3-D printed ovaries produce healthy offspring in mice
news.northwestern.edu
news.northwestern.edu
From the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15261
> Two mice with sham controls and seven mice with bioprosthetic ovaries were mated with males who had previously sired pups. Three bioprosthetic ovary recipients had litters of one or two pups each, while none of the sham controls had pups. Of the litters produced, at least one pup per litter was confirmed to have resulted from an egg ovulated from the implant.
This is especially true for chemical (liver) or cell (thymus) factory organs. Just because the research community can't yet manufacture blood vessel networks needed for large organs doesn't mean they can't use fully or mostly functional organoids to produce benefits. It is possible in principle to patch a diseased liver with many organoids, or put thymus organoids into lymph nodes, and so forth.
This sort of thing will get underway in earnest if there isn't any real movement on the blood vessel network problem within the next few years.
To me the whole in vitro meat burger thing is the wrong place to start. It's too hard to get taste, texture, and appearance right.
I wonder if it is easier to develop a bio 'machine' that produces chicken eggs. Imagine a world where eggs didn't come from chickens, but they came from a small toaster sized appliance on your counter top. What if this little box could produce eggs daily and you just needed to keep it plugged in and top up the protein/carbohydrate slurry reservoir periodically.
It doesn't matter what this tissue would look like, or taste, or smell. All that would matter is that it produced eggs.
I'm not a biologist, butcher or genetic engineer...so take my answer with a dash of seasoned salt.
EDIT - Corrected
Its structure is intricate, much like a Chinese set
of nested spheres carved from a single block of jade.
We see the first layer of structure whenever we cut
into a hard-cooked egg. Where heat gels the white
into a smooth, continuous mass, the yolk sets into a
crumbly mass of separate particles. The intact yolk
turns out to consist of spherical compartments about
a tenth of a millimeter across, each contained within
a flexible membrane, and so tightly packed that
they’re distorted into flat-sided shapes (much like
the oil droplets that egg yolk stabilizes in
mayonnaise; see p. 626). When a yolk is cooked
intact, these spheres harden into individual
particles and give the yolk its characteristic
crumbly texture. But break the yolk out before you
cook it so that the spheres can move freely, and it
becomes less granular.
What’s inside these large yolk spheres? Though we
think of the yolk as rich and fatty, in fact its
chambers are filled mostly with water. Floating in
that water are sub-spheres about one hundredth the
size of the spheres. The subspheres are too small to
see with the naked eye or to be broken up by a
kitchen beating. But they can be seen indirectly, and
disrupted chemically. Yolk is cloudy because these
subspheres are large enough to deflect light and
prevent it from passing through the yolk directly.
Add a pinch of salt to a yolk (as you do when making
mayonnaise) and you’ll see the yolk become
simultaneously clearer and thicker. Salt breaks apart
the light-deflecting sub-spheres into components that
are too small to deflect light—and so the yolk clears
up.
And what do the subspheres contain? A mixture similar
to the liquid that surrounds them in the spheres.
First, water. Dissolved in the water, proteins: hen
blood proteins outside the subspheres; inside,
phosphorus-rich proteins that bind up most of the
egg’s iron supply. And suspended in the water,
subsubspheres about 40 times smaller than the
subspheres, some of which turn out to be familiar
from the human body. The subsubspheres are aggregates
of four different kinds of molecules: a core of fat
surrounded by a protective shell of protein,
cholesterol, and phospholipid, a hybrid fat-water
mediator which in the egg is mainly lecithin. Most of
these subsub-spheres are "low-density lipoproteins,"
or LDLs—essentially the same particles that we keep
track of in our own blood to monitor our cholesterol
levels.
Stand back from all these spheres within spheres and
the picture becomes less dizzying. The yolk is a bag
of water that contains free-floating proteins and
protein-fatcholesterol-lecithin aggregates—and these
lipoprotein aggregates are what give the yolk its
remarkable capacities for emulsifying and enriching.
McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking
(Kindle Location 2093).
Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.For example:
> Its structure is intricate, much like a Chinese set of nested spheres carved from a single block of jade. We see the first layer of structure whenever we cut into a hard-cooked egg. Where heat gels the white into a smooth, continuous mass, the yolk sets into a crumbly mass of separate particles. The intact yolk turns out to consist of spherical compartments about a tenth of a millimeter across, each contained within a flexible membrane, and so tightly packed that they’re distorted into flat-sided shapes (much like the oil droplets that egg yolk stabilizes in mayonnaise; see p. 626). When a yolk is cooked intact, these spheres harden into individual particles and give the yolk its characteristic crumbly texture. But break the yolk out before you cook it so that the spheres can move freely, and it becomes less granular.
Why not just let the chicken hang out on the farm in the first place, and eat the nutrients itself?
I can't help but feel like the whole in vitro food movement is missing something fundamental. Energy has to come from somewhere. You can make a solar panel that generates food. You can make that food resemble what would come from a farm.
But what's the benefit of having this solar food machine vs an expertly run farm a la http://www.polyfacefarms.com/? The farm makes a bunch of animals and people happy. It is a beautiful place. It is an efficient use of solar resources, probably more efficient than any machine we'll be able to build in the next 50 years.
To me there are two facts that both in vitro meat people and vegans seem to have a hard time accepting:
1) There's a limited amount of solar energy hitting the planet. It's either going to your food, or it's going to a wild ecology. It's a zero sum game, and animals either die, or are ecologically aborted in order for you to live. The only question is the number, and what life is like for the animals in your foodshed, whether you eat them or not.
2) For any given chemical process, there are already animals who are basically doing that process close to optimally.
Replacing an animal with a solar machine isn't actually any kind of kindness. They like existing. They enjoy it. Exterminating a flock of happy chickens and replacing them with machines is mean.
In the long term, it seems obvious to me that some combination of plant-heavy cuisine + expertly run, animal-included farms + ecologically sensitive hunting in wild spaces is the solution that gets you the most animal happiness per square foot of solar activity.
Maybe in vitro meat can help out during this period of excessive meat consumption culture, but I just don't see how the math works out in the long run. And there's still this whole hand-wavy "costs and energy will come down" thing which hasn't technically happened yet, although people like to talk about it like its a foregone conclusion.
Falafel sandwich for lunch, eggs benedict on Sunday, tempeh Reubans on Tuesday. That kind of diet keeps humans and chickens happy and is as close to absolute solar efficiency as I can imagine. I just don't see how a solar egg fits into that picture. Is there some other animal living under the solar panel that you prefer to a chicken? Solar farm snakes or something?
If the end goal is meat, I think there are a lot of places where gains in efficiency are possible.
That's my point. I think you can get much more off of a square of solar exposure than just meat. And I think a cow is more than a meat factory. The cow's life is intrinsically valuable, and especially if we can have a relationship with the cow, it can make our lives more valuable.
Let's say you succeed in making a beef factory that's more efficient than an optimal cow pasture. Great, what are you going to do with the extra space? Make a movie theater? A theme park? A nature preserve? A cow pasture is a nature preserve!
I think a cow pasture is actually pretty nice. I don't think we need nearly as many of them as we have, and we could stand to eat a lot more plants, but I don't think replacing the cow pasture with a meat machine is really a step forward.
Plants
i.e. here in Italy you get a code to distinguish between happy chicken in a farm, free range chicken, closed range non intensive and intensive.
besides most of the 'horrible living condition' propaganda is aimed at the uneducated. of course in a large operation as huge as chicken farming there are gonna be mutated ones that get direct to waste - there's an estimate 7.2 billion chicken going around, even only considering normal genetic mutations there ought to be hundred millions yearly to go around to be used in those 'look these horrible sad chicken' videos, that are just a production of numbers and proportions more than actual cruelty (as compared to, say, foie gras)
you cant choose with your wallet to buy a model S because your wallet is not fat enough.
most consumers cant choose with their wallet to buy "fair trade happy animal farm" things because their wallets are not fat enough.
I'm deeply skeptical of that number, but let's assume you can make your machine. Why? What good does it do? Why would you want to have a solar food factory when you can just live in an ecology? What's your vision for the Earth? Mine is that it's covered in healthy ecologies that sustain the plants and animals that live in them. It's not just about food, it's about how to enjoy being alive. It's about being connected with the plants and animals that sustain you, not for their sake, but for yours: so you might learn about yourself. Because we're just them, added together.
I don't think an egg protein solar factory that's attached to a VR pod facility is an improvement on a rainforest. I'm happy for the VR pod/egg factory to exist, but I don't think a world covered in them is anything but a dystopian future for us.
At no point did I say it was a good idea, you're projecting your fears of a technical dystopia upon my pseudo-scientific hypothesising. In fact, if you re read my thread you'll see that I say I AGREE with your ecological point - i.e. I want garden earth. Don't be careless at comprehension. I just said it appears practically possible to improve significantly on the energy conversion of sunlight into not just dextrose but the full biological stack - fats, amino acids and subsequently proteins.
Re the numbers, as I said that was my fermi equation method of getting to it. I know ballpark figures for most of the numbers so in true fermi fashion it's within an order of magnitude of the true figure. I don't care if you're skeptical of the figure, that's not the point of a fermi equation (unless you're the great man himself and get within 5kt of the yield of the trinity nuclear test by dropping a piece of paper)
This is normally only done in patients with brittle diabetes because of the need for immunosuppression. This is a less complex procedure than a full pancreas transplant.
I think there are genes on the Y chromosome which code for sperm cells, so trans men wouldn't be fertile with one of these testicle-chips, but even getting an endogenous source of hormones would be awesome.
Also, I'm not sure what "IANAB" means. I am not a "?"
I know there's SRY, and that does kick things off, but I also know there's a disorder where SRY translocates to the X chromosome. It causes otherwise XX individuals to develop as a male, but they don't produce testosterone and they require augmentation. That makes me believe that the testosterone producing genes are probably on the Y chromosome as well.
Avg. Adult Male 270 - 1,070 ng/dL
Avg. Adult Female 15 - 70 ng/dL
One might expect that ovaries don't produce testosterone, but in a typical healthy XX woman the testosterone in her bloodstream is produced by multiple parts of the body. So while an XX individual has low levels, there are multiple sources of it in their physical makeup, and it's at least theoretically possible you could increase production.
As far as estrogen goes there are some easy ways to produce it for an XY individual but the side effects are pretty severe :) Some otherwise healthy XY men have various genetic or other maladies that cause their body to produce unusually high levels of estrogen by itself, so assuming you could control for the undesirable side effects, it's clearly possible to do that too.
Personally, I don't think we're going to get a good handle on producing the hormones necessary for MtF and FtM trans people in the body naturally anytime soon, but it seems feasible to me. And it would certainly be helpful to cis people with unpleasant hormonal disorders.
Re: Males producing estrogen, that's why I focused on the FtM in my previous reply. I knew it was possible for men to produce estrogen pretty easily, and I figured that's a much quicker path than the other way around.
Thanks for the information! It was truly informative.
Overpopulation is almost always a result of the opposite.
Also, the dwindling of our population is mostly due to societal changes like people wanting fewer children on average, or not finding a partner. Infertility is not the major problem, if you even want to call it a problem at society level (personally, it can very well be, of course).
Regarding dwindling population, that was sarcastic too; while human population growth has subsided in some areas, there's still a net explosion of humans on this planet. So that makes advances in fertility seem absurd when looking at the big picture.
Finally, for those of us who believe that humans are responsible for many of the ills we're seeing in our habitat, a logical conclusion is that more humans equals more problems.
A declining growth rate (as we've had since the peak in the 1960s) is not a "net explosion".
As an example, I highly doubt a Japanese person concerned about birth rates is concerned about the boom in Africa and other distant nations. Japan's population is going to decline drastically in the coming years, and they don't want lots of immigration to make up for it. It won't surprise me if they do something weird eventually, like the state paying women to have children the state itself would raise. Technology like this could open up even more strange doors.