- b112 4y ago
- dang 4y agoOk, we've put stem cells up there too. Thanks!
- Tozen 4y agoNow the title is arguably confusing and significantly different from that of the original linked article. It seems unnecessary to mangle the title to that extent, to create a wider difference.
- dang 4y agoIt's standard for users to clamor for changes to misleading titles, and standard for moderators to accede to the clamoring. We do that because otherwise the thread fills up with ever more complaints about the title. The OP is a press release and such titles are usually overstated and need to be changed anyhow. This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). This one seems designed to aggrandize the study (as well a press release should, I suppose), so the complaining commenters had a point or two.
- Tozen 4y agoUnderstand, as the various situations are complex. Thanks for the explanation.
- user_7832 4y agoWell, to quote Carl Sagan, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I doubt human technology will be able to create life from organic molecules for at least several decades if not centuries.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LinuxBender 4y agoHere is a auto-tuned song of Carl Sagan [1] saying that quote so that others may have it stuck in their heads and to share the full quote. [1] - https://amorningfilledwith400billionsuns.ytmnd.com/ https://amorningfilledwith400billionsuns.ytmnd.com/
- ikt 4y agoThanks for taking me back to 2009* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc)
- intrasight 4y agoWhat a great quote!
- ralusek 4y agoAnd to think he was just trying to convince a kernel developer that it would be fine to use JS, just this one time, for a simple UI he needed.
- guggleet 4y agoWe already can...? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI think syntactic biology is still very far from creating lifeforms from atomic or molecular precursors. Xenobots, for example are made using harvested stem cells
- leetrout 4y ago* mouse embryo
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoImportant point. Pretty fucked up to do this to a human.
- M3L0NM4N 4y agoThat's arbitrary.
- epgui 4y ago
- furjrudjrufurrj 4y agoFucked up to do it to a mouse too. Go damn speciesist
- xwdv 4y agoNot a human, just a thing made of human parts.
- aliqot 4y agoit's a homunculus
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agomurinculus
- domador 4y ago...and that kind of thinking illustrates the kind of dehumanizing attitude that is harmful to the "products" of such experiments, such as the person that would develop from such an embryo. Very worrisome research.
- rossdavidh 4y ago"Elsewhere on campus, two other Cambridge scientists created a non-synthetic embryo with brain and beating heart, baby shower scheduled for mid-2023."
- cirrus3 4y ago
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
- seydor 4y agoNot newsworthy
- biolotthek 4y ago> to understand why so many pregnancies fail and how we might be able to prevent that from happening Are we sure that's a good idea? I've read that one of the reason for early pregnancy failure is that the embryo is not fit enough and it would be a waste of time and resources to commit to it. Another very counterintuitive finding is that if you try to implant embryos in various tissues (brain, liver, ...), the one in which is the hardest is the uterus! Because it's actively fighting against the embryo.
- shash 4y agoThe question is why is the embryo not “fit enough”. One way to increase the chance of success is by making the embryo “more fit”, but that requires an understanding of what that definition of fitness is, and that is what I understand this study is about.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
- colechristensen 4y agoThe genetic recombination process often results in failure, shuffling genes around and associated mutations breaks important things and the embryo gets to the point where it can no longer survive. It is sort of the first filter in evolution, surviving the single-cell to infant process.
- nomel 4y agoThis is making an extreme assumption that miscarriages aren't an expected, or required, phenomenon.
- shash 4y agoNo assumptions. Just a different way to study a phenomenon...
- pyuser583 4y ago
- nsxwolf 4y agoThe comparison image of the synthetic embryo compared to the natural one is about as horrifying as you could have hoped for.
- emmelaich 4y agoAlso cool - stem cells to improve eyesight (in mice). https://www.jci.org/articles/view/154619 https://www.jci.org/articles/view/154619 "Human photoreceptor transplants ultimately led to the reestablishment of cone-mediated light responses in the cone-deficient mouse."
- Apocryphon 4y agoNo name for this research project was mentioned- may I suggest the Nexus-0?
- winkeyless 4y agoReplicant number zero. This research is terrifying to me because life is never within our control. What kind of life is it if a mouse or human is reproduced without parents.
- alexvoda 4y agoWhat makes this so terrifying for you? Many things were not within our control and yet now they are.
- inglor_cz 4y ago"What kind of life is it if a mouse or human is reproduced without parents." What kind of wagon is it if it is not pulled by horses? What kind of country is it if it is not ruled by a king? What kind of food is it if it was neither hunted down nor gathered?
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoSynthetic mouse embryo, so let's hold sensationalism.
- badkitty99 4y ago
- latchkey 4y agoA few years ago, someone did home experiments (posted to a FB group) with raising chickens outside of their egg shells. It caused a lot of controversy, but damn, so fascinating at the same time. This has actually been a whole thing for a while... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell-less_chick_embryo_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell-less_chick_embryo_cultur... https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/shell-less-chick-embryo-development https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/shell-less-chick-embryo... https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jpsa/51/3/51_0130043/_pdf https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jpsa/51/3/51_0130043/_p...
- hatsunearu 4y agoThis is not that newsworthy, I've seen this is done as a science fair experiment by kids. There's nothing controversial about this...
- type0 4y agoThis ought to prove that chicken came first and not the egg
- olingern 4y agoCue politicians naming this “the work of the devil” and a bill to ban such experimentation
- junofan 4y agoWhy? It’s a great opportunity to expand bureaucracies and fund lots of unproductive ethics people. cf ML ethics.
- verisimi 4y agoWill she become known as 'the woman that made other women irrelevant'?
- hulitu 4y agoBut is the brain functioning or is only there for display ?
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoOk, but when they will be able to make new kidneys from stem cells? Mine won't last more than 15 years, I'm told.
- j7ake 4y agoWhat was once thought impossible is now possible. Incredible work.
- SergeAx 4y agoThe brain part is important. I know several people who suffer without brain.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI for one welcome our synthetic embryo overlords.
- squarefoot 4y agoThis is great news, which of course will generate a lot of heat in some circles. Before someone screams "playing god" and similar nonsense, I would ask them if they would have the same reaction when a new advanced weapon is introduced, because you know, if playing god applies when giving life, then it also does when giving death.
- adrianN 4y agoI think many people who dislike this kind of research would also dislike weapons research.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cantrevealname 4y ago> By progressing development just one day further, they have proved development of the whole brain. If you progress development to 20 days (gestation period for mice), do you get a live mouse? I assume not, but the article doesn’t tell us what happens to the embryo if you continue the experiment. > UK law permits human embryos to be studied in the laboratory only up to the fourteenth day of development. The restriction on human embryos seems to imply that non-human embryos are not restricted the same way. So I presume they didn’t terminate the mouse experiment for legal reasons.
- nadavision 4y agoSounds really cool. Can someone smarter than I explain what are the main differences between this and the recent study carried out at the Weizmann Institute of Science? Is it mostly the successful development of the brain? - https://www.jpost.com/science/article-713690 https://www.jpost.com/science/article-713690