More 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.
Yes. 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.
Totally agree. The current state of gestation is untenable. The child-bearer is sick for nine months and pretty much incapacitated for a good portion of that towards the end. Their lifestyle choices can cause harm to the fetus. At the end of it all, they face a significant risk of death.
In-vitro gestation is probably not that far off technologically - we’re already very close with sheep (there was a very successful artificial womb experiment there) and the age of viability keeps getting lower. I hope that regulators are willing to take the leap to human trials so we can finally do away with pregnancy for those who want to avoid it but still want children.
>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.
Oocytes 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.
My 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.
This 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.
> 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.
Millions 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.
The 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.
In certain cultures rearing by grandparents already happens. I’d be interested in any longitudinal studies, though it’s hard to disentangle confounders.
That said, I don’t know that economic factors are important as social ones. If they were you’d expect to see something different in couples where the husband earns much more than the wife, but in my observation those women wait about as long as their friends in marriages where the salaries are more similar. The social context seems far more determinative.
More 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.
Seems 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?
it’s kind of disturbing, what about pair bonding? imprinting stuff like that at a young age, also will people grow cold towards these people or treat them as subhuman one day? i know this sounds negative but i worry that this will lead to some type of genetic war eventually.
it sounds sci-fi’ish/black mirror but honestly this seems like it will eventually happen, given how terrible some people treat others purely based on their eye color, height, skin tone etc. or what’s more, will this create people so perfect or beautiful that natural humans decide to worship them?
it already happens with celebrities. what if one of these people end up being extremely handsome and but extremely deceptive, like hilter meets [insert attractive person here], or add to that highly intelligent as well. people already have followed cult leaders for their charisma and honesty it doesn’t seem like society has changed enough to not do any of these things. for example this year/last year and the year prior was a already a good sample size of the madness that people are okay with being. anyways something for all of us to think about.
Eugenics 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.
> 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.
If 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.
How much does ethics even matter in this specific case? If they develop this technology and use it in a "maximally ethical" way, whatever that is, what is stopping the next person to get their hands on it from using it unethically? It seems to me that the ethics question was "Should we have this technology at all?" and not "What do we do with it?" and it's already been answered.
“We do not take the development of this technology lightly. Our hope is that it will one day be used to bring healthy kids into the world, so we must hold ourselves to very high safety and ethical standards. Our plan will be to work closely with scientific, regulatory and ethical experts to ensure this technology develops safely and responsibly.”
women 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)
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.
It'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.
For 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.
I can think of other reasons like a couple struggling with female infertility. Those who have had kids can tell you that having children is the opposite of a selfish act.
Trade and commerce is something the government regulates and stopping the sale of human flesh is a worthwhile goal.
Regulating business is wholly different from regulating bodily relations between two individuals. In the same way I'd encourage regulations for brothels and prostitutes, which constitute a business, while finding similar regulations between spouses abhorrent.
It'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.
This 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.
Some more details are in this MIT Technology Review article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/28/1038172/concepti...
More 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.
Yes. 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.
Totally agree. The current state of gestation is untenable. The child-bearer is sick for nine months and pretty much incapacitated for a good portion of that towards the end. Their lifestyle choices can cause harm to the fetus. At the end of it all, they face a significant risk of death.
In-vitro gestation is probably not that far off technologically - we’re already very close with sheep (there was a very successful artificial womb experiment there) and the age of viability keeps getting lower. I hope that regulators are willing to take the leap to human trials so we can finally do away with pregnancy for those who want to avoid it but still want children.
2 replies →
300 adults to take care of 3,000,000 million kids and maintain the colony. Talk about overworked parents.
3 replies →
All that work, when you could just print the optimal (given current knowledge) genome? [1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whole-genome-synt...
I’d guess synthesizing a fertilized egg from scratch is further away than in vitro gametogenesis. Could be wrong of course.
From 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.
Oocytes 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.
My 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.
This 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.
> 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.
2 replies →
> I suppose you can get mad at God
Do you think God has sovereign immunity?
1 reply →
Millions 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.
That's explicitly mentioned at least two times in the article as a primary motive of the founder.
It's in the mission statement at the top of the link:
> and potentially allow male-male couples to have biological children.
Of course they'd still need a surrogate to gestate the baby. Which ain't cheap.
3 replies →
The 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.
In certain cultures rearing by grandparents already happens. I’d be interested in any longitudinal studies, though it’s hard to disentangle confounders.
That said, I don’t know that economic factors are important as social ones. If they were you’d expect to see something different in couples where the husband earns much more than the wife, but in my observation those women wait about as long as their friends in marriages where the salaries are more similar. The social context seems far more determinative.
To be fair, I would rather have me at 40 instead of 20 raising my own kids, instead of relying on my parents.
Why’s that? NB You’d also have your spouse’s parents.
You think pre-historic humans skipped generations?
More 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.
2 replies →
Seems 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?
it’s kind of disturbing, what about pair bonding? imprinting stuff like that at a young age, also will people grow cold towards these people or treat them as subhuman one day? i know this sounds negative but i worry that this will lead to some type of genetic war eventually.
it sounds sci-fi’ish/black mirror but honestly this seems like it will eventually happen, given how terrible some people treat others purely based on their eye color, height, skin tone etc. or what’s more, will this create people so perfect or beautiful that natural humans decide to worship them?
it already happens with celebrities. what if one of these people end up being extremely handsome and but extremely deceptive, like hilter meets [insert attractive person here], or add to that highly intelligent as well. people already have followed cult leaders for their charisma and honesty it doesn’t seem like society has changed enough to not do any of these things. for example this year/last year and the year prior was a already a good sample size of the madness that people are okay with being. anyways something for all of us to think about.
> 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.
Eugenics 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.
science fiction reference for cells eugenics: gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
19 replies →
> 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.
2 replies →
> 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.
If 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.
No Ethics personnel on the team?
How much does ethics even matter in this specific case? If they develop this technology and use it in a "maximally ethical" way, whatever that is, what is stopping the next person to get their hands on it from using it unethically? It seems to me that the ethics question was "Should we have this technology at all?" and not "What do we do with it?" and it's already been answered.
I agree with you completely - I was just trying to make the point that they claim to care about ethics and yet have no ethicists from what it appears.
Let me help you out with my automated bioethics bot.
val bioethics = function(proposal) { return "That's unethical"; }
My current level of cynicisms says that if you make someone a gatekeeper, they will use that power.
At minimum, to justify their salary.
“We do not take the development of this technology lightly. Our hope is that it will one day be used to bring healthy kids into the world, so we must hold ourselves to very high safety and ethical standards. Our plan will be to work closely with scientific, regulatory and ethical experts to ensure this technology develops safely and responsibly.”
From their homepage
> Our Mission
> We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
What is so unethical about that?
Sure, that end is noble, but the ends don't always justify the means.
11 replies →
Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I can see many ways this spirals into something different.
1 reply →
if they ever succeed what would happen with the failure tests over the process ?
women 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)
Oh 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.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. We're trying for the opposite of that here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It'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.
For 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.
neurobiology is more involved than that, you'd be surprised :)
I can think of other reasons like a couple struggling with female infertility. Those who have had kids can tell you that having children is the opposite of a selfish act.
wouldn't it mean, we need no men? After all, the fetus has to grow somewhere.
The '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?
Trade and commerce is something the government regulates and stopping the sale of human flesh is a worthwhile goal.
Regulating business is wholly different from regulating bodily relations between two individuals. In the same way I'd encourage regulations for brothels and prostitutes, which constitute a business, while finding similar regulations between spouses abhorrent.
There are already too many people on this planet.
> "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.
It'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.
This 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.
> There are few children up for adoption who don’t require special support.
Do you have any source to back this up?
ethics aside, this is very, very cool, and very, very important research!