Scientists Create Healthy Mice With Same-Sex Parents (bbc.com)

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences were able to make baby mice with two moms and no dad. "The aim of the Chinese researchers was to work out which rules of reproduction they needed to break to make baby mice from same-sex parents," reports the BBC. "That in turn helps understand why the rules are so important." From the report: It was easier with double mums. The researchers took an egg from one mouse and a special type of cell -- a haploid embryonic stem cell -- from another. Both contained only half the required genetic instructions or DNA, but just bringing them together wasn't enough. The researchers had to use a technology called gene editing to delete three sets of genetic instructions to make them compatible (more on that later). The double-dad approach was slightly more complicated. It took a sperm, a male haploid embryonic stem cell, an egg that had all of its own genetic information removed and the deletion of seven genes to make it all work.

The reason we need to have sex is because our DNA -- our genetic code -- behaves differently depending on whether it comes from mum or dad, the study in Cell Stem Cell suggests. And without a female copy and a male copy our whole development gets thrown out of whack. It's called genomic imprinting with parts of the DNA in sperm and parts of the DNA in eggs getting different "stamps" that alter how they work. The bits of DNA carrying these stamps were the ones the researchers had to delete in order to make the baby mice viable.

Comments

Re:Done Before?

[FalcDot]

Almost right.

Our chromosomes exist in pairs, and we have 23 pairs of them.

On one particular pair, women have two X chromosomes and men have an XY combination. Thus, the most obvious genetic difference between our sexes exists only on one chromosome, which is why in common parliance we refer to "the X chromosome" or "the Y chromosome". But again, in both cases these are part of a pair.

When reproducing, both parents give one (pretty much randomly selected) of each pair of their own chromosomes to the child.

Meaning that women always give an X sex chromosome to their child, and men give 50% X and 50% Y.

Thus, two women will indeed always give two X chromosomes, leading to a girl. Two men will have 25% female children, 50% male children and 25% children with YY chromosomes. A quick google shows that pretty much no-one knows what that would be like. It is not impossible that it would not be viable.

Sally Miller Gearhart would be pleased

[Kartu]

When she suggested reducing population of men to 10%, she meant non-brutal methods.

In her early career, Gearhart took part in a series of seminars at San Francisco State University, where feminist scholars were critically discussed issues of rape, slavery, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Gearhart outlines and justifies a three-step proposal for female-led social change:

I) Every culture must begin to affirm a female future.
II) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture.
III) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.
Gearhart does not base this radical proposal on the idea that men are innately violent or oppressive, but rather on the "real danger is in the phenomenon of male-bonding, that commitment of groups of men to each other whether in an army, a gang, a service club, a lodge, a monastic order, a corporation, or a competitive sport." Gearhart identifies the self-perpetuating, male-exclusive reinforcement of power within these groups as corrosive to female-led social change. Thus, if "men were reduced in number, the threat would not be so great and the placement of species responsibility with the female would be assured." Gearhart, a dedicated pacifist, recognized that this kind of change could not be achieved through mass violence. On the critical question of how women could achieve this, Gearhart argues that it is by women's own capacity for reproduction that the ratio of men to women can be changed though the technologies of cloning or ovular merging, both of which would only produce female births. She argues that as women take advantage of these reproductive technologies, the sex ratio would change over generations.[13]

Sally Miller Gearhart, one of the founders of gender studies`

Re:Done Before?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not a "patch".

Sexual reproduction exists because females have redundant chromosomes that prevent genetic mutations. Males have no such redundancy, and are subject to much higher rates of mutation. Evolution and adaption are driven by females selecting males with beneficial mutations and avoiding males with deleterious mutations.

For every single metric we have regarding genetic variables, the bell curves between the sexes are the same. For females, they are tall with narrow tails. For males, they are short with wide tails.

For humans, the primary sex selection criteria is intelligence. This is why women have a higher average intelligence, but males have a higher number of geniuses and retards.

The is no gender fluidity, the errors you describe are fundamental to sexual reproduction and life as we know it for all complex organisms.

Re: 19 year old radical feminist in 1950 might lik

[AmiMoJo]

Of course that would have been around 1950, some 70 years ago. Reading her later writing and how she describes her early ideas, I have a feeling she probably wouldn't be all that pleased.

It seems like you must be aware of this because you linked to her Wikipedia page that explains it. So I'm wondering what the purpose of presenting this information in such a misleading way is.

It's been modded as "informative" which suggests that at least some people accepted it without checking. That's a great demonstration of how links are used to add credibility to a post, even though the link largely contradicts it. The existence of the link makes people think that the claim is properly sourced, so they don't bother to check.