Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turning stem cells into human eggs

conception.bio

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 106 posts

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#41

Post by bradleyjg »

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#42

Post by k__ »

iammisc wrote: post #36

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 th…

wouldn't it mean, we need no men? After all, the fetus has to grow somewhere.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#43

Post by dragonwriter »

the-angry-dome wrote: post #38
iammisc wrote: post #36

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 th…

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…

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#44

Post by agumonkey »

the-angry-dome wrote: post #38
iammisc wrote: post #36

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 th…

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…

neurobiology is more involved than that, you'd be surprised :)

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#45

Post by NaNDude »

sdhfjg wrote: post #17
willmorrison wrote: post #13

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?

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

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#46

Post by dang »

iammisc wrote: post #36

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 th…

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...

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#47

Post by MayeulC »

> 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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#49

Post by Nevermark »

bradleyjg wrote: post #41

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 i…

All that work, when you could just print the optimal (given current knowledge) genome? [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whole-genome-synt...

Post reply on HN