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Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

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21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#21

> People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not…

Why would the celebrity care?

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#22
post #20

This is funny. It's "my son if it has my DNA" is the copyright equivalent of "it's my song if it has my chords." I can't resist: - "You got a copy of my DNA files. Then you had a child, and they look similar to one of ours. I don't care if you modified it by removing all my faulty genes, or if you wrote the DNA from scratch after looking at mine. I sue you for copyright deft, you ought to pay reparations and the kid…

> I don't think that parenthood has anything to do with genes.

Genetic mirroring is a powerful force and the role of nature plays a far greater part than most are willing to admit.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#23

> …explore the potentially far-reaching thicket of social, ethical, moral, legal and regulatory ramifications of the emerging technology. Oh, hi, dystopia! Nice to meet you.

We are already here. Modern sperm and egg banks are just the eugenics industrial complex with a few branding tweaks.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems fairly probable that if this became feasible and an actual thing people were doing, the laws would carve out an exception. Though I guess it might be kind of difficult to prove, since the surrogate mother could just insist she had an affair with the person.

[flagged]

This just does not happen if the donation was done with the correct contracts and paperwork. Gamete donation has been a multi billion dollar industry for many years would not exist if those donors, anonymous or otherwise, suddenly would be at risk of paying child support for anywhere from 3 to 300 children.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#25
post #12

One of the main problems preventing human cloning is the trouble getting enough eggs. Even if you don't care about the ethical issues (females only have a quite low finite number of eggs), it's still really expensive. If a small team can get their hands on a whole lot of viable human eggs, they may be less limited by what funders of big research grants want.

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.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#26

> People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely. A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not…

Or get (1) from a rich, old person with no heirs, do (2), and then once the involuntary parent dies (3) show up and use offspring from (2) to claim the inheritance.

At least here in Norway, children are guaranteed part of the inheritance regardless of the will.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#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.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#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.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#29
post #15

This will be great until we select away our natural ability to reproduce, and then the power goes out and nobody can reproduce anymore and humanity goes extinct in one generation

Well if power goes out 99% will already be dead because of current dependence on technology. And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

Re: Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This just does not happen if the donation was done with the correct contracts and paperwork. Gamete donation has been a multi billion dollar industry for many years would not exist if those donors, anonymous or otherwise, suddenly would be at risk of paying child support for anywhere from 3 to 300 children.

[flagged]
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