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Human embryo models grown from stem cells
- testelastic 3y agoA team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute have successfully created an 'embryo model' that closely resembles a 14-day-old human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or womb.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- readthenotes1 3y agoThe question I have is why they call it a model? It is certainly not a simulation, and although it apparently started with different components they manipulated those to behave the way the normal versions do. What would happen if they implanted it in a womb?
- Retric 3y agoIt’s a model because it’s not completely equivalent. Medicine has learned a great deal from studying rodents, but humans are quite different. For one thing human embryos would have already been implanted in a womb for a week at that point and a great deal of signaling occurs between embryo and the uterus.
- beebeepka 3y agoSignalling? Thank you for expanding my horizons. Could you please share some more? Even a link or two would suffice.
- danielschonfeld 3y agoI am not expert but I think OP means different hormones would start to get produced and others would become suppressed to support the creation of a placenta, to support the the lining of the uterus and to cease ovulation and menstrual cycle as well as to start supporting the growing embryo in terms of nutrients by means of generating and connecting blood vessels. I read somewhere that pregnancy (unlike what is normally described) is a tug of war between the embryo which is the leach if you will on the mother which is the host. The embryo basically try consumes the host and so long as everybody is doing what they're supposed to, all the mechanisms end up keeping that war at bay with both participants making it alive at the end. If some mechanisms (and signals) were to misbehave one of the two would cease to exist.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoPreeclampsia is a condition where the fetus "requests" that the mother's body increase blood pressure to dangerous levels. It's definitely a case where one misbehaving could kill both the mother and the fetus.
- jtbayly 3y ago>"For one thing human embryos would have already been implanted in a womb for a week at that point" At what point? Implantation typically occurs 6-12 days after fertilization. This experiment starts at the equivalent of day 7. IVF is a thing. It sounds like you're just guessing. Edited to add, this article says "It would be illegal to implant them into a patient’s womb" which is a far cry from what you are implying, that it would be impossible. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/14/synthetic-human-embryos-created-in-groundbreaking-advance https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/14/synthetic-hu...
- Retric 3y agoI thought I was repeating what the article said: “This stage corresponds to day 7 of the natural human embryo, around the time it implants itself in the womb.” “The researchers discovered that if the embryo is not enveloped by placenta-forming cells in the right manner at day 3 of the protocol (corresponding to day 10 in natural embryonic development), its internal structures, such as the yolk sac, fail to properly develop.” “The stem cell–based embryo-like structures (termed SEMs) developed normally outside the womb for 8 days, reaching a developmental stage equivalent to day 14 in human embryonic development.” (So ~1 week post implantation for a human embryo.)
- jtbayly 3y agoNone of your quotes indicate that it would be impossible to implant these. The article is beating around the bush, but essentially it is saying "These could potentially be implanted." That's why people are somewhat up in arms about this. Read the other article I linked. This research in animals has led to successful implantation, but not live births. Nobody knows why yet.
- Retric 3y agoNothing I said had anything to do with if these were viable or could be made viable, just that they aren’t direct equivalents. People could be up in arms if hypothetically 50% of these where viable, but the nonviable 50% would still cause errors when compared to human embryos. Alternatively, 100% could be viable and they could still be different in critical ways from natural human embryos resulting in universally late or premature births etc. Or perhaps 0% are viable and people just don’t understand the nuances. It’s therefore an orthogonal question.
- Stevvo 3y agoWe don't know what will happen. Further research will provide more answers.
- tkahnoski 3y agoAnother commenter linked to an earlier Nature article where 'Model' is a particularly carved out word in the ethical guidelines. https://archive.ph/Xnx5n#selection-1171.0-1171.349 https://archive.ph/Xnx5n#selection-1171.0-1171.349
- patall 3y agoIt's one of the two publications that raised a controversy in June, for example discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36330732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36330732 A summary on Nature news at the times: https://archive.ph/Xnx5n https://archive.ph/Xnx5n
- arthur2e5 3y agoNice, the Nature news article links to the biorxiv version of three papers. The one linked by TFA is Oldak, https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.14.544922 https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.14.544922.
- kleiba 3y agoI used to be a researcher in NLP until not too long ago. Over the last few years, increasing pressure has been put on on everyone trying to publish papers related to training data collected through human trials to provide ethics statements as a way to ensure that certain standards are met regarding that data. Not everyone is able to see too much sense in this process, and I've heard comments from non-US colleagues that it reflects a purely American world view. But I think that there are at least some applications where ethical consideration are definitely worth talking about, eg., in applications such as hate speech detection. And of course, even if you don't agree with the necessity for ethics statements, because it is just one more thing that takes up time you could otherwise spend on your actual job (doing research), you certainly don't want to risk having your paper rejected just because you don't meet whatever ethics standards the conference or journal seeks to uphold. But remember, I'm talking natural language processing here. In that light, it is a complete mystery to me how research like the one described in the article could have possibly, ever made it past an ethics review. Unless, of course, completely different standards are applied - which in itself would be rather questionable.
- dekhn 3y agoWhy do you believe this work would not have passed an ethics review? (your comments are a bit obscure, in a way that suggests you aren't familiar with how modern biological research is evaluated)
- kleiba 3y agoI have no doubt that it passed an ethics review. I'm sorry if my comment seemed to suggest otherwise. I suppose what I was trying to get at was a suspicion that ethics reviews in today's research landscape (not only in the medical field, but others as well) seem to me more like a lip service. And don't get me wrong, that's just an opinion, I'm sure a lot of you think otherwise.
- dekhn 3y agoIt is true that a great deal of review is lip service. A cynic would point out that while IRBs contain an ethical review, they often exist only to absolve the university of legal or moral responsibility. The realist in me points out that ethical review has been right-shifted: now we're more likely to approve a wide range of experiments that skirt right up against the common ethical boundaries, and then let the subsequent public response determine the ethics of the action. None of this really matters until somebody announces we can make viable embryos from stem cells or that we can bring a viable embryo to term in an artificial womb. Both of these seem to be not implausible in the next 20 years.
- frank_bb 3y ago[dead]
- rmbyrro 3y agoThat sounds to me like opening console and messing up with the website's JS code :D
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- arthur2e5 3y agoBiologists have been messing with the console since a long time ago. They figured out what each gene does in large part by turning them off one by one, or occasionally making them run more than they should (overexpression). Even before they had the whole genome, they used random mutagenesis and slowly analyzed what got broken by breeding experiments. With enough data you can even locate it on a chromosome relative to known genes by linkage maps. The most fun stuff to mess with is of course parts that controls how other stuff works. Figuring out what makes stem cells want to grow into shapes will lead us to more of these control switches.
- rmbyrro 3y agoI did not comment negatively about the tech, to be clear
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago[flagged]
- shadowgovt 3y agoFrom an ethical standpoint, there is no reason to assert a human being created from re-embryonized adult stem cells should be any more enslaveable than any child of any parents or the younger of any pair of twins. ... of course, the flip-side of the coin is that for a certain segment of the pro-life movement, using these cells as test subjects will be equivalent to intentionally fertilizing human egg cells and then using those as test subjects.
- lvass 3y agoFrom some ethical standpoint, it's absolutely fine to engineer some creature for slavery, as long as you make it ugly and forbid anyone from discovering how many chromosomes it has, and life can be much better than it is now. (Reference work of fiction omitted to prevent spoilers)
- makeitdouble 3y agoThe line has always been "is it like us?", for any value of "like us" that can be assessed, so yes. Even today there will be situations where the difference between effective slavery and freedom is the country on your passport (or lack of it)
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoEthics have always been fungible when the hunger is strong. My comment was mostly in jest.
- KorematsuFredt 3y agoReducing human suffering is a noble goal and infertile couples could benefit from this research. I would rather have western world make giant leaps in this field and also set the direction of ethics here rather than just banning it and leaving it up to Russia and China to conduct this sort of research in their secret facilities.
- mkii 3y ago[flagged]
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- antisthenes 3y agoDon't worry, Russia isn't in any position for this high-tech research. Anyone who's been anywhere close to capable of doing this work has left since 2014 or 2022. China is a bigger risk factor, but it's not like they would care about the direction of western ethics anyway.
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- goodbyesf 3y ago> Reducing human suffering is a noble goal and infertile couples could benefit from this research. The research isn't about reducing human suffering. No research is. All research is about attaining new knowledge. > I would rather have western world make giant leaps in this field and also set the direction of ethics here rather than just banning it and leaving it up to Russia and China to conduct this sort of research in their secret facilities. Why? Given the history of the western world in biological, chemical and nuclear genocides, why is it better that the west make sets the directin of ethics than russia or china. The west has proven it hasn't a ethical bone in our body. Research should happen because humans want to learn and advance. The west ain't saints. The russians and chinese certainly aren't monsters, especially compared ot the west.
- abledon 3y agopopulation collapse: solved {checkmark} warring super-solider arms race: {added to jira board}
- TeMPOraL 3y agoOut of all sci-fi/fantasy ideas out there, I'd never have thought Star Wars: Attack of the Clones would show up as a possible future. But as we are making rapid advancements in robotics and AI on one hand, and biotech on the other, and the relevant fields are controlled by different corporate interests, clones fighting droids doesn't seem so out there anymore.
- natechols 3y ago> the relevant fields are controlled by different corporate interests As opposed to governments, which are famously cautious about deploying destructive technology, and scrupulously avoid civilian casualties.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoDidn't mean that - but rather that corporate players transcend governments.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agothe progression of the commodification of human beings: on schedule.
- dragonelite 3y agoGive a normal person some steroids and strength/endurance training exercise regiment. You will have a person that is 80~100% stronger then your average male within 7~10 months. A lot quicker and cheaper then waiting 20 years for a embryo to grown up.
- yieldcrv 3y ago[flagged]
- rpastuszak 3y ago[flagged]
- Yoric 3y ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 3y agoI got brave new world vibes from the article too, matching up with the Generation nomenclature
- idosh 3y agoThe goal eventually is to be able to create organs in lab condition that can be implanted
- polski-g 3y agoThe hard part of children is the womb and available parents, not creating an embryo. The UK needs to finish their artificial womb work.
- justrealist 3y agoThere are millions of couples going through IVF that fail to get viable embryos. Probably 3/4 of women over 40 fail to get any successful pregnancies, and many younger ones too.
- mtmail 3y agoDepends how much over 40. "At age 40: 44% will have a conception ending in a live birth within one year, 64% will have a conception ending in a live birth within four years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility
- ipaddr 3y agoWhy wouldn't the state raise them? We've been moving away from the traditional family.
- gustavus 3y agoPlease Don't create the Torment Nexus
- debok 3y agoMoving away from the traditional family has detrimental effects for the children. See this Wikipedia page and it's citations for a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_absence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_absence
- 123yawaworht456 3y agono, we haven't. that's a view held by 0.00001% of the population in a handful of western countries
- 3y ago
- no-dr-onboard 3y ago"we are summoning things that cannot be easily unsummoned"
- coldtea 3y ago"and for no good reason besides that we can and profit"
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThe people here don't like it when you imply there are things people just should not do. They think they're going to be singularity'd into gods. If they got that amount of entitlement from a "welfare queen" they'd be offended to death.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- germandiago 3y agoTerrifyng to me.
- echelon 3y agoWe are biochemical, biomechanical machines already. We just don't teach it.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoI recommend studying metaphysics. Scientism and its presumed mechanistic metaphysics are not coherent.
- drsnow 3y agoIf metaphysics were real, it'd just be called physics.
- arnoooooo 3y agoPhysics is about matter. If you were only matter, you'd have no free will.
- raffraffraff 3y agoWe are only matter. But "only" is great way to devalue something pretty fucking amazing. Consider that you are using matter right now to think.
- echelon 3y agoWho says we have free will? I think the jury is out on that one. The sheer number of interactions in our environment per femtosecond is astounding. They're dynamical inputs into our brain that compound over time. It's certainly enough to approximate "free will" at our level of detection.
- inglor_cz 3y agoMetaphysics looks like a lot of vacuous garbage to me; the sort of vacuous garbage that people use as intelectual mimicry. It is nevertheless worth looking at - in order to know what to avoid.
- stanford_labrat 3y agoEdit: link to my previous comment with a list of papers from the last time a similar thread was posted for those interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018392 This was a busy summer for developmental biology, full disclosure that I am an author on one of these papers and my thesis work is in embryo models/early development. The Hanna group was unfortunately scooped by some unethical behavior but their model is superior to the other one in Nature by Zernicka-Goetz.
- areoform 3y agoWould you be open to giving a talk on the topic?
- ed 3y agoGiven the spectrum of talk opportunities you might want to provide a little context. There’s a big difference between eg “my twitter space” and Ted.
- areoform 3y agoIt would be indiscrete of me to say so. But always happy to chat privately! I can be reached on the username areoform via areoform.com
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pvg 3y agoJust link your old comment next time since sometimes threads get merged https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20copy%20paste%20comments&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- stanford_labrat 3y agoThank you I wasn't aware, appreciate it.
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- formvoltron 3y agoWould this allow them to study the rejuvenation events that occur during embryogenesis? I'm talking about the epigenetic resets that occur at some point after egg & sperm unit.
- akomtu 3y ago[flagged]
- rationalfaith 3y ago[dead]