The first early human eggs from stem cells • Hacker News Board

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#121

Post by fallingfrog » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #20

I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc. The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human. I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation,…

I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#122

Post by ACCount37 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #5

That can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate.

If this ever becomes a pressing issue, you can do cell selection and mitochondrial transplants.

As long as mitochondrial damage is not uniform, you can sample for cells with low mtDNA damage and no known-harmful mutations, and base your eggs on those cell lines. Do "in vitro" what natural selection would have done "in vivo", reduce damage accumulation that way - potentially to zero.

And if you really want to, you can make eggs off a "known good mtDNA" cell line, then swap a new nucleus into them (cloning-like process), and get a cell line with target nuclear DNA and known good mtDNA. Mitochondrial replacement therapy. Then make eggs off that hybrid line.

Involved lab work, but, perfectly doable, and rides the same stack you already use for IVF. Mitochondrial replacement is already a known tech, but only worthwhile for cases of known harmful mtDNA anomalies currently. "Good mtDNA" eggs are sourced from donors instead of produced from cell lines currently, but this tech might change that too.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#123

Post by lsbehe » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

sudo_cowsay wrote: post #6

misiek08 wrote: post #4

How hard you have to work to break scroll on web page? Nice article, but going through it was a technical nightmare. Can we stop adding unnecessary JS to website to stop global warming by calculating AND ALTERING SCROLL?

Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.

What exactly is the good idea? It's ignoring my accessibility options. I'm getting motion sickness.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#124

Post by ACCount37 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

Ylano wrote: post #105

I'd be very curious how they even define "safe enough" for this. With most therapies, the risk is mostly to the patient. Here the risk could be passed on to a future person who never consented to the experiment.

Same as the rest of the IVF-associated assisted reproductive technology stack. Tampering with the reproductive process is not exactly new.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#125

Post by amanaplanacanal » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

qsera wrote: post #117

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.

So it depends on how you want to measure it.

How would you measure it?

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#126

Post by amanaplanacanal » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #103

100ms wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably throwing quite the grenade here, but around 29% of pregnancies end in termination globally. Absent cultural considerations, it's questionable whether life expectancy has improved in absolute terms in modern times

I don't think it's a grenade unless you are implicitly trying to mean it that life begins before birth, which ultimately is a definition game since it's actually quite hard to define life, hard enough that calling it "life" is a matter of personal worldview. I personally think it's quite reasonable to exclude pre-birth "deaths" from life expectancy, or event infant deaths sometimes, depending on what you are trying t…

For those who believe in God, she performs way more abortions than humans do.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#127

Post by Qem » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

pelagicAustral wrote: post #60

saturn8601 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting...maybe this is another great filter preventing a species from becoming multi planetary or expanding beyond a type 0 civilization?

I would've thought that generic engineering was the biggest ticket to getting a civilization out of their home planet...

Reminds me of this: https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#128

Post by oneshtein » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #106

qsera wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc." Haven't we?

Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.

If continuously sample range [0..inf), then average will grow with time.

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#129

Post by antasvara » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

oneshtein wrote: post #128

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.

If continuously sample range [0..inf), then average will grow with time.

Is there a reason you expect IQ to be unbounded? Feels like there are physical constraints, at which point you're sampling from a truncated normal distribution (or similar).

Re: The first early human eggs from stem cells

#130

Post by Mistletoe » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

antasvara wrote: post #96

Mistletoe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the spirit of what you are saying but the smart part isn’t true at all. IQ peaked around the mid 1990s and as someone that lived back then that tracks. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962... Look at Fig. 3. The world seems to be experiencing a reverse Flynn effect.

The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote: > Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specifi…

I don’t agree with their interpretation at all and neither do lots of other studies around the world that get the same result.

> the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests

What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.