Japanese scientists working on creating human eggs and sperm in the lab
npr.org
npr.org
This is actually a good idea. I have a hard time believing it actually performs well though
As our fertility challenges increase (from biological issues like decrease in male sperm counts and fertility to social ones like longer student loans, getting together later, and strong emergence of non-cis-hetero families), it seems increasingly a must to preserve a modern society at least in the Interim. But yeah, people don't / didn't talk about it much. A lot of older generations or particularly zealously religious still don't - we like to find exciting ways to taboo and isolate each other :-/.
Fujita, who's on the committee the government formed to consider this, supports that.
"The technology of IVG, its purpose is not only [to] have a baby — genetically related baby — but there are many benefits and good things you can know from the basic research," she says, such as finding new ways to treat infertility and prevent miscarriages and birth defects.
As someone who has a family because of IVF, I am very thankful that researchers were allowed to roll the dice on that one, and see that it turned out well.
Also, this is not a question of precaution, but a known objectively gravely immoral act. There is no risk here that we might be doing something wrong using IVF. We know with certainty that IVF is gravely immoral. That we may have obtained some outcome that is desirable does not justify the illicit means. That is, applied to your case, while it is not wrong for your family to exist per se, the means by which they were brought into existence was definitely illicit.
Why?
Sorry but... what? What about that is immoral, or... even questionable?
Can you expand? Are you making the claim that normal ivf is either immoral or illicit? Based on religious grounds, or actual discussable morality?
There are many ethical discussions to be had about research and potential genetic manipulation, but I'm not aware of any general "we" that believes IVF is immoral, other than orthodoxly religious. I'm eager to be enlightened otherwise!
Who would those be?
More generally - It's rare to see a truly and honestly non-religious opposition to reproductive aids, so I'd be genuinely eager to hear more!
Questionable lifestyles with all their ill health implications would be a close second.
I don't know that I could give you dozens of distinct reasons, but I bet I could fill out a top 5 pretty easy.
> and what/who gets to evaluate or define a "true need"?
Let's be objective here. If, through no fault of your own, you are sterile and childless and if technology makes it possible to effectively reverse that, then though it may not be ideal it is acceptable. Though far too late for the victims, those who were forcibly sterilized decades ago would have qualifed. Someone with some congenital issue maybe. Possibly those who have suffered peculiar accidents (more likely for men than women?).
> It's rare to see a truly and honestly non-religious opposition to reproductive aids,
If we're talking about people I care about, relatives of mine or not, I would want those children to have a true and genuine human experience. "Mommy couldn't bother to get around to making you before her ovaries shriveled up, and so Dr. Frankenbaby cooked you up in a test tube and gestated you inside GMO-gestation livestock" isn't that.
The only thing that gives me pause is that, generally speaking, I don't care about any of you. This will make it easier to think of the vast bulk of humanity as things, rather than people.
> If, through no fault of your own, you are sterile and childless and if technology makes it possible to effectively reverse that
In the modern Western economy, it's pretty easy to find oneself not financially able to sustain a family until one is in one's early forties. I'd say people "waiting too long" are meeting your criteria.
> I would want those children to have a true and genuine human experience. "Mommy couldn't bother to get around to making you before her ovaries shriveled up, and so Dr. Frankenbaby cooked you up in a test tube and gestated you inside GMO-gestation livestock" isn't that.
For what it's worth... I gestated a bit too long and wouldn't biologically come out. Nearly died. Was "from my mother's womb untimely ripp'd," as the Bard might put it. Me and about 32% of other American births.
None of this bothers me, of course, because I don't remember any of it. I don't have any memories until about the time I was verbal. So my lack of having the true and genuine human experience of passing through a vagina into a waiting nurse or OB-GYN's arms hasn't really been, you know... An issue. For me or the other 32% of living Americans.
I'd counsel against putting hard limits on what makes for "a true and genuine human experience." This deeply unnatural technology of the Caesarean section has allowed me and millions of others a chance at life, as well as decreasing the maternal death rate drastically. If gestation in whatever a "GMO-gestation livestock" is provided even more people a chance at life... Who cares?
Such limits are also a good way to miss the awesome breadth of what the human experience is. It's a pretty wide thing. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
In Africa, there's someone who lives on $10/month. It's not stopping them. When you talk about "being financially able to sustain a family", I get the impression you're talking about getting a purebred dog with a pedigree, because you want a pet but it can't be just any... "has to be perfect".
> So my lack of having the true and genuine human experience of passing through a vagina
No one cares about that, least of all I.
If you think it's comparable to what some people dream of though, well, I don't know what to say. Be grateful for your lack of imagination and its protective properties to the manmade horrors beyond comprehension heading our way.
Very true. How far does $10 a month go in the United States?
> No one cares about that, least of all I.
Not true. There are still people who consider cesarean section to be unnatural birth. There are still people who consider IVF to be unnatural birth. And I don't doubt that whatever "horrors" come our way, there will be people who consider being born that way an unnatural way of being until every third person they meet came into the world that way.
The whole point of the article is that they are working on a technology that might obviate that particular concern.
> Questionable lifestyles with all their ill health implications would be a close second.
What does this mean? I can see an argument for wanting people to be around for their kids to grow up, but there are many risky or unhealthy behaviors that don’t harm your ability to have kids. I don’t see any particular reason to assume that having kids earlier will lead to better health outcomes (I mean there are obvious alternatives we can imagine; someone could get an advanced degree, which is correlated to a longer lifespan).
My whole point is that if you're saying "sure, you made poor life decisions, your ovaries shriveled up" but we can cook up a Frankenbaby for you, then maybe this isn't the solution to a problem, but a problem compounding on itself.
> What does this mean? I
I don't know how much more plainly I can put it. There are any number of chronic health conditions that lead to reduced fertility, those that are either caused by poor decisions, or exacerbated by them.
> but there are many risky or unhealthy behaviors that don’t harm your ability to have kids.
They might not make you 100% infertile, but they tick up whatever number you're at by some fraction of a percentage.
> I don’t see any particular reason to assume that having kids earlier will lead to better health outcomes
Having better health can make having them naturally a little more probable.
Are you certain you're an atheist?
I've seen very few (not zero but close) non-religious ethical systemic discussions against reproductive aids. As I said in another comment though,I'm eager to learn!
Which seems weird and judgmental, but it doesn’t necessarily have to come from a religious place.
It is hard to speculate about people’s beliefs without putting words in their mouth. But generally people can use all sorts of things (evolutionary biology, economics, whatever) to justify themselves.
1. There is no god nor gods.
2. Jesus Christ was not a historical person, but wholly fabricated.
3. I could not find it within myself to lie about these truths, even if it forfeited my life. I would struggle to lie about it even if it forfeited the lives of loved ones.
4. Should I somehow be wrong on any of these points, then a deity that would torture me for eternity for the intellectual mistake of disbelief is in fact a devil and is my enemy which I would have wished I was clever enough to have recognized, so that I could wage war against it.
How atheist are you?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/23/annegret-rauni...
At 65 the woman wanted more kids even though she had already had 13 before those 4 if i understood the article correctly. As far as i understand german doctors would not let her do an IVF but in ukraine she found a doctor. It seems they went above and beyond the usual numbers of embryos to guarantee she would get pregnant.
"We know with certainty that IVF is gravely immoral." is essentially "I know I'm 100% right and everyone who disagrees is wrong."
Seriously, why even bother engaging with people like that who have made it exceedingly clear they are uninterested in listening. In the words of the always incisive Barney Frank, "I'd rather have a debate with a dining room table."
Otherwise, what is immoral about a couple using their own sperm and egg to conceive a child that they otherwise would not have had? I suppose you could say there are many children who need to be adopted, but that reasoning also applies to the decision to have children without IVF.
Alternatively, an interpretation of Aristotelianism and Platonism. There's this weird presumption that religious people mainly use texts, despite the fact that the largest denomination of the largest religion in the world, Catholicism, often ignores texts when even considering many modern moral qualms. There seems to be a real desire to reduce modern religions to some kind of magic cult, despite the fact that a lot of modern religions give great weight to secular philosophy.
In particular, the Catholic objection to IVF is rooted chiefly in Aristotle's concept of the telos, which is pretty secular. Any text in the Bible that goes along with that is just icing on the cake, not really the main objection.
Basically... The telos of sex is reproduction. To separate reproduction from sex renders sex meaningless, and thus irrational from an aristotelian perspective.
The typical objection is that sex is also for pleasure. However, Aristotle considers base pleasures like sex not worth pursuing.
Now another typical objection here is that this could mean that ivf should be pursued while we don't have sex. This is I suppose where some religion may come in since Christianity typically sees sex within marriage as a good to be pursued. Nevertheless, I've not heard any modern argument that says we should eliminate sex and sexual desire and pursue only ivf.
So basically, separating sex from reproduction renders sex meaningless and irrational.
The actual reason religious people are mad at IVF is undefensible in somewhat secular society -- i.e. creating life is domain of god, thus fertilizing those embryos in the first place is bad. But with IVF there is a straw to hang on -- it's never just one egg, it's one (or two) eggs used and the rest discarded after fertilization. Which you can kinda defend as murder.
That is very much a religious idea and not something universally held. I certainly don't believe a jar of fertilized embryos is deserving of any special respect.
But it's the only clean line they can draw about when human life becomes human life, so they nominally stick to it even though they don't hold by any of the logical consequences of doing so.
"Which is of course bad" - all these people thinking their personal opinions are universal, unwavering truths...
> That is very much a religious idea and not something universally held.
How so? From an entirely secular standpoint, it's the moment a distinct individual life starts (e.g. viable new organism with its own unique DNA).
> I certainly don't believe a jar of fertilized embryos is deserving of any special respect.
And that's supposed to prove what? Someone else might believe a child who has not yet met some arbitrary developmental milestone as not deserving of any special respect. And that's not hypothetical, infanticide has been common in many cultures up to and including recent times.
Applications of ideas around consent to human reproduction are confusing and self-contradictory at the best of times.
Which is ethically fine by me! I'm just pointing out that reproduction is one of the areas where the limitations of consent based bioethics are blindingly obvious.
The genes in sperm are physically different than those in eggs. It's called methylation and I gave you an example of a disease caused by it going wrong.
At some point you're going to want this if you're trying to pick specific genes from people or if you're doing things like making people with dozens of parents.
The genetic mix from parents is randomized. Always. Both good and bad results are equally the result of a random process initiated by the parents. A combination of recessive genes to cause disease is not more or less random than a combination of healthy genes. The parents roll the dice, the child gets the result.
In other words: The ethics can't proceed from first principles around consent to experimentation. It has to include, as you say, empirical questions about the technology in question. But that's a different sub-thread.
If I had to say anything about that: I think this is one of those things that is just going to happen whether or not anyone likes it. The fact that it has already succeeded with mice + the massive applications... it's just going to get tried, it's just a matter of which country it happens in. The fact that it could potentially be used by same sex couples is a total side note to how strongly this will be pulled along by the same existing demands that drive IVF currently, the potential is just too powerful. So I imagine we're just going to see eventually.
I don’t see how this is not going to end in this. What I’m less certain about is whether the Breeded will be the cannon fodder or we‘ll be…
There's no reason creating a human being via a new method should suddenly flip the rules and allow it.
Not really, but in history children born out of wedlock were freely discriminated against, assumed to be subhuman and criminal, and killed without repercussion.
It would be reasonable, extrapolating from (recent) history, to assume artificial humans would instantly be put in that category.
I'm sure we'll eventually get to the point where you can go to a medical company, throw your spit into a machine and be able to check on/off boxes for desired traits, remove negative traits, etc. etc. and have a baby ready for you under accelerated growth in weeks, not months. For added comedy, have it delivered by drone - instead of a stork delivering your child, it could be Amazon!
Interesting dystopia?
But as far as I understand, the understanding of genetics is changing. Meaning there are no simple flags to set, that will enable or disable certain diseases or traits. It is way more interconnected, so your custom ordered amazon baby might have to wait a little bit longer.
It is, if done well. Otherwise I suppose it's just a chore or a duty?
It's a very challenging contact sport, for a few gifted people.
No, really, almost all sex today is both those things, like it or not. Semantic struggling notwithstanding.
I wonder as well how many people do not have kids because they simply cannot find a suitable partner. Maybe this will cause a further drop in the rate of marriages and partnerships.
Of course the above solutions will only create a marginal increase but an increase none the same.
I also think that if things get bad enough the government will intervene and create institutions where these kids would get born and educated. A very brave new world scenario but if the technology allows it, i would not put it past governments to solve their problems.
This is incredibly dangerous. From an American perspective, a government exists to serve its people. That is to say... government exists at the pleasure of its citizenry. If the government started actually making the babies (i.e., its population), then this is creating a whole other entity, one which we've not really considered before. What does it mean to be a government of the people when the government is creating the people? How can a government derive its power from the people, if the people only exist because the government created them. This would be a great inversion of the liberal democracies that have been the source of our immense progress over the last few decades.
And let us say if the old generation starts seeing the truth they might turn the production slightly higher to compensate. You can go even darker and speculate that the government might keep the life expectancy low genetically to avoid this kind of issue.
Obviously it presupposes that the technology will reach that stage. I hope we will never reach the industrial scale. As long as you need a woman's body to carry the child to term you will not scale it.
Now again afterwards you would need to somehow conspire to continue the program to undermine your democracy. Probably this extreme case will never happen. But we could get into a sort in between zone where we still have an immoral usage of the technology but not as bad as it could be.
Note however that existing dictatorships will definitely try to use this to further their own goals.
Most couples are barely scraping by economically. Those who want children are faced with employers who expect their employees ass in seat 12 hours a day six days a week. Childcare is difficult.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/09/10/business/japan-...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34486824
It's reasonable to say, half of Japan wants their culture to continue - the men. But they need the cooperation of the women to achieve that. But they can't achieve that, without changing their culture. So deadlock.
But, GP's point could still be true - even if it's not the real underlying cause, it may be still enough to accelerate research in this area.
If you're facing the choice of not having kids or being delegated to married housewife a lot of women across East-Asia just choose to not want one. Understandable, really.
The average man has greater physical strength than the average woman, and household chores involve lots of non-automated tasks (lifting laundry baskets, etc). Plus, it is unlikely, but if there’s a burglar, men can typically put up a better fight.
Is it typical of the conservative line these days, to just repeat their antique notions and insist everybody agrees, despite evidence? It would seem so, in media anyway.
Slightly old but relevant piece from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/world/asia/japan-working-...
Yeah, certainly can't let women breed at any age like men do.
It seems very optimistic to think that humans can (a.) perform that at a germ cell level, and (b.) distinguish between moral and evolutionary goods (because they may be at odds) [0]. If the history of dog breeding is any example, quests for some perceived good lead to maladaptive features in other areas.
I’m more sanguine about possibilities in altering expression of somatic cells like what octopuses do [1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
1. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/octopuses-other-cephalopods-...
In this scenario we already have a good idea of what people might do when given the chance if you look at science fiction.
Instead of waiting for the technology to get ready we should really think hard on which aspect of this technology we want to adopt and which ones we want to ban. For example if you can scale this technology by not requiring women wombs, should we allow the government to grow an army of clones? Would these clones have the same right as normal citizen?
We can allow individuals to have kids through this method while banning the government from misusing it (in theory).
It was a joke, but it was also very true.
Was a time folks assumed fairies planted children in women's stomachs. Nowadays we know better. Lots better: now we can control the process deliberately. To claim any particular advancement in this chain of understanding is an abomination or horrifying, is a terrible temptation to update that joke.
I don't see how any human being is 'horrifying', but I fear there will be those that dehumanize some of us, and call them subhuman or make it a crime for them to be born. Resist this impulse!
It's utterly horrifying because we've seen repeatedly how corporations abuse such things.
I've done a quick google and failed to find evidence of artificial humans created from scratch. Not sure where that was going, except as hyperbole.
And it wasn't so much about childbirth as technology. Perhaps the point was hard for some to understand, so I'll elucidate.
Reproduction is a biological process that can be understood at many levels. To understand and effect change at a new level is not horrifying, not evil, not even very surprising. It's just another step in knowledge and care for human beings.
Also, what if, they engineer these "artificial" humans to die preciesly when they reach a particular age? The state can then accurately predict retirement benefits, design infrastructure, distribute benefits more uniformly
replace it to "when". Hopefully we can avoid it and use the tech to fix health problems for existing people
It wasn't a feature; it was a bug. The company marketed it as a feature, but in reality (before Rachael, maybe) they didn't know how to build Nexus-6 with more than a four-year life expectancy. When Roy finally tracks down his creator and demands he remove it, Tyrell admits that he can't.
```
Tyrell: You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
```
It's the realization that his own creator, despite all the marketing hype, isn't a god, but just another flawed mortal... that the two of them are fundamentally equal creatures in this mad universe... that pushes Roy past the edge into madness and eventual redemption, when he realizes that in the face of a universe so cold and uncaring about the life within it, it's only life that can care about life. All of it, in all its forms.
Pretty much a science fantasy, but what stops the population from engineering it back?
Plus infinite life seems a near super power. Would they just hand it to nobodies? Seems like at that point they could produce a special few that live forever while the rest of the plebs have a largely normal life.
And heck, to extend your idea further; if it is equally difficult than perhaps you could do both, not one or the other. So make many mortals and a select few chosen royalty bloodlines that live forever. You get a population you can predictably control and forever royalty.
.. sometimes i'm glad i wasn't born 500 years later.
So the whole economic structure would have to be very different. Maybe AI’s will be specifically designed to serve humans, and maybe they’ll design particularly rebellious humans, as they present more novel requests.
Of course the technology might never get there either but to me gene editing for a birth defect sounds easier than gene editing to live forever but maybe i underestimate the former.
But in the real world people already die at a predictable age - we are all statistics.
People who don't want to raise kids probably also wouldn't want to raise artificial kids.
If the kids are put in state's care, well, current society can't take good care of existing orphans. How are we going to handle more parent-less kids?
I have two children whom I have tried quite conscientiously to not expose to the more toxic parts of our culture. They have, to my knowledge, never watched any of the sitcoms where some significant fraction of the comedy revolves around parents and other adults complaining about having children/families. None of the standup comedians of that ilk (supposing that's still a part of their schtick). I avoid anything that talks about how "your carbon footprint will be smaller if you just don't have kids". They weren't really aware of the term "overpopulation".
Most of all, I've always talked quite fondly and genuinely of having become a father myself.
And, now, even as teenagers, they seem to look forward to the idea of becoming parents themselves one day.
I don't have a large sample size, and it's hardly scientific, but the biggest problem I think is that our culture revels in how awful parenting is. The act of believing that idea causes people to be incapable of enjoying it. I also suspect rather strongly that it is more than just some arbitrary meme that bounces around in everyone's collective heads, instead the idea itself causes people to fail to enjoy parenting and to avoid it. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy, should they fail to achieve lasting childlessness.
Why should such a culture deserve to even survive? Your civilization requires that people continue to reproduce, but shows nothing but contempt for the concept. It shows contempt for itself. All of the very ideals this civilization embraces and exalts seem contrary to reproduction, and no one shows any awareness that that would have to change, let alone interest in making the changes.
Also, orphans is an interesting word. This isn't Charles Dickens' London. There really aren't all that many orphans anymore. No big wars, plagues with that one exception are rather uncommon. Don't even do the thing where we steal the infants of unwed teenagers or natives anymore. When some rich people want to adopt, they usually end up having to fly halfway around the world to purchase them from warlords and conmen.