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Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

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Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being one of the few natural born kids starting school in 2046. Half your class is named Chris because they are literally the clones of Chris Pratt/Pine/Hemsworth/Evans. It may seem impressive, but they really are only the generic bargain bin option for genetic engineering by then. The other half, the richer kids, are hyperintelligent chimeras of every most famous, intelligent, world class athlete, celebrity…

I keep talking to people about that scenario, of basically adopting the reproductive model of racing horses for humans, but it seems that nobody realizes how far we’ve already gone in that direction.

There was an attempt to blatantly push eugenics via a sperm bank[0], and it was active until 1999. Nowadays they are just more discreet about it.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_for_Germinal_Choi...

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#52
post #14

> "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. Exactly when and how is consent given? Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction. If the requirement for consent implies a requirement for a written contract, then consent fo…

> Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction.

Then you may wish to have family law changed in (e.g.) the province of Ontario:

> 7 (1) The person whose sperm resulted in the conception of a child conceived through sexual intercourse is, and shall be recognized in law to be, a parent of the child. 2016, c. 23, s. 1 (1).

* https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c12#BK9

Pregnancy is an easily foreseen consequence of having sex, and so being held (civilly) liable for actions is perfectly reasonable. Or, as old meme/trope goes: f*ck around and find out.

* https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/personal-injury/personal-...

* https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/foreseeability

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#53
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of eggs women have is far from "quite low". How many do you think they need? A woman menstruates once a month until menopause, from say age 14 till 55. So you would estimate a need for 492 total eggs. A woman is born with 1 million eggs, and has about 300,000 left by puberty. Which is to say: developing the eggs is not a limiting factor in getting them from women.

Getting eggs from women is hard because the current technology is very invasive and expensive, and there are challenges storing and maintaining the eggs. A technology that allows the creation of as many eggs as you want from skin samples totally changes all that, and removes the limitations for many reproductive technologies.

Absolutely. No contention there.

I'm just contesting that the total number of eggs in a woman is meaningfully finite though: the X at birth thing is thrown around a lot without thinking about the actual numbers involved.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#54
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> And court can easily decide that you are no longer "anonymous donor", because you "accepted paternal role", by giving money, by paying for dinner or even by answering messages! There are precedents for that! The only precedent I’ve found for this is a few homophobic judges that wanted an excuse to pull the sperm-donor father into a child’s life despite having one (single mother by choice) or two women parents that…

[flagged]

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#55
post #27
post #9

If you could crest a sperm and egg from any cell, could it be from a cell from an newly created embryo? As in rapid multi generational directed evolution, the ability to highly concentrate polygenic traits much more efficiently than a bogosort type algorithm.

For evolution you need to actually wait while the organism becomes an adult and see how it behaves. Without it you don't know in which direction your changes move the organism. If you could know it only from genes you could simply edit the genes without having to create embryos from embryos.

Honestly I'm not sure you're even likely to get a viable embryo at the end the GPs procedure.

A large -- up to 1/3 -- fraction of fertilized embryos are not viable, largely because of chromosome abnormalities. Sometimes this happens quickly, before you would really say someone was pregnant, but people don't usually talk about their pregnancies in the first trimester because miscarriages are likely for this reason.

Depending on how well you can sequence the genome and forecast viability of the intervening steps, you'd just be compounding this probability each time.

And as you say, without the intervening "natural selection", there's no real evolution, just an increased mutation rate.

There is one interesting thing you could do, which is probably unethical under many ethical systems, which is that you could use the process to generate "many-parent" babies. Take samples from N people, and in a few days or weeks you could produce an embryo which shares all of their DNA (equally, if you start with a power of two). Sure, it would be functionally (and actually, since you have the intervening embryos) grandchildren or great-grandchildren instead, but I could imagine someone wanting that.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#56

Imagine how many brad pitt babies

Imagine being one of the few natural born kids starting school in 2046. Half your class is named Chris because they are literally the clones of Chris Pratt/Pine/Hemsworth/Evans. It may seem impressive, but they really are only the generic bargain bin option for genetic engineering by then. The other half, the richer kids, are hyperintelligent chimeras of every most famous, intelligent, world class athlete, celebrity…

There would be likely a law to keep the necessary genetic diversity for species survival, to avoid exact clones or similar copies.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#57
post #47
post #14

> "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. Exactly when and how is consent given? Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction. If the requirement for consent implies a requirement for a written contract, then consent fo…

Sex is not separate from reproduction. If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father. Most western countries recognize verbal and other non-written contracts. The clearest example I can see here is the UK's law about weather the genetic father is the legal father. If the child was conceived through sexual intercourse then the genetic father is always the legal father.

[flagged]

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#59
post #28

While I appreciate there's a lot of new debates to work through, the possibility of a child with two same-sex parents would be revolutionary for gay and lesbian couples. It's striking how many commenters here thus far default to treating this as a college ethics question, concocting contorted hypotheticals.

This technology goes way beyond that. I don't see why we should dismiss the many valid ethics questions because it is something that some gay people want. That may be a slight positive to weigh against all the other questions.

[flagged]

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#60
post #28

While I appreciate there's a lot of new debates to work through, the possibility of a child with two same-sex parents would be revolutionary for gay and lesbian couples. It's striking how many commenters here thus far default to treating this as a college ethics question, concocting contorted hypotheticals.

The only real “new” issue that would come out of this is the hypothetical problem of stealing DNA from someone else to create a gamete. Granted, this technology is still very much in its infancy and, while the promise implied here is that you can create the gamete from any cell, in practicality, it may require a good quality sample of a specific kind of cell to reliably make this happen.

As someone who is active in the Donor Conceived Community, being a product of donor sperm, this process would remove a lot of trauma from the offspring of these arrangements. A big problem is that a lot of offspring did not receive the benefit from genetic mirroring which causes some issues when the child is not informed at the earliest age.

Some of these problems stemming from this trauma include developing trust issues, feeling of not belonging, and even a poor ability to recognize faces later in life. There’s also the problem with large sibling groups even to this very day due to fragmented rules and sparse regulations.

Growing up with genetic family does prevent the bulk, if not all, of complaints fielded by offspring such as myself. This is it something parents, both perspective and current, never want to hear because it’s upsetting, uncomfortable, and it’s a threat to their self. If they accept this, they accept that no matter what they do, they may never be good enough if using an anonymous gamete donor. While this is not true if you take a child-centered approach, the conversation has usually ceased by now.

Newborn babies are not a blank canvas for painting upon, nor do they exist to please and serve their parents. The DNA they are born with links them back to their biological parents and absence of one or both without that knowledge is trauma, unfortunately.

The pedants are going to catastrophize with wild hypotheticals from their armchairs, but I know this can be transformative for many who seek gamete donation and greatly beneficial to their offspring who are born with this technology.

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