Viable offspring derived from single unfertilized mammalian oocytes | Hacker News Reader

Viable offspring derived from single unfertilized mammalian oocytes

pnas.org

75 pointsbirriel30 comments

Isn't this kind of research illegal? Because the results usually are. (I say as someone who used to own marbled crayfish[1])

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbled_crayfish

Interesting, they forbid to 'breed' it but that's apparently not really how it works for these particular animals. A single individual will be happy to reproduce without any breeding taking place and there isn't much that you could do to stop it short of killing the creature.

But is it because of the origin, or rather the invasive species status?

I remain hopeful...

> "The 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, named 'Yuka', were found in Siberian permafrost. Here we recovered the less-damaged nucleus-like structures from the remains and visualised their dynamics in living mouse oocytes after nuclear transfer."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30858410/

Immediately imagining Strong Bad going "Don't need THIS any more" and slapping a nutsack out of the way a la https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/41-invisibility

f*k... Oh. we dont have to any more. :)

In Brave New World, they don't have to fuck, yet find plenty of opportunity to do so anyway. (and we are told this is somehow a dystopia?)

Lagniappe: "cloning can be worthwhile" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMkjoQ6S7oQ

Yeah, Brave New World is a really interesting work of dystopian fiction IMO, because many people disagree that it's "dystopian", unlike 1984 which it's often compared with. No one thinks living in the world of 1984 sounds appealing, but BNW sounds like a pretty nice place actually, but the anti-BNW crowd tries to tell us it's horrible because it's "unnatural" or "against family values" or something like that. Meanwhile, in the real world today, many families are completely broken (and many were in Huxley's time too, except they didn't get divorced, they just suffered), the marriage rate has gone down, the birthrate is unsustainably low, and young people frequently aren't even having sex any more, leading many to be isolated and depressed. Personally, I fail to see how adopting a BNW-style society could possibly be any worse than what we have now; indeed, it seems like a huge improvement in most ways.

Well the "we have the ability to alter humans so we're all strong, healthy, and intelligent but we not only choose not to do that but choose to stunt development of some humans to produce a docile compliant workforce for menial labor" is pretty darn dystopian no matter how you swing it.

And if you say "oh that wouldn't be so bad" you can even put your money where you mouth is -- would you be fine with being deprived of oxygen long enough to cause minor brain damage but otherwise not harm you? Done right you wouldn't feel a thing too. You can volunteer to be permanently dumber.

Huxley describes very eloquently how one end by two means are not the same. Human variation that arises naturally but at all times people are trying their best is a fact of life. But humans taking the reins and making that same variation by choice for their own desires is dystopian.

>Well the "we have the ability to alter humans so we're all strong, healthy, and intelligent but we not only choose not to do that but choose to stunt development of some humans to produce a docile compliant workforce for menial labor" is pretty darn dystopian no matter how you swing it.

That's not the thing the anti-BNW crowd complains about at all. It's not really even relevant: BNW was written a century ago before computers, automation, and robotics were invented. In a real BNW-type future scenario, you wouldn't need to artificially stunt peoples' intelligence to make menial workers: you'd just make robots to do that stuff, like we're already doing today.

The relevant part of BNW that would actually apply in the future is the idea of eliminating families, and having the state control reproduction and child-rearing. That's the part people find dystopian. No one seriously considering the issue thinks about the stuff you're talking about, because they realize that robots and automation have made that whole point moot.

Huxley was satirising fetal alcohol syndrome as a problem of his age; one might hope that in this more enlightened day and age parents would know not to drink during pregnancy and to keep their kids vaccinations up to date after pregnancy (and keep trace amounts of iodine in their diets) ... but your mileage may vary.

> and we're told it's somehow a dystopia

They also have an eugenics based caste society.

“oh no, people couldn't chose what caste they were born into, this book is an imagined dystopian fiction”

despite everyone being content with their caste and having lots of consequence free sex and activities fulfilling to their mental faculties

yeah I also found this world to be attractive

which, oddly enough, looks amazingly like our caste society, turned to 11?

What do you mean? India? Most people here are US based.

The US has its Alphas and Betas and Gammas and Deltas, all of whom are targeted by advertising that convinces them that their caste is the best (and the other castes are living incorrectly). It's probably not as bad as the old UK system the book was satirising, but exists clearly enough once you look for it.

References to crawfish and lagniappe in the same HN thread? My wife would be over the moon!

TLDR: transfer of 155 parthenogenetic embryos generated two live offspring. Both had body weight similar to that of controls at birth and survived to adulthood.

Seems like there are still a lot of unknowns in this process, so caution is warranted.

(2022)

in mice.

This is a case where there's not a super compelling reason to believe it would fail in other mammals.

Yeah my favourite "in mice" story is cryogenics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

that's the kind of news I expect to be in mice and not in humans ;)

Next, dinosaurs.

Dinos are a few orders of magnitude harder. No DNA or RNA fragment can even remotely survive over 65M years. To make something similar to a dino researchers will have to produce a working mix of bird and reptilian DNA - which is enormously complicated.

Plenty of avian dinosaurs around. Just not the ones you're thinking about.

I hope!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com