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George Church lab creates ovarian granulosa-like cells from stem cells
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoGeorge M. Church
- apsec112 3y agoEdited for clarity
- unsubstantiated 3y agoGeorge Michael O'Church
- lubujackson 3y agoHere we go again: https://www.theonion.com/u-s-out-of-my-uterus-vs-we-must-deploy-troops-to-jess-1819594277 https://www.theonion.com/u-s-out-of-my-uterus-vs-we-must-dep...
- paulusthe 3y agoWe truly do live in an incredible time. The first human immune to aging has likely already been born. Hypothetically, given enough luck, an immortal human probably walks among us. We're that close to being able to genetically modify everything.
- nicechianti 3y ago[dead]
- civilitty 3y ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 3y agoBioengineering now is what silicon and plastics were decades ago, the new frontier.
- sobkas 3y agoThis two gave us Facebook and taste of microplastics in every meal, so this time I don't know what else could go wrong...
- aaauaucuggaa 3y agoThere is still time, we are very, very far away from "we can genetically modify everything".
- zachthewf 3y agohopefully a whole bunch of them!
- sillysaurusx 3y agoAs someone who just spent 9 weeks in the hospital with his wife in order to safely deliver his child, I’d just like to say that this sort of tech can’t come too soon. I’ve always wanted to be a father, but due to PCOS it was questionable whether it would ever happen. IVF finally worked after five years, and then we capped it off with a mega hospital stay. Totally worth it, but I definitely wouldn’t choose to do it if there was any other option. Point being, the default comment for reproductive research seems to be “Oh no.” And I’ve never understood this. Having babies naturally sucks. It’s difficult, painful, and something that people do because they have to, not because it’s fun. And in the worst case it can kill your wife, which was on the table for us. Bring on the incubation pods, I say. We have six more embryos in cold storage, and it feels so surreal. We have the option of having a kid when we’re 60 — we won’t, obviously, but it’s literally a miracle that we could. (We’ll probably donate the embryos.) We’re definitely living in the future, and I am so grateful. More advances in this space, please.
- martinclayton 3y agoCongratulations.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThank you. She’s still baking in the NICU, but Kess will be home with us within a couple weeks. Bonus pic of her figuring out how to create a sleep mask out of random parts: https://imgur.com/a/luDdo6E https://imgur.com/a/luDdo6E
- zaken 3y agoYou're probably well aware and quickly fixed the issue after the photo was taken, but I just need to say it's a really bad idea to have ANYTHING in an infants crib that they can use to block their airways like that. Glad to see she's doing well and hope you have good times with her once she's home!
- tafda 3y ago
- EatingWithForks 3y agoI hope we can relieve women of the pressure of motherhood this way. Maybe we can even develop more equitable societies where any gender can raise any children, or all genders will be expected to raise all children. Or, worst case, only poor people will be expected to raise children at all, and raising children will become a job/career bimodally distributed to the very poor earning almost nothing raising workers to fuel capitalism and the very wealthy developing dynasties to rule over the poor with.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoConversely, have we considered that motherhood is a joy and a privilege for women, that it is the most sublime fulfillment of their biological design and destiny, to bear and feed their young, to bond with them, to hold and touch them, to care for them, no matter what? Have we considered, that despite the "pangs of childbirth" that are a very real part of the experience, that conception, pregnancy, and childbirth are natural processes, not diseases or disorders to be eliminated, and that mankind has been well-equipped to accompany women and support them every step of the way, no matter what obstacles they face, that they retain their dignity and continue to fulfill their vocation of motherhood?
- ksenzee 3y agoIf women went around telling everyone what we thought about testicles, we’d get laughed right out of the public square. And yet men don’t hesitate to give their opinions about the process of childbirth, about which they know nothing firsthand.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
- ksenzee 3y ago
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoI wonder how far it is until transwomen could have a functional female reproductive system? This would seem to be one step closer.
- mikrl 3y agoIt is the final frontier for a lot of the transphobic rhetoric out there. If an XY person can give birth, it makes obsolete any jibe or argument based on genetics or ‘biology’
- klyrs 3y agoThe existence of intersex people has not put a stop to the insistence that gender is sex is binary because "biology." They just insist that any counterexample to their ideology is subhuman.
- mantas 3y agoWe insist humans have 20 fingers. Even though there’re both natural and human-made ways that number may not be true for few individuals.
- ryan-c 3y agoI wonder how long it'll be before we can just switch the chromosomes in vivo.
- mantas 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mutant_glofish 3y ago> I wonder how far it is until transwomen could have a functional female reproductive system? Actually, we are probably very far from that. And obviously, just because something is in the realm of possibility doesn't imply that we should do it. May I recommend a short book by C. S. Lewis (the author of The Chronicles of Narnia)? It's called "The Abolition of Man", with the intended meaning of "Man" being just the mankind/humanity in general. A central argument of the book is that a level of technological progress which enables arbitrary conditioning of human beings doesn't necessarily lead to some kind of liberation. More likely, it will empower the conditioners and destroy the constraints that fundamentally define our humanity. If you like liberty and humanity, that would be a grim prospect. Technologies which would genuinely enable turning a man to a woman (in the biological sense) would also enable a lot of undesirable things (even if you think turning a man to a woman is itself something desirable).
- mutant_glofish 3y agoThe original title is "Directed differentiation of human iPSCs to functional ovarian granulosa-like cells via transcription factor overexpression". Also, although I'm not sure that I understand this completely, it seems to me that this isn't quite a new development. For example, here's a 2016 paper claiming to do something very similar [1] (with the additional step of transplanting the human cells into mice): https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/mmr.2016.5191 https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/mmr.2016.5191 [1]: From the 2016 paper: "In the present study, human iPSCs were induced to differentiate into ovarian granulosa-like cells (OGLCs) in vitro. Subsequently, these cells were transplanted into POF mice."
- Metacelsus 3y agoHi, I'm the first author on the eLife paper. The 2016 paper you mentioned is basically worthless (their differentiation method doesn't make biological sense and didn't work when I tried it, they're only looking at a small subset of cherrypicked markers to conclude they have granulosa cells, and also, these people are from the "Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine"). We have much more functional validation of our granulosa-like cells, in terms of gene expression, hormone production, and follicle formation. A better precedent would be Yoshino 2021: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34437124/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34437124/, which made mouse granulosa cells from mouse stem cells:
- narrator 3y agoOrganoids are a really interesting George Church project. He wants to create human organs that didn't come from a body, but just grew on their own in a vat and are fully functional. Mind blowing.
- acyou 3y agoCould we please have the title corrected to "George Church Lab identifies factors in cell expression for female reproductive tissue related cells"? "Creates functional ovary" is such an extreme stretch it's not funny.
- dang 3y agoI've attempted an edit. If someone can suggest a better title (that means: more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article itself), we can change it again. Note that the limit is 80 chars. (Submitted title was "George Church lab creates functional ovary tissue from adult human stem cells", which says "functional ovary tissue", not "functional ovary", but ok...)
- refurb 3y agoPrecisely. It's the expression of one type of cell in a human ovary of which there are multiple types of cells. It's nowhere close to a functional ovary.
- Metacelsus 3y agoAgreed, as the first author on this paper. We didn't make a full ovary (although we're working on it!)
- Metacelsus 3y agoHi, this is my research and I'd be happy to answer any questions about it (I know I'm a bit late though).
- brendank310 3y agoWhat do you suspect will be the practical uses of this? Could it help researchers run experiments to develop better fertility protocols? Or depending on costs, fertility clinics could test various protocols to find the optimal "hormone environment" for promoting high quality egg development? Or is this going to a more "out there" direction as in you could grow an egg entirely in vitro for later fertilization and implantation?
- Metacelsus 3y ago1 and 2: Yes that's what we're doing (in partnership with Gameto, the startup commercializing this tech). See our recent preprints: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.27.534477v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.27.534477v2 and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.27.534479v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.27.534479v2 3: I'm definitely excited about in vitro oogenesis and that's the direction I want to take this in the future. Right now, we're not able to reliably get the germ cells to do meiosis, so that's what I'm working on.
- Teever 3y agoHow long until we're looking at a home appliance that can grow a baby to maturation from a genetic sample? What are the biggest bottlenecks? How do you anticipate such a device will be regulated? What do you anticipate will be the response from the pro-life right? From the antiscience antivax type community?
- Metacelsus 3y agoThat's a completely different technology, artificial wombs are much harder than artificial ovaries. Very unlikely within 20 years, I won't speculate past that point.