[HN Gopher] Turning stem cells into human eggs
___________________________________________________________________
Turning stem cells into human eggs
Author : apsec112
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-10-29 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (conception.bio)
(TXT) w3m dump (conception.bio)
| willmorrison wrote:
| 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?
| sdhfjg wrote:
| 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.
| danuker wrote:
| > 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.
| sdhfjg wrote:
| I could have been more clear, the distinction is semantic.
| I was referring to culling/sterilization to prevent
| reproduction in the sexually mature. Unborn persons are not
| adults, even if they will be.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop creating accounts for every few
| comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is
| in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to
| be a community, users need some identity for other users
| to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames
| and no community, and that would be a different kind of
| forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&
| type=comme...
| NaNDude wrote:
| science fiction reference for cells eugenics: gattaca
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
| delecti wrote:
| I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically pessimistic.
| I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you
| grant such a thing even exists) is that much different from
| an average person.
|
| It seems more likely that we would just eliminate some
| genetic diseases and cancers, and vain/rich parents would
| select for taller children. Most other differences seem to
| be too weakly correlated with genes we've identified to
| result in such a stark change to society. It's less like
| taking a bunch of dials tuned to 5 and turning then all up
| to 11, and more like increasing some dials from 5 to 6, and
| arbitrarily spinning some others because they weren't
| labeled to begin with.
| anonporridge wrote:
| > I'm unconvinced that the "best possible person" (if you
| grant such a thing even exists) is that much different
| from an average person.
|
| This seems like an absurd thing to believe for anyone who
| has a solid grasp of how evolution by natural selection
| works.
|
| Or rather, it's absurd to believe that even a small
| improvement from the average isn't a HUGE advantage for a
| person's success in life and genetic legacy.
| delecti wrote:
| We aren't comparing the global average to the global
| "best person". We're comparing the typical outcome of a
| pair of parents with the best possible child those
| parents could have. Any effects on the outcomes of that
| child's life based on their genetics will be completely
| outstripped by how they're raised.
|
| We also aren't discussing selective breeding, the same
| distribution of people would be pairing and having
| children.
|
| After several hundred years I could plausibly see a
| stratification happening among those with the earliest
| and most advanced access to a technology like this. But
| given all of the above limitations, I think it would
| still be fairly limited.
| anonporridge wrote:
| > We're comparing the typical outcome of a pair of
| parents with the best possible child those parents could
| have.
|
| I'm still not sure I agree with this. There's huge
| variability between the reproductive fitness of siblings,
| even excluding genetic illnesses and deformities. Might
| be intelligence, body type, attractiveness, etc.
|
| The real problem I see is that qualifying the "best"
| traits might be impossible, because what's best is highly
| subjective to the environment and the environment that we
| all live in is constantly shifting and seems to be doing
| so at an accelerating rate.
|
| The film Gattaca actually gives an interesting take on
| how this drive for "best" might play out. Those born into
| the privilege of having the "best traits" a) don't feel
| as strong of a need to struggle and overcome adversity,
| b) dismiss people who are "lesser" than they are, and end
| up surprised and unable to compete when they fall behind,
| and c) people who are "lesser" are filled with motivation
| and drive to prove themselves. I could even see some
| parents intentionally giving their child a minor
| disability to give them an edge over their "perfect"
| peers who all flit their lives away thinking everything
| will be handed to them on silver platter. Similar to how
| some parents are starting to realize how damaging massive
| trust funds and inheritances can be to people that
| receive them.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| We bypass natural selection all the time. Some people are
| more vulnerable to certain pathogens. We give them
| medicine or vaccines to mitigate mortality. Natural
| selection would have us let nature take its course. Some
| people have religious beliefs that in fact route people
| towards nature or God determining mortality rather than
| medicine.
| anonporridge wrote:
| True, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's
| right and good to alleviate suffering where we can.
|
| But we still stand to suffer as a civilization if the
| average quality of individuals doesn't improve, or even
| declines. Especially as the challenges we are capable of
| facing become more complex and challenging. Idiocracy
| comes to mind.
|
| Then again, maybe our future is one where we develop
| sentient AIs that can independently keep civilization
| running, while humans can be left to degrade into a kind
| of pet that doesn't do any work and exists only for the
| benefit and good will of the AI.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| > I always felt like Gattaca was unrealistically
| pessimistic. I'm unconvinced that the "best possible
| person" (if you grant such a thing even exists) is that
| much different from an average person.
|
| To simplify the scenario to a single dimension, imagine
| how much different the NBA would look like if there were
| 10,000 Lebron James's and Shaq's being born every year.
| I'd expect it will take a few generations for sufficient
| predictive confidence to develop though.
| delecti wrote:
| That does get at my point though. While there obviously
| isn't a single "Shaq gene" or "Lebron gene", I also don't
| think we could reliably identify even a very large
| _suite_ of genes that could be tweaked to result in
| increased "Shaq-ness" or "Lebron-ness". And beyond that,
| we certainly aren't anywhere close to identifying a
| "likes basketball" gene.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| While I agree with the difficulty to impossibility of
| finding those specific genes, a whole genotype 'nearest
| neighbor' or other classification criteria is very
| interesting:
|
| Considering that both the 'Shaq' phenotype and genotype
| are known, it wouldn't be too difficult[0] to rank 10,000
| embryos per couple in terms of closeness to the 'Shaq'
| genotype. Then cross reference and weight the 'Shaq-
| likeness' ranking with the 'Jordan-likeness' ranking and
| the 'Gretsky-likeness' ranking. To me anyway, that seems
| like a recipe[1] for, statistically, dramatically
| improving one's offspring's odds at being a professional
| basketball player.
|
| [0]Mathematically, anyway
|
| [1]As a counter point, I'd expect to see this sort of
| thing take off in horse racing if it was productive. Big
| money and looser ethics.
| rackjack wrote:
| There is a genetic mutation that allows a person to
| function normally on just 4 hours of sleep. A person who
| needs 8 hours of sleep in this world would probably
| always be behind the rest.
| DemocracyFTW wrote:
| > "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.
| tempestn wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > There are few children up for adoption who don't require
| special support.
|
| Do you have any source to back this up?
| iammisc wrote:
| 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.
| the-angry-dome wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| neurobiology is more involved than that, you'd be surprised
| :)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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?
| pcarolan wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| wouldn't it mean, we need no men? After all, the fetus has to
| grow somewhere.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. We're trying for
| the opposite of that here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: we've had to ask you multiple times not to do this.
| That's not cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28952157
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27851470
|
| Edit 2: actually, you've been posting a huge number of comments
| to HN and it's clear that you're using the site primarily for
| ideological battle. In fact it looks like you've been using it
| exclusively for ideological battle. That's way over the line
| past which we ban accounts [1], regardless of which ideology
| they're battling for or against. Therefore I've banned this
| account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to
| email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
| pakius wrote:
| if they ever succeed what would happen with the failure tests
| over the process ?
| idorosen wrote:
| 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.
| pishpash wrote:
| That's explicitly mentioned at least two times in the article
| as a primary motive of the founder.
| ddoolin wrote:
| It's in the mission statement at the top of the link:
|
| > and potentially allow male-male couples to have biological
| children.
| klipt wrote:
| Of course they'd still need a surrogate to gestate the baby.
| Which ain't cheap.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| https://jpia.princeton.edu/news/lessons-ukraine-shifting-
| int...
|
| And it's getting more expensive, because the number of
| women who want to be surrogates and who are also not
| suffering from abject poverty is low.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Until we perfect artificial wombs.
|
| I wonder if it would make sense to use a surrogate to
| gestate the very early stages, and then transfer the fetus
| to an artificial womb for the later stages. There would
| probably be many more women willing to do this since it's
| the later stages of pregnancy and birth that creates the
| most wear and tear on the body, not to mention emotional
| trauma with immediately losing the baby you carried.
|
| Hell, even women having their own babies might choose this
| route if it becomes feasible, like many preemptively choose
| c-sections now.
| [deleted]
| bth wrote:
| There are already too many people on this planet.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _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.
| [deleted]
| Nevermark wrote:
| All that work, when you could just print the optimal (given
| current knowledge) genome? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whole-genome-
| synt...
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I'd guess synthesizing a fertilized egg from scratch is
| further away than in vitro gametogenesis. Could be wrong of
| course.
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| 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.
| ravitation wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| You think pre-historic humans skipped generations?
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| I still don't understand the distinction you are making. At
| first I thought that you meant that literally a generation
| would not procreate. But now I think you are trying to say
| that young adults would not be doing child rearing. Are you
| suggesting that mothers would return to physical labor
| right after birth to defer child rearing to elders, or
| after breast-feeding? That mothers would somehow not be
| present as much as elders?
| wyager wrote:
| Correct - child bearing obviously continues as normal,
| but child rearing is delegated to the grandparents. This
| seems like an advantageous setup in both a pre-modern and
| post-modern context, where there's significant value
| placed on women performing labor during the age of
| lowest-difficulty child-bearing.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| No Ethics personnel on the team?
| WJW wrote:
| > Our Mission
|
| > We want to help parents have kids when it otherwise wouldn't
| be possible.
|
| What is so unethical about that?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Sure, that end is noble, but the ends don't always justify
| the means.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I don't understand. Are you saying there's some negative
| impact to allowing people to have children who otherwise
| couldn't? What problems do you foresee?
| willmorrison wrote:
| I commented above a few of the issues I see. For example,
| would Lebron James (or any celebrity or person that has
| genetics that are profitable) be afraid of giving blood
| for fear of someone making Lebron 2.0 without his
| permission?
| klipt wrote:
| That's not a new problem, in the USA even a man who is
| raped can be forced to pay child support to his rapist.
|
| Obviously these child support laws are in need of reform.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Or, literally some kind of false paternity fraud - such a
| child would come with certain legal rights and
| privileges.
| mcculley wrote:
| Once humans (and other animals) can be created without
| parents being involved, there will be many ethical
| issues.
|
| At what point do they attain human rights? At conception?
| At "birth" from an artificial womb? What defines "human"
| in "human rights"? (Can they knock out a few genes and
| make a sentient creature that is capable of suffering but
| not human? We have sentient non-humans suffering in
| factory farms already.) How will we prevent
| people/corporations/governments/religions from just
| deciding to create a bunch of people? What does
| regulation look like in this inevitable future?
| throwaway482423 wrote:
| >At what point do they attain human rights? At
| conception? At "birth" from an artificial womb?
|
| This is hardly a new issue
| mcculley wrote:
| The issue is currently limited to pregnant women.
| iammisc wrote:
| Personally, I foresee breeding programs for armies to
| create perfect soldiers. I foresee breeding programs for
| a permanent slave underclass. How can you not see the
| problems?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Governments buying soldiers from birth.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Are you saying there's some negative impact to allowing
| people to have children who otherwise couldn't?
|
| In and of itself, no. I'm saying there's issues with some
| particular ways of doing so.
| WJW wrote:
| Obviously, but this is not so different from "regular" IVF
| for example. I'd have liked a little bit more explanation
| from GP about why these particular means go too far for
| them whereas current fertility treatments don't, instead of
| just throwing a blanket suggestion of unethicalness out
| there.
| hourislate wrote:
| Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I can
| see many ways this spirals into something different.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Having Ethicists making these decisions is paving another
| road with good intentions.
| skulk wrote:
| 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.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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.
| willmorrison wrote:
| "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
| kevinpet wrote:
| Let me help you out with my automated bioethics bot.
|
| val bioethics = function(proposal) { return "That's unethical";
| }
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My current level of cynicisms says that if you make someone a
| gatekeeper, they _will_ use that power.
|
| At minimum, to justify their salary.
| arpa wrote:
| ethics aside, this is very, very cool, and very, very important
| research!
| MayeulC wrote:
| > 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.
| DemocracyFTW wrote:
| 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.
| smoyer wrote:
| 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.
| anonporridge wrote:
| 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.
| apsec112 wrote:
| Some more details are in this MIT Technology Review article:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/28/1038172/concepti...
| The_rationalist wrote:
| 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)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-29 23:01 UTC)