Turning stem cells into human eggs • Hacker News Board

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#51

Post by DemocracyFTW » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #47

> 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…

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#52

Post by bradleyjg » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #49

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...

I’d guess synthesizing a fertilized egg from scratch is further away than in vitro gametogenesis. Could be wrong of course.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#53

Post by mensetmanusman » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

klipt wrote: post #33

ddoolin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#54

Post by tempestn » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

DemocracyFTW wrote: post #50

> "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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#55

Post by mensetmanusman » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:09 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #8

josephcsible wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that end is noble, but the ends don't always justify the means.

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?

Governments buying soldiers from birth.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#56

Post by wyager » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:13 PM UTC

DemocracyFTW wrote: post #50

> "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.

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#57

Post by wyager » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#58

Post by mcculley » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #57

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…

You think pre-historic humans skipped generations?

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#59

Post by delecti » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:28 PM UTC

NaNDude wrote: post #45

sdhfjg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Turning stem cells into human eggs

#60

Post by bradleyjg » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #57

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…

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.