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Comment by Vecr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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