5 ms·

Human trials of artificial wombs could start soon

38 points by rolph 3y ago

Supply5411 3y ago
>Even what to call the entities in these devices is fraught, says Chloe Romanis, a biolawyer at Durham Law School, UK. They’re not fetuses in the conventional sense because they are no longer in the womb, she says. Is this an attempt to nullify all existing laws that use the word "fetus"?
- cinntaile 3y ago
  It's a lawyer pointing out that we're headed into uncharted territory. It's not an attempt to nullify anything.
  - Supply5411 3y ago
    Except not in this case. Elizabeth Chloe Romanis has written dozens of articles[1] arguing for new classifications for these unborn children. This is not a person saying "we're going into uncharted territory." This is a person arguing a very clear and opinionated perspective on the classification of human beings. >Artificial womb technology and the significance of birth: why gestatelings are not newborns (or fetuses)[2] In this abstract[3], she argues that a new classification is needed to determine what can and can't be done with each "entity", because it will impact the freedoms of women. How does a fetus in an artificial womb impact the freedoms of a woman? 1. https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/#publications https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/#publicat... 2. https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/11/728 https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/11/728 3. https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054?login=false https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054?logi...
    - RecycledEle 3y ago
      Let's not repeat the errors we made with SpyWare, when we allowed crooks to define new terms that led to us allowing practices we all knew were wrong. There are common sense crossovers between a baby inside her mother and a baby in side her artificial womb. An embryo is an embryo, regardless of whether it is in a mother's body, in an artificial womb, or in a freezer. A fetus is a fetus whether it is in a biological mother's natural womb, in a surrogate mother's natural womb, or in an artificial womb. Birth is when the fetus exists the womb and presumably starts to breathe on its own. This can be vaginal delivery, caesarian section, or delivery from an artificial womb. Humans are humans, regardless of whether they were delivered vaginally, through caesarian section, or were delivered from an artificial womb. I hope we do not go back to the days of legalized slavery. The USA still has scars from a war that mostly ended slavery. The UK took until 2015 to finish paying off the debt incurred from compensating slave owners when they freed the slaves. Now of the uncomfortable topic of abortion. I remember an L. Neil Smith book where a woman found herself unintentionally pregnant, and had the baby taken out and stored frozen for a few decades until she was ready to become a mother, then she had the baby incubated in as artificial womb. In a world with that level of technology, where unplanned babies could be incubated in artificial wombs and easily adopted, abortion would serve one of several purposes: 1. Eliminate severely deformed or genetically defective people from society. (I wonder if genetic engineering will raise our collective IQs and athleticism until one day everyone in this conversation would be aborted for being too stupid or too weak to live?) 2. When all the people who want to adopt are overloaded with kids, when all foster care facilities are overflowing, and and the government does not want to raise kids in group homes, eliminating the excess children could be a final solution. I wonder what the long-term economics would be when AIs can raise children very cheaply. Would the children be cheap to raise and very productive, or would they be useless eaters overpopulating a crowded planet? I think contraception is a kinder solution. I would not put it past some authoritarian regime to demand they get to decide what unborn babies are incubated and which are aborted for the purpose of eugenics. 3. Maybe someone just wants to kill a kid? I see posts about wanting to get pregnant to have an abortion for the joy of killing a child on social media, but I have a hard time taking them seriously. I have known people who would take part in a human sacrifice for the fun of it if it was legal. I don't talk to them any more. I typed this wall of text, and never mentioned clone armies. I'm a failure.
- waterheater 3y ago
  I wrote an excessively detailed comment on the implications of an artificial wombs from a legal perspective in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308675#37314083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308675#37314083 TLDR: it's not as simple as just "fetus", but there is much disagreement around when a developing clump of cells becomes protected under the law.
  - RecycledEle 3y ago
    In the post You link to, You say that in Georgia they define an unborn person as being in a womb, then You say an artificial womb would not apply. Why not? Is an artificial womb not a womb?
    - waterheater 3y ago
      Obviously, this is just my opinion, but no, I believe it's possible that the Georgia definition may be exploited, particularly because the intent behind the law was to protect mothers (a natural person), not an artificial womb owned by a corporation (an artificial person).
      - RecycledEle 3y ago
        I expect any law that defines a "womb" as being inside a woman will change once artificial wombs become possible.
        waterheater 3y ago
        One can hope, though that's my main point in talking about it. The paradigm of artificial wombs will be a literal "brave new world". I wonder what the downstream effects will be when a company offers BaaS (Babies as a Service). Seems studying the present-day cloud may serve as an effective foil.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    Perhaps, like many phones or cars, children of the future would be leased not owned, with full ownership (or at least a share of ownership) belonging to the corporation, state, etc. Further to this, there could be agreements that there would be an annual "service" of the child, with it being a requirement to have some ongoing medical treatment or gene therapy, that might be written into the terms of service. If any of that, at what point would the child 'own itself'? Does it ever? Will there be lifetime contracts?
- jimbob45 3y ago
  That was kind of my takeaway from this as well. They're no longer fetuses and these aren't wombs in any sense of the word. If these are wombs then everything else we currently use to promote the health of preterm births in the NICU would be "wombs" as well.
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  There is an interesting phenomenon in some (many?) philosophical schools where words are given too much power. It is as if they "are" the things that they describe. And yet, with all that magical power granted to words by academic philosophers, words are really just slippery labels that can be distorted on a mass scale quite quickly these days. And yet we still treat words like magic spells. We live in a world where saying that the meaning of a word has changed, somehow means that you have "changed reality", and everybody seems to march along saying the mantras. They forget that words are used in legal documents and in "common knowledge" inside our heads. I really wish that human language was strongly typed. You shouldn't be allowed to hijack a word for your own political ends. But to even suggest that the original concept or article deserves it's own distinct word puts you at risk of being accused of some thought crime. Why? Because that makes the incoming bait-and-switch easier to spot. The warping of the word is a magic spell, designed to manipulate reality. Edit: misspellings and ramblings
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > I really wish that human language was strongly typed. I don’t think “strongly typed” even makes sense in reference to human language, except in the sense of grammar where words can only be used in the place where a the particular part of speech they are is called for, in which case formal writing is pretty close (though it responds to linguistic drift that results from informal language not being “strongly typed”.) What I think you mean is you wish that definitions of words were precise and fixed and that adherence to strict and literal use according to those precise, fixed definitions was universal and compulsory. Which, well, would be convenient for some things but really bad for others, and in any case is irrelevant because there is no way for it to happen. > But to even suggest that the original concept or article deserves it’s own distinct word puts you at risk of being accused of some thought crime. Does it? People make suggestions like that all the time, and while they are often disputed, its rarely about anything like “thought crime”.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > I really wish that human language was strongly typed. You shouldn't be allowed to hijack a word According to my one true definition of "strongly typed" it already is--how dare you try to hijack those words. /s
- mock-possum 3y ago
  Yeah I wouldn’t have expected a fetus to only be called a fetus while it’s inside a human being. ‘Fetus’ is a stage of development, not a context or a location.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  No. I imagine the lawyer is erring on the side of amplifying the rights of the child (now somewhere between a foetus and a newborn) rather than diminish them.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  Look up "Chloe Romanis, a biolawyer at Durham Law School, UK" and see what her bias is: Available for media contact about: Ethics: Abortion Law & Crime: Abortion English Law: Abortion Gender and law: Abortion Ethics: Reproductive Technologies Law & Crime: Reproductive Technologies https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/ https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/
nickpp 3y ago
What’s the hold up on designer babies though? I grew up thinking this is the future, choosing and customizing the genetic makeup of your children but I had to create my own kids the old fashioned way, fearing at every checkup for whatever defects and abnormalities we may find. Together with artificial wombs, this would liberate us from one of the heavies tyrannies nature (and evolution) have placed on us. But it could be worse, I guess. We could be like praying mantises…
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  What will happen is everyone will end up the same.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
    Nope. Fads come and go.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      That’s another way of saying “around any given time, nearly everyone (whose parents can afford the latest fad) will come out the same”. Which is fine, its not like genetic monocultures have ever produced problems.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
        Which is fine, because that genetic monoculture will go, deservedly so. Meanwhile the disadvantaged masses of wild slaves in their slums will profit from the exploratory teams of transnational bio-corps, looking for interesting new traits and specimens. Some will be elevated as winners of the 'lottery'. Like some of the poor formerly free roaming mustangs in the west, now mostly coralled in. Can't have them disturb our cattle, can't we? /imagine braying laughter here...
- tomohelix 3y ago
  AFAIK, there are two main issues. The first is ethics which is pretty much obvious. Experiments on human are not easy to get approved and near impossible for things like permanent changes to babies and fetuses. There are ethics boards on every company and university that regulate these stuff and they would almost immediately deny all request or proposal that approach this kind of work. You may get something going in less regulated countries like China but even then the international research community would not be kind to you and your career. The second is theoretically, it still is not possible to "design" a baby. In biology, things are very different from pure engineering. The ways stuff gets discovered is like this: if you have a big clockwork machine, you increase signal to a gear, you notice the machine do X, you say that gear is associated with X function. Then you go to another gear, do it again, and try to map out everything in the machine and their function. Cool. Now the problem is you don't know interactions between gears. So you try to change 2 gears that both associated with X. Turn out when you do that, the result is not just X but XYD get changed. Then when you try 3 gears at the same time, turns out it changes XMA function. Worse, in another supposedly identical machine, changing gear X actually causes Y change because of a previously unknown gear that is a switch for gear X to affect either X or Y and that switch depends on some obscure environment parameters... In short, biology is too complex and the way we are probing it is still too primitive and it takes a long time to even figure out what go where. We can try poking around to optimize one thing but it always causes unintended effects, mostly lethal. So the ethics boards are even less likely to approve a project like this. Just as an example: CRISPR system. We know about nucleases and these enzymes and stuff for decades. But to make it something reliable enough to be used took so long this thing only became big recently. Biology is very slow and very tedious. It won't be like writing a software and wait 10min for it to compile. Experiments can take years to run and come out with nothing because a stupid mistake was made somewhere along the way.
eps 3y ago
The trend of adding "Here's what you need to know" to the news titles is extremely off-putting. "Here, lemmings, your daily nutritious portion of news. Munch it down."
- biggc 3y ago
  As far as click-bait/enticement "here's what you need to know" is one of the less annoying forms.
  - Aromasin 3y ago
    It's moving up in the rankings based on frequency. Its nearly up there with "you'll never believe what happened" and "person x shocked the Internet"
- mock-possum 3y ago
  You’ll never believe how effective this one weird trick is!
- 000ooo000 3y ago
  It's especially annoying because I did not need to know a single thing in that article.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    You misunderstand: you were needed to read the article for their metrics, not for your own edification.
iamnotsure 3y ago
Nature.
pvaldes 3y ago
Only logical way to do space travel efficiently; to send people out of the earth fast enough, and to populate other planets with enough people to guarantee covering the loses by accidents (that will happen) and protection from endogamy problems. Another interesting question (filosophically, biologically and morally) is if artificial wombs could break the boundaries of human pregnancy. Currently is subject to the capability of the body of the mother to sustain a successful parturition without bursting (sorry for the ugly mental image but is like that). The babies can't grow indefinitely inside the mother. Artificial wombs don't have this constrain. Could this machines extend it for a whole space travel of 1 year, or 1,5 years, or even more, so this children are much more apt to fend for themselves when born? nobody knows.
- tibbydudeza 3y ago
  I remember a short story like this - AI sentient probe landing on a remote planet after centuries of travel and then gestating eggs and taking on the role of "mother". It ends on a good note compared to most stories of this nature where the AI self-terminates because the kids now adults are ready to the job further.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  I haven't watched it, but that's supposedly the premise of the scifi TV show "Raised By Wolves". Frozen embryos born and raised by robots.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    not to mention some discussions in Hacker news that predate both cases (probably, didn't read that history)
tibbydudeza 3y ago
Dear Lord I hope not. Imagine Musk getting a hold of this - he would be churning out duplicates of himself by the dozens. He has a rather insane fixation on human population growth akin to the shady eugenics movement of the 60's.
ausbah 3y ago
it would be great if ppl didn’t have to get pregnant anymore. seems like you might need a high threshold to use these than normal pregnancy tho
- justo-rivera 3y ago
  that would be FANTASTIC. Care to explain why doing what we have done to make you exist in this planet earth should STOP at the exact same generation than you were born? Sounds narcissitic, you were born to stop people being born. Think about it
  - ausbah 3y ago
    how did you get that from my comment. I think being born is a net positive & if it could be done without the complications, pain, etc. of being pregnant
    - justo-rivera 3y ago
      eh, guess i was looking for trouble and "people shouldnt get pregnant anymore" triggered it
    - justo-rivera 3y ago
      and to be honest its getting hard to see the difference between "transhumanist" and "antihumanist", it gets more subtle every time probably because getting hyper-humans means getting rid of some humanity
throwp 3y ago
Is it possible to have kids without a female partner involved in anyway? I like the idea of having kids but not interested in marriage
- bagels 3y ago
  Adoption, maybe?
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> But researchers discount these concerns. This idea "is so far in the distant future that it's not worth discussing its implications in relation to the current technology", Werner says. That sentence really deflated me It makes me ashamed to call myself a scientist in world where others claiming the same status show such a stunted, parochial outlook. Haven't we just lived through this with AI, and now face a rude reckoning? Surely the "distant future" in this case is about 10 years, making such dismissive, offhand remarks pure political deflection. It's always "worth discussing" the implications of your work. Having the courage to use sceptical imagination, and even express doubts about how your work might be misused, is surely an essential characteristic of a worthy researcher.
- calgoo 3y ago
  I see that sentence as a preempt defense against the ultra conservatives that would otherwise attack it. If we where to discuss those alternatives, then it becomes an enormous political battle. By stating it as a "save the children" they are making it harder for anyone to object, which to me as a parent of twins who where born premature (not this early, but where still in incubators for 1 week) this could be fantastic news for some if it works.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    I think it's fantastic news too. I'm at an age where know 20 or 30 women who've been through horrendous, mentally and physically injurious experiences chasing fertility. Obviously natural birth is the gold-standard, but this research looks like good medicine that, in limited contexts, will save lives (of babies and mothers). Yet I am dismayed to read so many negative, borderline paranoid comments. And to hear the glib remarks of researchers and their PR spokespeople caught in the corporate power dance. We have such a deep problem with ethics in technology. I think it is bound to the epoch, and arises mainly in the era of massive power inequality, monopoly, poor education and massively distorted communications. As a result, there's general scientific hubris in the air, and the descent of the West into corporate crypto-fascism is making wonderful scientific advances only look threatening (robots, AI, genetics...). These are Frankensteinian times. Now the first thing we think about when a brilliant new technology emerges is "how will the rich, powerful and malevolent misuse this to further enslave people?" That can't be healthy, but unfortunately it's become a necessary scepticism. Scientists need to (wo)man up and learn to talk about this stuff.
readthenotes1 3y ago
I've just been re-reading Cyteen. This, plus the recent news of the "model" fetus and the old news of CRISPR, means we're in for some interesting times. Khan!Khaaaan!! https://youtu.be/wRnSnfiUI54?feature=shared https://youtu.be/wRnSnfiUI54?feature=shared https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/chinas-testing-biologically-enhanced-super-soldiers-on-their-own-troops-says-dni-ratcliffe/ https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/chinas-testing-biol...
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
  Had to think of the AZIs too. And HOLY FORD! What a BRAVE NEW WORLD!

38 points by rolph 3y ago

>Even what to call the entities in these devices is fraught, says Chloe Romanis, a biolawyer at Durham Law School, UK. They’re not fetuses in the conventional sense because they are no longer in the womb, she says. Is this an attempt to nullify all existing laws that use the word "fetus"?

cinntaile 3y ago
It's a lawyer pointing out that we're headed into uncharted territory. It's not an attempt to nullify anything.
- Supply5411 3y ago
  Except not in this case. Elizabeth Chloe Romanis has written dozens of articles[1] arguing for new classifications for these unborn children. This is not a person saying "we're going into uncharted territory." This is a person arguing a very clear and opinionated perspective on the classification of human beings. >Artificial womb technology and the significance of birth: why gestatelings are not newborns (or fetuses)[2] In this abstract[3], she argues that a new classification is needed to determine what can and can't be done with each "entity", because it will impact the freedoms of women. How does a fetus in an artificial womb impact the freedoms of a woman? 1. https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/#publications https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/#publicat... 2. https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/11/728 https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/11/728 3. https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054?login=false https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054?logi...
  - RecycledEle 3y ago
    Let's not repeat the errors we made with SpyWare, when we allowed crooks to define new terms that led to us allowing practices we all knew were wrong. There are common sense crossovers between a baby inside her mother and a baby in side her artificial womb. An embryo is an embryo, regardless of whether it is in a mother's body, in an artificial womb, or in a freezer. A fetus is a fetus whether it is in a biological mother's natural womb, in a surrogate mother's natural womb, or in an artificial womb. Birth is when the fetus exists the womb and presumably starts to breathe on its own. This can be vaginal delivery, caesarian section, or delivery from an artificial womb. Humans are humans, regardless of whether they were delivered vaginally, through caesarian section, or were delivered from an artificial womb. I hope we do not go back to the days of legalized slavery. The USA still has scars from a war that mostly ended slavery. The UK took until 2015 to finish paying off the debt incurred from compensating slave owners when they freed the slaves. Now of the uncomfortable topic of abortion. I remember an L. Neil Smith book where a woman found herself unintentionally pregnant, and had the baby taken out and stored frozen for a few decades until she was ready to become a mother, then she had the baby incubated in as artificial womb. In a world with that level of technology, where unplanned babies could be incubated in artificial wombs and easily adopted, abortion would serve one of several purposes: 1. Eliminate severely deformed or genetically defective people from society. (I wonder if genetic engineering will raise our collective IQs and athleticism until one day everyone in this conversation would be aborted for being too stupid or too weak to live?) 2. When all the people who want to adopt are overloaded with kids, when all foster care facilities are overflowing, and and the government does not want to raise kids in group homes, eliminating the excess children could be a final solution. I wonder what the long-term economics would be when AIs can raise children very cheaply. Would the children be cheap to raise and very productive, or would they be useless eaters overpopulating a crowded planet? I think contraception is a kinder solution. I would not put it past some authoritarian regime to demand they get to decide what unborn babies are incubated and which are aborted for the purpose of eugenics. 3. Maybe someone just wants to kill a kid? I see posts about wanting to get pregnant to have an abortion for the joy of killing a child on social media, but I have a hard time taking them seriously. I have known people who would take part in a human sacrifice for the fun of it if it was legal. I don't talk to them any more. I typed this wall of text, and never mentioned clone armies. I'm a failure.
waterheater 3y ago
I wrote an excessively detailed comment on the implications of an artificial wombs from a legal perspective in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308675#37314083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308675#37314083 TLDR: it's not as simple as just "fetus", but there is much disagreement around when a developing clump of cells becomes protected under the law.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  In the post You link to, You say that in Georgia they define an unborn person as being in a womb, then You say an artificial womb would not apply. Why not? Is an artificial womb not a womb?
  - waterheater 3y ago
    Obviously, this is just my opinion, but no, I believe it's possible that the Georgia definition may be exploited, particularly because the intent behind the law was to protect mothers (a natural person), not an artificial womb owned by a corporation (an artificial person).
    - RecycledEle 3y ago
      I expect any law that defines a "womb" as being inside a woman will change once artificial wombs become possible.
      - waterheater 3y ago
        One can hope, though that's my main point in talking about it. The paradigm of artificial wombs will be a literal "brave new world". I wonder what the downstream effects will be when a company offers BaaS (Babies as a Service). Seems studying the present-day cloud may serve as an effective foil.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Perhaps, like many phones or cars, children of the future would be leased not owned, with full ownership (or at least a share of ownership) belonging to the corporation, state, etc. Further to this, there could be agreements that there would be an annual "service" of the child, with it being a requirement to have some ongoing medical treatment or gene therapy, that might be written into the terms of service. If any of that, at what point would the child 'own itself'? Does it ever? Will there be lifetime contracts?
jimbob45 3y ago
That was kind of my takeaway from this as well. They're no longer fetuses and these aren't wombs in any sense of the word. If these are wombs then everything else we currently use to promote the health of preterm births in the NICU would be "wombs" as well.
raffraffraff 3y ago
There is an interesting phenomenon in some (many?) philosophical schools where words are given too much power. It is as if they "are" the things that they describe. And yet, with all that magical power granted to words by academic philosophers, words are really just slippery labels that can be distorted on a mass scale quite quickly these days. And yet we still treat words like magic spells. We live in a world where saying that the meaning of a word has changed, somehow means that you have "changed reality", and everybody seems to march along saying the mantras. They forget that words are used in legal documents and in "common knowledge" inside our heads. I really wish that human language was strongly typed. You shouldn't be allowed to hijack a word for your own political ends. But to even suggest that the original concept or article deserves it's own distinct word puts you at risk of being accused of some thought crime. Why? Because that makes the incoming bait-and-switch easier to spot. The warping of the word is a magic spell, designed to manipulate reality. Edit: misspellings and ramblings
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > I really wish that human language was strongly typed. I don’t think “strongly typed” even makes sense in reference to human language, except in the sense of grammar where words can only be used in the place where a the particular part of speech they are is called for, in which case formal writing is pretty close (though it responds to linguistic drift that results from informal language not being “strongly typed”.) What I think you mean is you wish that definitions of words were precise and fixed and that adherence to strict and literal use according to those precise, fixed definitions was universal and compulsory. Which, well, would be convenient for some things but really bad for others, and in any case is irrelevant because there is no way for it to happen. > But to even suggest that the original concept or article deserves it’s own distinct word puts you at risk of being accused of some thought crime. Does it? People make suggestions like that all the time, and while they are often disputed, its rarely about anything like “thought crime”.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > I really wish that human language was strongly typed. You shouldn't be allowed to hijack a word According to my one true definition of "strongly typed" it already is--how dare you try to hijack those words. /s
mock-possum 3y ago
Yeah I wouldn’t have expected a fetus to only be called a fetus while it’s inside a human being. ‘Fetus’ is a stage of development, not a context or a location.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
No. I imagine the lawyer is erring on the side of amplifying the rights of the child (now somewhere between a foetus and a newborn) rather than diminish them.
RecycledEle 3y ago
Look up "Chloe Romanis, a biolawyer at Durham Law School, UK" and see what her bias is: Available for media contact about: Ethics: Abortion Law & Crime: Abortion English Law: Abortion Gender and law: Abortion Ethics: Reproductive Technologies Law & Crime: Reproductive Technologies https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/ https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/

nickpp 3y ago

What’s the hold up on designer babies though? I grew up thinking this is the future, choosing and customizing the genetic makeup of your children but I had to create my own kids the old fashioned way, fearing at every checkup for whatever defects and abnormalities we may find. Together with artificial wombs, this would liberate us from one of the heavies tyrannies nature (and evolution) have placed on us. But it could be worse, I guess. We could be like praying mantises…

ChatGTP 3y ago
What will happen is everyone will end up the same.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
  Nope. Fads come and go.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    That’s another way of saying “around any given time, nearly everyone (whose parents can afford the latest fad) will come out the same”. Which is fine, its not like genetic monocultures have ever produced problems.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
      Which is fine, because that genetic monoculture will go, deservedly so. Meanwhile the disadvantaged masses of wild slaves in their slums will profit from the exploratory teams of transnational bio-corps, looking for interesting new traits and specimens. Some will be elevated as winners of the 'lottery'. Like some of the poor formerly free roaming mustangs in the west, now mostly coralled in. Can't have them disturb our cattle, can't we? /imagine braying laughter here...
tomohelix 3y ago
AFAIK, there are two main issues. The first is ethics which is pretty much obvious. Experiments on human are not easy to get approved and near impossible for things like permanent changes to babies and fetuses. There are ethics boards on every company and university that regulate these stuff and they would almost immediately deny all request or proposal that approach this kind of work. You may get something going in less regulated countries like China but even then the international research community would not be kind to you and your career. The second is theoretically, it still is not possible to "design" a baby. In biology, things are very different from pure engineering. The ways stuff gets discovered is like this: if you have a big clockwork machine, you increase signal to a gear, you notice the machine do X, you say that gear is associated with X function. Then you go to another gear, do it again, and try to map out everything in the machine and their function. Cool. Now the problem is you don't know interactions between gears. So you try to change 2 gears that both associated with X. Turn out when you do that, the result is not just X but XYD get changed. Then when you try 3 gears at the same time, turns out it changes XMA function. Worse, in another supposedly identical machine, changing gear X actually causes Y change because of a previously unknown gear that is a switch for gear X to affect either X or Y and that switch depends on some obscure environment parameters... In short, biology is too complex and the way we are probing it is still too primitive and it takes a long time to even figure out what go where. We can try poking around to optimize one thing but it always causes unintended effects, mostly lethal. So the ethics boards are even less likely to approve a project like this. Just as an example: CRISPR system. We know about nucleases and these enzymes and stuff for decades. But to make it something reliable enough to be used took so long this thing only became big recently. Biology is very slow and very tedious. It won't be like writing a software and wait 10min for it to compile. Experiments can take years to run and come out with nothing because a stupid mistake was made somewhere along the way.

eps 3y ago

The trend of adding "Here's what you need to know" to the news titles is extremely off-putting. "Here, lemmings, your daily nutritious portion of news. Munch it down."

biggc 3y ago
As far as click-bait/enticement "here's what you need to know" is one of the less annoying forms.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  It's moving up in the rankings based on frequency. Its nearly up there with "you'll never believe what happened" and "person x shocked the Internet"
mock-possum 3y ago
You’ll never believe how effective this one weird trick is!
000ooo000 3y ago
It's especially annoying because I did not need to know a single thing in that article.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  You misunderstand: you were needed to read the article for their metrics, not for your own edification.

iamnotsure 3y ago

Nature.

pvaldes 3y ago

Only logical way to do space travel efficiently; to send people out of the earth fast enough, and to populate other planets with enough people to guarantee covering the loses by accidents (that will happen) and protection from endogamy problems. Another interesting question (filosophically, biologically and morally) is if artificial wombs could break the boundaries of human pregnancy. Currently is subject to the capability of the body of the mother to sustain a successful parturition without bursting (sorry for the ugly mental image but is like that). The babies can't grow indefinitely inside the mother. Artificial wombs don't have this constrain. Could this machines extend it for a whole space travel of 1 year, or 1,5 years, or even more, so this children are much more apt to fend for themselves when born? nobody knows.

tibbydudeza 3y ago
I remember a short story like this - AI sentient probe landing on a remote planet after centuries of travel and then gestating eggs and taking on the role of "mother". It ends on a good note compared to most stories of this nature where the AI self-terminates because the kids now adults are ready to the job further.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I haven't watched it, but that's supposedly the premise of the scifi TV show "Raised By Wolves". Frozen embryos born and raised by robots.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  not to mention some discussions in Hacker news that predate both cases (probably, didn't read that history)

tibbydudeza 3y ago

Dear Lord I hope not. Imagine Musk getting a hold of this - he would be churning out duplicates of himself by the dozens. He has a rather insane fixation on human population growth akin to the shady eugenics movement of the 60's.

ausbah 3y ago

it would be great if ppl didn’t have to get pregnant anymore. seems like you might need a high threshold to use these than normal pregnancy tho

justo-rivera 3y ago
that would be FANTASTIC. Care to explain why doing what we have done to make you exist in this planet earth should STOP at the exact same generation than you were born? Sounds narcissitic, you were born to stop people being born. Think about it
- ausbah 3y ago
  how did you get that from my comment. I think being born is a net positive & if it could be done without the complications, pain, etc. of being pregnant
  - justo-rivera 3y ago
    eh, guess i was looking for trouble and "people shouldnt get pregnant anymore" triggered it
  - justo-rivera 3y ago
    and to be honest its getting hard to see the difference between "transhumanist" and "antihumanist", it gets more subtle every time probably because getting hyper-humans means getting rid of some humanity

throwp 3y ago

Is it possible to have kids without a female partner involved in anyway? I like the idea of having kids but not interested in marriage

bagels 3y ago
Adoption, maybe?

nonrandomstring 3y ago

> But researchers discount these concerns. This idea "is so far in the distant future that it's not worth discussing its implications in relation to the current technology", Werner says. That sentence really deflated me It makes me ashamed to call myself a scientist in world where others claiming the same status show such a stunted, parochial outlook. Haven't we just lived through this with AI, and now face a rude reckoning? Surely the "distant future" in this case is about 10 years, making such dismissive, offhand remarks pure political deflection. It's always "worth discussing" the implications of your work. Having the courage to use sceptical imagination, and even express doubts about how your work might be misused, is surely an essential characteristic of a worthy researcher.

calgoo 3y ago
I see that sentence as a preempt defense against the ultra conservatives that would otherwise attack it. If we where to discuss those alternatives, then it becomes an enormous political battle. By stating it as a "save the children" they are making it harder for anyone to object, which to me as a parent of twins who where born premature (not this early, but where still in incubators for 1 week) this could be fantastic news for some if it works.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I think it's fantastic news too. I'm at an age where know 20 or 30 women who've been through horrendous, mentally and physically injurious experiences chasing fertility. Obviously natural birth is the gold-standard, but this research looks like good medicine that, in limited contexts, will save lives (of babies and mothers). Yet I am dismayed to read so many negative, borderline paranoid comments. And to hear the glib remarks of researchers and their PR spokespeople caught in the corporate power dance. We have such a deep problem with ethics in technology. I think it is bound to the epoch, and arises mainly in the era of massive power inequality, monopoly, poor education and massively distorted communications. As a result, there's general scientific hubris in the air, and the descent of the West into corporate crypto-fascism is making wonderful scientific advances only look threatening (robots, AI, genetics...). These are Frankensteinian times. Now the first thing we think about when a brilliant new technology emerges is "how will the rich, powerful and malevolent misuse this to further enslave people?" That can't be healthy, but unfortunately it's become a necessary scepticism. Scientists need to (wo)man up and learn to talk about this stuff.

readthenotes1 3y ago

I've just been re-reading Cyteen. This, plus the recent news of the "model" fetus and the old news of CRISPR, means we're in for some interesting times. Khan!Khaaaan!! https://youtu.be/wRnSnfiUI54?feature=shared https://youtu.be/wRnSnfiUI54?feature=shared https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/chinas-testing-biologically-enhanced-super-soldiers-on-their-own-troops-says-dni-ratcliffe/ https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/chinas-testing-biol...

LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
Had to think of the AZIs too. And HOLY FORD! What a BRAVE NEW WORLD!