Creating a sperm or egg from any cell? | Hacker News Reader

Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

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113 pointsandsoitis93 comments

> "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely.

Exactly when and how is consent given?

Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction. If the requirement for consent implies a requirement for a written contract, then consent for sexual intercourse does not imply consent for reproduction. If the requirement for consent merely implies a requirement for a lack of coercion and allowing people to continue on with what they have found along the path of life, then surely one should be allowed to make do with the barber's garbage.

Eventually, the discussion should stop revolving around consent and start revolving around commitment. Women should have a right to expect men to decide whether or not to make a commitment by a certain deadline, and should have the power of the courts to hold men to that commitment, should it be made. And nobody should presume that celebrities are making a commitment (of any kind) to anyone who decides that a celebrity's trash is their treasure.

> could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction

You might also enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_abortion - I stumbled upon this last night and thought about it for a while.

Sex is not separate from reproduction. If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father.

Most western countries recognize verbal and other non-written contracts. The clearest example I can see here is the UK's law about weather the genetic father is the legal father. If the child was conceived through sexual intercourse then the genetic father is always the legal father.

Sex has been separated from reproduction, at least in the few species we know of that partake in it for pleasure only. Humans engage in a variety of sexual activities that ostensibly cannot result in a pregnancy.

You talk about verbal contracts, how is that different from misrepresenting yourself if you said you were on the pill or you had a vasectomy? The verbal contract of consent can be delivered or revoked during this stage as well.

> Sex has been separated from reproduction, at least in the few species we know of that partake in it for pleasure only.

That's like saying that eating has been separated from sustenance (or nutrition) because people (just happen to) eat Twinkies for pleasure.

People doing something for reasons that just happen to not to be the primary purpose does remove the purpose of an action.

I would argue that sex is different because, looking at the animal kingdom, the result is rarely a benefit to the individual. It’s resource intensive and in some cases (with insects specifically) the ushering in of a new generation results in the death of the parent. Reproduction is absolutely essential to the survival of the species but often a bad deal for the organisms involved. It’s a bodily function that many resources are dedicated to but is the least essential for for the survival of the individual.

Part of what enables pleasure-sex in humans is the fact that penetration does not trigger ovulation and that happens on its own schedule so evolution selected for mating strategies that would lead to frequent and short encounters. Additionally, the way we began to walk upright had the effect of moving human female genitalia more to the front which enabled her to be more selective about her partners. With the parental instinct being shared among both males and females combined with the fact both parties also are able to derive a great deal of pleasure from the experience, both sexes end up being more closely aligned with the goals of a sexual encounter vs those of our most recent, more ape-like ancestors.

To bring it back around, I understand what you are trying to say here, but disagree with your conclusion. Evolution selected modern humans to engage in sexual encounters that will not always result in a pregnancy, unlike eating which your body will always attempt to process the same as the last thing you are.

This is confusing the practical realities of today with ideal law. The burden of carrying or terminating a pregnancy, bodily and fiscally rests solely on the woman in any scenario.

The law can't meaningfully distinguish, or even collect solid evidence, of "consent for reproduction" nor can it handle third party equipment failure (or reasonably prove it was not due to misuse either way).

If a man has sex with a woman and she gets pregnant, every bodily consequence falls on her, and some magic "I didn't consent to reproduce" law would have the practical effect of legally compelling a woman's decisions about her body to her own detriment.

All of which is a long winded way of saying: having sex is not consenting to be a father, but it is consenting to having to deal with the possible consequences. Invent a world where men can disable sperm production entirely, and you'd be able to write very different laws.

Are we pretending things like vasectomies aren’t a thing? The success rate is generally in the upper-90% so sure it could fail but for the vast majority of people, that is equivalent to “disabling sperm production entirely”

The laws also, as have been mentioned already elsewhere in this post, do include such a consent clause. So it’s not really theory either.

Are you ignoring my distinction between hypothetically perfect laws and the laws as written?

And also being just downright stupid about what a vasectomy is and it's reversibility (hint: no medical professional will perform a vasectomy if you are getting one under the impression that it is reliably reversible, particularly after decades).

You never said it had to be reversible, so maybe next time outline your goal posts a bit better if you don’t want people to blow right through them.

It’s almost as if all you said was:

> Invent a world where men can disable sperm production entirely, and you'd be able to write very different laws.

And you clearly can’t bother looking at the existing comments when you have so much snark to share so let me help you out with real, actual laws that exist. There is no difference between an ideal world and real laws when the laws actually exist.

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c12#BK9

> There is no difference between an ideal world and real laws when the laws actually exist.

If you're not capable of understanding what a hypothetical is then there's really no further discussion to be had here.

Hypotheticals get thrown out the window when an actual law exists. I agree there's no further discussion to be had but not for the reasons you think.

That's still not how hypotheticals work, nor does it have any bearing on the original argument I was making.

You've managed to not read my original post, and have been doubling down by pretending that "well what about vasectomies" was a core problem or even oversight.

What hypothetical? The one where men can turn off reproduction? Congrats, that already exists. The one where laws are made around the ability to do so? Congratu-fucking-lations. It exists.

There is no hypothetical when the things being discussed already exist. That's not how hypotherticals work.

Next time, don't have a shit argument that can be broken down in a heartbeat and then whine about your precious hypotheticals not being respected.

> This is relatively new; previously Visa/MC prevented their merchants from doing this but it changed recently.

Not that it is the biggest point in this chain of people arguing badly past each other, but you have confused “hypothetical” (which assumes a condition independent of what is true in reality) vs. “counterfactual” (which assumes a condition contrary to what is true in reality).

Gotta love replying to a day old thread you had nothing to do with with both a quote that doesn’t come from the thread and a definition that isn’t accepted by most major dictionaries.

That’s like peak “I know what I’m talking about” material.

> If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father.

That sounds primitive and regressive. "If you're a women who has sex, you're consenting to be a mother".

If you consent to the sex, you consent to the aftermath of the sex too. Which in straight intercourse could result in pregnancy.

That’s the point, not whatever you were trying to read out of it.

If you're a woman, you're consenting to the possibility of becoming pregnant. If you're a man, you're consenting to the possibility that the woman man become pregnant and may choose to keep the baby.

That's the legal standard, yes. I think the stark inconsistency between how the sexes are treated here, with one being given far more power to decide outcomes for everyone, strikes many people as wrong. In a world where 'equality' is one of the highest values, it's hard to square that.

Equity is the real thing we should be striving for, not equality. There is a massive difference between the two, and it's very telling that even then, you chose to put quotes around equality.

Maybe when you're asking yourself why the woman has the ultimate choice, you remember that you're not the one carrying the baby to term.

I disagree. I think equity is impossible and more of a political device than an actual thought out goal. Equality is actually legally enforceable and achievable.

Certainly, the fact that the woman carries the baby is an argument in favor of her having decision of whether to abort it or not.

(Not a perfect argument, since it is of course his child as well and killing it would seem to involve both of them.)

It's harder to argue that she should also be the one to decide who is forced to work to pay for the baby's upbringing for 18 years. There is no situation where the woman can be so forced; she would give it up for adoption instead, which is the female version of 'paper abortion'.

This is where the idea of paper abortion for men comes from.

The same argument is often used against abortion (of children not conceived by rape). After all, who are you to decide to end a life you've willingly conceived?

There are even rare cases where women went digging through the trash of famous people they've had sex with to impregnate themselves. There are also plenty of stories of women sabotaging birth control to "baby trap" a man.

With our current laws, in many places, the male is forced to pay child support in this case (a failed attempt made the news recently: https://www.jacarandafm.com/news/entertainment/model-wants-s..., with more details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_theft) or have other responsibilities not because of birth control being unreliable, but because of the malicious intent of others.

"If the baby is yours it's your problem" is too simplistic and causes legal issues in cases like these.

> Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction.

Then you may wish to have family law changed in (e.g.) the province of Ontario:

> 7 (1) The person whose sperm resulted in the conception of a child conceived through sexual intercourse is, and shall be recognized in law to be, a parent of the child. 2016, c. 23, s. 1 (1).

* https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c12#BK9

Pregnancy is an easily foreseen consequence of having sex, and so being held (civilly) liable for actions is perfectly reasonable. Or, as old meme/trope goes: f*ck around and find out.

* https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/personal-injury/personal-...

* https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/foreseeability

While I appreciate there's a lot of new debates to work through, the possibility of a child with two same-sex parents would be revolutionary for gay and lesbian couples. It's striking how many commenters here thus far default to treating this as a college ethics question, concocting contorted hypotheticals.

This technology goes way beyond that. I don't see why we should dismiss the many valid ethics questions because it is something that some gay people want. That may be a slight positive to weigh against all the other questions.

I fully agree that we ought not dismiss valid ethics questions. These should by all means be discussed, and - as with any reproductive tech - they will be, before anything like this ever rolls out.

I don't think "but yeah what if you steal rich people cells and make a baby and then totally blackmail them" is quite the ethical quandary some people seem to think it is, however. It's clear to whom this is a purely navel-gazing academic exercise, and to whom this offers life-changing possibilities.

Among other things, this vastly increases the potential for artificial selection of embryos using PGS, for which there are already companies operating publicly (and dark groups operating privately). Concern over this isn't just "navel gazing" and should be weighed against the positives. There are a hundred of other questions which are valid concerns and your original comment seems dismissive of these. Yes some of us jokes about stealing celebrity DNA but it is hardly the only question.

Right, so we agree, there's valid ethical issues to consider and be balanced against one another.

Seems like you're trying to go for a bit of a motte and bailey argument here. The issue you raise is valid, but it isn't the one being raised in the other comments, which is making celebrity babies for the purposes of blackmail, and it isn't the one my comment was aimed at.

Women have tried to impregnate themselves with disposed condoms before. Some people are just crazy like that.

It's rare that this happens, but the law should have a provision for this case before this technology can be used without repercussions. Not only because of the question of "who's the father" but also because of laws forcing biological parents to pay child support, for example, regardless of how the child came to be.

The only real “new” issue that would come out of this is the hypothetical problem of stealing DNA from someone else to create a gamete. Granted, this technology is still very much in its infancy and, while the promise implied here is that you can create the gamete from any cell, in practicality, it may require a good quality sample of a specific kind of cell to reliably make this happen.

As someone who is active in the Donor Conceived Community, being a product of donor sperm, this process would remove a lot of trauma from the offspring of these arrangements. A big problem is that a lot of offspring did not receive the benefit from genetic mirroring which causes some issues when the child is not informed at the earliest age.

Some of these problems stemming from this trauma include developing trust issues, feeling of not belonging, and even a poor ability to recognize faces later in life. There’s also the problem with large sibling groups even to this very day due to fragmented rules and sparse regulations.

Growing up with genetic family does prevent the bulk, if not all, of complaints fielded by offspring such as myself. This is it something parents, both perspective and current, never want to hear because it’s upsetting, uncomfortable, and it’s a threat to their self. If they accept this, they accept that no matter what they do, they may never be good enough if using an anonymous gamete donor. While this is not true if you take a child-centered approach, the conversation has usually ceased by now.

Newborn babies are not a blank canvas for painting upon, nor do they exist to please and serve their parents. The DNA they are born with links them back to their biological parents and absence of one or both without that knowledge is trauma, unfortunately.

The pedants are going to catastrophize with wild hypotheticals from their armchairs, but I know this can be transformative for many who seek gamete donation and greatly beneficial to their offspring who are born with this technology.

> People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely.

A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not give you money.

Or skip step 2 and threaten to make the baby if they do not give you money.

Or skip step 1 & 2, merely pretend that a baby is related to the rich person, and go straight to step 3.

LoL, why are we threatening to harm the baby? Our current system would require the celebrity pay a huge amount of child support if the dna matches. No laws even look at how conception happened.

It seems fairly probable that if this became feasible and an actual thing people were doing, the laws would carve out an exception. Though I guess it might be kind of difficult to prove, since the surrogate mother could just insist she had an affair with the person.

I just discovered this is a thing already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_theft

Rulings differ a bit, sometimes ruling in favour of the man, sometimes for the woman, and sometimes in-between.

That's too complicated.

Leave their artificial blood or sperm at a crime scene.

Or if you really like complicated, wait until they get kidney disease or whatever and then offer their clone as an organ donor.

Don't forget to add that you've got their IP address as well.

Why hurting the kid. Just make a kid with both your DNA and then take them to court for child support. Easy.

Why would the celebrity care?

Or get (1) from a rich, old person with no heirs, do (2), and then once the involuntary parent dies (3) show up and use offspring from (2) to claim the inheritance.

At least here in Norway, children are guaranteed part of the inheritance regardless of the will.

Why would I care about such baby being harmed any more than any other random baby being harmed? I'd probably notify authorities that there's some baby likely being harmed and be done with it.

The only reason to care is that the current laws would consider such baby mine. I wouldn't. In such reality, these laws would have to be adjusted.

Why harm the baby? In many places a claim of a one night stand and evidence of biological fatherhood are enough for a life long of child support payments.

Threatening to release the documentation for the child support case to the media can be a good blackmail opportunity.

Nobody is going to care.

The larger problem is what happens if someone gets a significant piece of DNA from a celebrity and then decides to mass market this to many different people. There's currently a huge scandal such as this one:

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/du....

going on with the sperm donor industry because some individuals have donated under various aliases. The people who were conceived from those donations are now at risk of potentially getting involved in sexual relationships with their biological siblings without having any knowledge of it.

These ”mega donor” scandals happen near monthly as they are revealed via DTC autosomal DNA tests. It’s a combination of the unchecked power banks have to recruit and collect ad-nauseam sperm that sells very well. Donors may also go to other clinics where they are likely to be approved as well, but are not required to disclose their prior donor status. This results in an unmanageable number of sibling in these group.

Also, ever since the industrial process of sperm and egg freezing, the accidental incest argument isn’t statistically significant anymore. It used to be that donors donated to clinics who then stored and did rounds of AI, IUI, or IVF depending on the needs of the client. Because these clinics were hyper local, donors were often in the same city or at least metro area as the DC offspring. Nowadays, gametes are shipped all over the US and the world so the likelihood of encountering a half sibling goes down significantly even for very large cohorts.

Reminds me of this Canadian show called ReGenisis where a cult trying to clone Jesus was one of the background stories.

> A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person,

I can imagine a future where this is prosecuted as a copyright violation. I'm not saying I'd be in favor of such a law, just saying I can imagine it.

Something would definitely have to be done, or celebrities would be in big trouble every time they ate in a restaurant (or took a cab or limo, or whatever). I think the odds are pretty high that there are bus boys who would happily hand off Taylor Swift's used drinking glass for a thousand bucks in cash.

This is funny. It's "my son if it has my DNA" is the copyright equivalent of "it's my song if it has my chords." I can't resist:

- "You got a copy of my DNA files. Then you had a child, and they look similar to one of ours. I don't care if you modified it by removing all my faulty genes, or if you wrote the DNA from scratch after looking at mine. I sue you for copyright deft, you ought to pay reparations and the kid should be terminated." ~~ SCO-genomics.

- "I don't care if you breastfed it, it's not a real person if their DNA was generated by an AI." ~~ Twitter mob.

Seriously though, I don't think that parenthood has anything to do with genes.

> I don't think that parenthood has anything to do with genes.

Genetic mirroring is a powerful force and the role of nature plays a far greater part than most are willing to admit.

« I don’t think that parenthood has anything to do with genes »

See, this is why 80% of people are annoyed by the « woke » and other progressive discourse: Taking minority or rare cases (Transgenderism, LGBT, Obesity, etc.) that are exception to the norm, and using them to completely and absolutely deny that any norm exists or that the norm exists for legitimate reasons.

I’m sorry, but for 100% of animals and 99% of humans, parenthood absolutely has a lot to do with genes. The whole point of natural reproduction in nature is for genes to transmit. That might be inconvenient for you and you are welcome to express it, but denying it and ridiculing the vast majority who understand that makes you sound annoying.

A few years ago i wrote up some questions related to this. Cool it’s on NPR now

Question:

Can an adult somatic cell be de-differentiated into an induced pluripotent stem cell and then re-differentiated into a working/healthy germ cell. Can this germ cell undergo meiosis and produce spermatocytes and oocytes?

Can one of these induced gametes fertilize another induced gamete and produce viable offspring.

Can this system be applied to humans?

Can a somatic Cell from an XX female be de-differentiated and induced to become a functional sperm by re-differentiation (and placement into reconstituted testis)

If sperm can be induced from the somatic cells of an XX female, can these sperm be used to fertilize an oocyte? (Whether it is an induced oocyte from a somatic cell or naturally occurring oocyte)

Objective: If possible, I want an induced sperm from an XX female somatic cell to fertilize a natural oocyte (or induced) and produce viable offspring capable of reproduction. The purpose is not to create a clone, such as seen in nuclear transfer, but to have a female derived sperm cell fertilize a female derived oocyte

The short answer to all of these questions is "Yes". Already in mice, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't be possible in humans someday. Although I think it's a ways out; we can induce pluripotent stem cells and do some differentiation into other cell types but I don't believe we're at fully functional germ cells in humans.

One of the main problems preventing human cloning is the trouble getting enough eggs. Even if you don't care about the ethical issues (females only have a quite low finite number of eggs), it's still really expensive. If a small team can get their hands on a whole lot of viable human eggs, they may be less limited by what funders of big research grants want.

The number of eggs women have is far from "quite low". How many do you think they need? A woman menstruates once a month until menopause, from say age 14 till 55. So you would estimate a need for 492 total eggs.

A woman is born with 1 million eggs, and has about 300,000 left by puberty.

Which is to say: developing the eggs is not a limiting factor in getting them from women.

Getting eggs from women is hard because the current technology is very invasive and expensive, and there are challenges storing and maintaining the eggs. A technology that allows the creation of as many eggs as you want from skin samples totally changes all that, and removes the limitations for many reproductive technologies.

Absolutely. No contention there.

I'm just contesting that the total number of eggs in a woman is meaningfully finite though: the X at birth thing is thrown around a lot without thinking about the actual numbers involved.

Actually, I'm not sure about the real situation. The organizations who fund large grants apparently claim that's a reason why they don't like human cloning, but it could be a cover for other reasons they don't want to talk about.

This will be great until we select away our natural ability to reproduce, and then the power goes out and nobody can reproduce anymore and humanity goes extinct in one generation

Well if power goes out 99% will already be dead because of current dependence on technology. And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

> And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

Not unless the Amish stopped being pacifists, they wouldn't.

You might be interested in a book called The Revolutionary Phenotype. The author goes through that scenario.

> …explore the potentially far-reaching thicket of social, ethical, moral, legal and regulatory ramifications of the emerging technology.

Oh, hi, dystopia! Nice to meet you.

We are already here. Modern sperm and egg banks are just the eugenics industrial complex with a few branding tweaks.

If you could crest a sperm and egg from any cell, could it be from a cell from an newly created embryo? As in rapid multi generational directed evolution, the ability to highly concentrate polygenic traits much more efficiently than a bogosort type algorithm.

Yes this is possible. Gwern wrote quite a lot about this several years ago I think.

For evolution you need to actually wait while the organism becomes an adult and see how it behaves. Without it you don't know in which direction your changes move the organism. If you could know it only from genes you could simply edit the genes without having to create embryos from embryos.

Honestly I'm not sure you're even likely to get a viable embryo at the end the GPs procedure.

A large -- up to 1/3 -- fraction of fertilized embryos are not viable, largely because of chromosome abnormalities. Sometimes this happens quickly, before you would really say someone was pregnant, but people don't usually talk about their pregnancies in the first trimester because miscarriages are likely for this reason.

Depending on how well you can sequence the genome and forecast viability of the intervening steps, you'd just be compounding this probability each time.

And as you say, without the intervening "natural selection", there's no real evolution, just an increased mutation rate.

There is one interesting thing you could do, which is probably unethical under many ethical systems, which is that you could use the process to generate "many-parent" babies. Take samples from N people, and in a few days or weeks you could produce an embryo which shares all of their DNA (equally, if you start with a power of two). Sure, it would be functionally (and actually, since you have the intervening embryos) grandchildren or great-grandchildren instead, but I could imagine someone wanting that.

A lot of discussion around theft or blackmail so I'll go another way. People could more easily stud themselves out. Imagine if 15% of the babies of 2036 were related to the sexiest social media model. Talk about designer babies. You'd begin to be able to tell when someone was born and how rich their family is by who they (do or don't) resemble. People could sling their own genes on online marketplaces where consumers pick a genetic partner (or two) like one would build a Mario kart.

Edit- And then there'd be the fraud. People buying knockoff celebrity DNA..

True, although if we actually can design babies the need for a "stud" drops a lot. Two people (or one person I guess) wants a kid, so they start from their DNA, and modify it as they please.

The obvious tongue-in-cheek follow-on - combine with lab-grown meat to get 'long pork' made of anybody you want. An enemy. A pop star. And so on.

> Creating a sperm or egg from any cell

That word "any" in there makes me nervous. How long will researchers resist trying this with a cell from a 100yo person or a cancer cell.

Nevermind the human applications, use this to bring back Dodos!

Imagine how many brad pitt babies

Imagine being one of the few natural born kids starting school in 2046. Half your class is named Chris because they are literally the clones of Chris Pratt/Pine/Hemsworth/Evans. It may seem impressive, but they really are only the generic bargain bin option for genetic engineering by then. The other half, the richer kids, are hyperintelligent chimeras of every most famous, intelligent, world class athlete, celebrity and model from the early 21st century mixed into a Select Blend. On your first day, the class watches Gattaca, and your teacher, GPT-12, discusses how many things the movie got wrong and how genetic discrimination is not bad at all.

I keep talking to people about that scenario, of basically adopting the reproductive model of racing horses for humans, but it seems that nobody realizes how far we’ve already gone in that direction.

There was an attempt to blatantly push eugenics via a sperm bank[0], and it was active until 1999. Nowadays they are just more discreet about it.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_for_Germinal_Choi...

There would be likely a law to keep the necessary genetic diversity for species survival, to avoid exact clones or similar copies.

does anyone have any idea on the timeline to make this available for humans?

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