Slashdot Mirror
Mice Produced Using Artificial Sperm
vasanth writes to tell us scientists have successfully grown mice from artificial sperm. The sperm was created from embryonic stem cells and implanted into female mice. There were a few problems, including that some of the mice showed abnormal patterns of growth and difficulty breathing. The hope here is to assist couples who are having difficulties with conception.
Not artificial sperm, but artificially grown sperm.
People took'sperm seeds' from stem cells and grew them into mature sperm outside the gonads.
Regardless, it looks like males have one less reason for existance.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Given some time, eggs may also be made as well as sperm from stem cells, and homosexual male couples can also have biological children with the help of a woman to carry the fetus.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
You know, with some of the recent medical advances I keep idly wondering how long it's going to be before the statement "same-sex couples can't have biological children" is no longer true. After all, there's no particular reason the stem cells used to create the artificial sperm in this procedure would have to come from a male, is there?
Ummmm....
Ew.
With this technology, two women could generate a baby that has 23 chromosomes from each of them. Men would no longer be necessary to create a new human being that is genetically half of two different individuals.
And since both "halves" would be providing an X chromosome and never a Y, the resulting baby would be female... every time.
If enough women in a society opt for this form of male-unnecessary reproduction, over a few generations there will be no more males in that society.
I can see Gloria Steinem and others of similar political persuasion creating a female-only society somewhere with this technology. An estrogen utopia.
I, for one, welcome our Lesbian overlords.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
the fact that god has said NO to a couple should be taken as an extremely stong hint that it just shouldn't be done.
He didn't say "no", he said "try harder." You'd know God's "no" if you saw it, it doesn't look like what you're seeing. There's more flaming corpses.
This was the set-up for David Brin's novel Glory Season: The vast majority of the population of an isolated colony world were female, and most of those were clones of various ancestral mothers.
A few men were kept around to provide sperm for modification; there was also a small minority population of non-clone women produced the old fashioned way.
The protagonist was a young "mixed" woman trying to move up in the world.
I'm not convinced that 'helping infertile couples have children' is the ultimate rationale - is everyone ENTITLED to have children?
I mean, is it so far fetched to believe that several million years of trial and error have produced a system of conception that is fairly fault-tolerant but will self-abort if a certain minimum level of viability is not achieved? And that short-circuiting this might not be in anyone's best interest - the parents', the child's, society's?
So then we come in with near-godlike medical technology, and FORCE certain sets of gametes together which would otherwise fail? Am I the only one that has a moral problem with that?
Personally, I'm a HUGE fan of the 'conventional' method of fertilization; if it works, great. If it doesn't, maybe there's a very good reason it doesn't.
-Styopa
An interesting meta-question is what might that (female-only reproduction) do to evolution? If we don't move into directed evolution (via DNA tinkering or selective abortion), how would having only female gametes change the rate of evolution? The reason that I ask is that male gametes are created at a fantastic rate, creating trillions of possible chromosomal mutations over the lifespan of a male. Female gametes, in contrast, are created at a very deliberate pace (either early on in the development of the ovaries, or, according to some more recent research, on-demand once a month from ovarian stem cells) - far fewer opportunities to screw up the copying and create a mutation.
Look at the one chromosome that is male-only - the Y chromosome, the most stunted, bizarrely mutated one of the bunch. Lots and lots of changes occurred on that branch, and without female evolutionary "brakes", it nearly mutated itself out of existence.
Would female-only reproduction cause a slowdown in genetic drift and mutation? Combined with the technological ability to modify our environment to minimize evolutionary pressures, this could keep humanity percolating at the homo sapiens sapiens level for a long time. An interesting point to ponder...
It would be a shame to let this comment die on the end of a deep thread. Mutations can help - I personally would like the one with the extra set of teeth coming in at age 40-42 as it would save me quite a bit in upcoming dental work. Nonetheless, the inability for humans to effectively cull the negative mutations is a huge burden for genetic optimization. Most mutations have a negative effect on a well-adapted organizm, and only a small fraction are positive. In our society, the model is breaking down, with the "successful" humans generally producing fewer offspring than the "unsuccessful" (in a genetic sense, not necesarily the financial one).
We have more to lose from mutation than we have to gain.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Or will it even be possible for Heather to have One Parent. Think about it, why couldn't they take stem cells from a female, and then turn those right around and fertilize that same females eggs with them?
I suppose the real question would then be this: Since both Gametes are of the same genetic origin, would it then be a clone? If it was a clone, did we just solve all the aging problems previously associated with cloning.
If any of the above is true, then we just gained the ability to reproduce A-sexually. Frightening.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.