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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.
It seems women are getting more and more fed up with us males that they're working diligantly on not needing us anymore. We can choose which sex, now we're working on assisting "couples" (of women) in having babies. Damn... At least I've procreated!
Aren't there already enough unwanted, unluved mice babies already?
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?
Gee, Brain, I guess I wasn't pondering what you were pondering. I was pondering more along the lines of me and Pippi Longstocking. I mean, what would the children look like? NARF!
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
So let me get this straight: you want to help a couple make a baby... by making a baby somewhere else, destroying it, harvesting its biological material, and using that material to make another baby, which you then give to the baby-challenged couple?
I guess the big advantages to working for the Department of Redundancy Department is, you get double funding for everything, and there's always someone else around to do your work for you. But it does seem kind of wasteful, sometimes.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Would this allow two females to produce an offspring together? Because that would be a species changing event for humanity.
Why can't more rich, self-absorbed and childless yuppies want to go to Mars? Then maybe our space program would get that much needed shot in the arm...
Damn.
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.
Screw your god, I'll do what I want.
Regards,
Steve
they're working diligantly on not needing us anymore.
They don't need us and the human species will be better off without us. We (males) are just too aggressive and violent.
Of course, the reason males are aggressive is the same as the reason that male peacocks have such enormous plumes. You don't think that male peacocks actually *want* to have those ridiculous tales do you? Oh no. The reason they have those tales is that female peacocks like it that way. The same sort of thing happens with humans. Men who are violent and aggressive are rewarded by being able to pass on their genes. The trait of aggression is selected for (by women) and so it becomes more common. The trait that is selected against becomes less common. If women didn't like males that way, they could breed it out of the gene pool in just one or two generations.
Then don't. Clothes turn people into lower mamals. Though we don't have the insight right now, I bet in 50 years, we'll figured out why God didn't want you to wear clothes. All life exists for us to look at, and in some species will havve fur, or occasionally produce a viable hairy offsprring. Given life's penchant for procreation, the fact that god has said NO to people wearing clothes should be taken as an extremely stong hint that it just shouldn't be done.
Become nudist. There are tons of guys waiting for women who actually want to show off their body.
Just because we can, doesn't mean its right. Or smart.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
How many couples really want to conceive a mouse, anyway?
If God didn't want you to have kids, this procedure wouldn't work. I always get a kick out of people who claim that God is all-powerful, and in the next breath claim that scientists are doing something that's against His will. They never seem to understand the inherent contradiction in those two statements...
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
The mice are actually pan-dimensional beings cleverly performing experiments on humans, getting pregnent on artificially produced sperm to find out how humans will react, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Actually it is a misconception that adoption is cheaper and easier. Average adoption costs are $12k US. Significantly more than the doctors bill for our first child. Also adoption, at least in the state of CA, is very dificult and requires 50+ hours of classes. Much more time invested then a couple hours at a bar and some drinks. ;)
They are using embryonic stem cells because of the benefits that embryonic stem cells offer over other stem cells when doing research. It is clear that once they can get the procedure working with embryonic stem cells in mice, the next step will be to get it working with non-embryonic stem cells.
The main abnormality in human children conceived through this method seems to be an unhealthy obsession with cheese and a tendency to scamper.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
Everbody knows that easily 'humanized' animals (i.e. cute and furry, big eyes, or perceived intelligence) get complete protection. Whereas ugly animals can just suck it. That's why everybody freaked out when they found out dolphins were being killed in tuna nets. But nobody cared that 1000's more TUNA were being killed in tuna nets. I mean, have you ever seen a tuna? They are ug-leee.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Are all the computer companies having trouble keeping up with the demand for new mice? Seems like a damned inefficient way to manufacture 'em if you ask me.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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
I don't agree with you, but I find it ridiculous that every unpopular opinion gets modded down by the Slashdot thought police.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Not so fast, it goes the other way too. Separate research is taking place in the meantime that involves turning donor cells into egg cells-- which would be the counterpart in fertility procedures to the artificial sperm procedure this article is about, and would also hypothetically make possible the conception of a baby with only males donating the biological material.
When a news article about such research cropped up last year, I saw people on the internet worrying about a science-fiction type scenario where the development could lead to a world devoid of women.
People get really paranoid about science...
We freely chose to sex, and God (we're taking for granted) thwarted the baby-making there. Do God's baby-prevention force fields only work within the confines of a uterus? Are the Lord's powers limited to just the vagina?
Well, there are quite a few people who are incapably or semi-incapable for medical rather than genetic reasons. They're born and develop perfectly able to reproduce, but do to accident. For example: getting hit in the nads too hard, or getting an inter-uterine infection, my mother was rendered incapable due to complications of a car accident (obviously after I was born).
It's also a survival method. What if some new nasty disease or bacteria, etc, rendered a large portion of the human race largely incapable of reproducing naturally. It's always a good idea to have a backup plan... it's just a matter of not abusing the ability.
By that same philosophy, if you get cancer, you shouldn't seek treatment because, apparantly, God wants you to die or you wouldn't have gotten cancer (or some other life-threatening disease) in the first place. After all, the world is already overpopulated, so instead of spending thousands of dollars researching and treating diseases, we should just allow the sick to die, as God intended.
As can be seen by several post here this is sad news, it is degrading to males.
It is also degrading to babies.
Such technology is degrading to human beings.
It treats procreation as being nothing more then a biological process.
It makes something that should be held as a honor and a privilege ( being a parent )
into a commodity bought and sold in the laboratory.
When you reduce procreation to a commodity you reduce people to being a commodity.
Honestly this kind of technology is evil for the same reason slavery is evil.
people are not a commodity.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
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?
Power tools? Eh...Your kidding right? Ohhhh... You meant like drills and saws. Never mind.
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.