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

Human embryo models grown from stem cells

wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 95 posts

Re: Human embryo models grown from stem cells

#61

Post by Metacelsus »

stanford_labrat wrote: post #39

Edit: link to my previous comment with a list of papers from the last time a similar thread was posted for those interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018392 This was a busy summer for developmental biology, full disclosure that I am an author on one of these papers and my thesis work is in embryo models/early development. The Hanna group was unfortunately scooped by some unethical behavior but their mod…

I agree, Zernicka-Goetz made a lot of hype at ISSCR but the Hanna lab's system is better.

Re: Human embryo models grown from stem cells

#62

Post by mtmail »

justrealist wrote: post #32
polski-g wrote: post #25

The hard part of children is the womb and available parents, not creating an embryo. The UK needs to finish their artificial womb work.

There are millions of couples going through IVF that fail to get viable embryos. Probably 3/4 of women over 40 fail to get any successful pregnancies, and many younger ones too.

Depends how much over 40. "At age 40: 44% will have a conception ending in a live birth within one year, 64% will have a conception ending in a live birth within four years" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility

Re: Human embryo models grown from stem cells

#63

Post by gustavus »

ipaddr wrote: post #56
polski-g wrote: post #25

The hard part of children is the womb and available parents, not creating an embryo. The UK needs to finish their artificial womb work.

Why wouldn't the state raise them? We've been moving away from the traditional family.

Please Don't create the Torment Nexus

Re: Human embryo models grown from stem cells

#65

Post by user3939382 »

kleiba wrote: post #8

I used to be a researcher in NLP until not too long ago. Over the last few years, increasing pressure has been put on on everyone trying to publish papers related to training data collected through human trials to provide ethics statements as a way to ensure that certain standards are met regarding that data. Not everyone is able to see too much sense in this process, and I've heard comments from non-US colleagues th…

[flagged]

Re: Human embryo models grown from stem cells

#67

Post by makeitdouble »

lvass wrote: post #34
shadowgovt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an ethical standpoint, there is no reason to assert a human being created from re-embryonized adult stem cells should be any more enslaveable than any child of any parents or the younger of any pair of twins. ... of course, the flip-side of the coin is that for a certain segment of the pro-life movement, using these cells as test subjects will be equivalent to intentionally fertilizing human egg cells and then u…

From some ethical standpoint, it's absolutely fine to engineer some creature for slavery, as long as you make it ugly and forbid anyone from discovering how many chromosomes it has, and life can be much better than it is now. (Reference work of fiction omitted to prevent spoilers)

The line has always been "is it like us?", for any value of "like us" that can be assessed, so yes.

Even today there will be situations where the difference between effective slavery and freedom is the country on your passport (or lack of it)

Re: Human embryo models grown from stem cells

#69

Post by lo_zamoyski »

polski-g wrote: post #25

The hard part of children is the womb and available parents, not creating an embryo. The UK needs to finish their artificial womb work.

The truly hard part is raising them to be decent human beings. There is more to procreation than fertilization and carrying to term.

While an artificial womb could be very useful as a medical device to save the life of the child, in vitro/ex vivo methods of reproduction only entrench human alienation. Support for them bespeaks an absence of a sound philosophical anthropology. And I mean not just the alienation of the children, but the alienation of men and women from their own humanity as well. And this is because it attacks the very core of what it means to be human.

But as they say, experience is an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other. Often, nothing short of catastrophe is needed to lead men to pause and reflection, and even then, there are no guarantees.

Post reply on HN