Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens | Hacker News Reader

Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens

nationalgeographic.com

90 pointsBaudouinVH119 comments

This was a highschool science project from years ago.

JAPANESE STUDENTS HATCH A HEN'S EGG WITHOUT A SHELL! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJDTYUw0sk

Higher quality video that shows how to replicate the process (along with a nice timelapse of the chick developing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE0uKvUbcfw

A Novel Shell-less Culture System for Chick Embryos Using a Plastic Film as Culture Vessels https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jpsa/51/3/51_0130043/_a...

An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112

Assessment of extremely premature lambs supported by the Extrauterine Environment for Neonatal Development (EXTEND) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11772227/

4H is gonna be wild in 5 years.

I've just started listening to the book "Brave new world" (no spoilers please!) and this is literally how the book begins (but with humans) - what could possibly go wrong!

No spoilers, but I used to think, along the lines of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.

Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.

I haven't read Brave New World but "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin left a similar impression on me, it's more subtle than 1984. It came out earlier than both books by the Western authors - even though Zamyatin was inspired while working in England in early 20th century.

The book "The Machine Stops" was posted here a a while back it's a 100 years old and just as prescient as "Brave New World" and "1984". https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/...

I will look up We.

I also produced We for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/yevgeny-zamyatin/we/gregor...

There was a good theatre adaption of The Machine Stops by a UK group called Pilot Theatre (I saw it at York). They performed it as a live Youtube broadcast during the faf of 2020, though I can't see it listed anywhere now. Worth having a look for if you have better sources than mine. I must have a scan of my media array later, to see if I downloaded a copy I can rewatch.

Thank you I will look for it.

Funnily enough, Orwell actually reviewed We in 1946: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/zamyatin/english/e_zamy

Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.

Yeah Orwell took a lot from "We". Its honestly a much better book.

mephi

1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.

I agree. Brave New World has some very interesting and relevant ideas, but I just couldn't hold my attention with his writing style.

No spoilers, but I've come to think that "Brave New World" actually is Utopian—in the "give people what they want" department.

But they get conditioned to want to be cogs. At any rate, Huxley certainly did not intend it as utopian: https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

About his ideas for utopia he wrote "Island": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)

His brother was Julian Huxley who was a prime mover in creating the UN. Julian had some curious views about the direction of the human race which may have found their way into Aldous' work.

Julian invented the tinfoil hat.

Before making such comments, why don't you read some actual quotations from Julian Huxley? The first Director of UNESCO was also in the British Eugenics Society where he argued for the "The virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types..."

Erm, yes, that does sound a bit like Aldous' "Brave New World". How about "long [term] unemployment should be a ground for sterilization..." (From "Man in the Modern World" 1947) i.e. get a job or be sterilised.

"Unless [we] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay ..." (From "Essays in Popular Science", 1926)

And read this, bearing in mind that Julian Huxley was upper class. That first quotation in context: "we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata... less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive." (From "Man in the Modern World" 1947)

Aldous wasn't much better. Childhood conditioning for the masses: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." ( "Letters of Aldous Huxley" published in 1969)

>Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.

I encounter this exact thought in every comment thread that mentions 1984 without fail.

And usually 3 or so comments later I realise that they poster of this amazing idea hasnt read (or at least doesnt remember) 1984 anyway.

>Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.

You mean some sort of situation where the masses (or "proles") are kept happy with puerile entertainment while those people with political impulses are kept under heavy surveillance? Kind of like the novel 1984?

Yep, there are the same tropes about 1984 in every discussion. And it's a shame, since 1984 presents something much stranger and more interesting than communism, surveillance dangers or dystopian universe in the abstract.

It shows what a system would evolve into without independent temporal continuity, and how truth can keep changing in a flow-like fashion while central power remains the only stable reference. Here, correspondence with reality is no longer treated as sacred, only useful. The Party does not need or want truth in any moral or objective sense. It only needs enough contact with reality to keep the machine running. Records still have to be managed, wars still have to be administered. Everything beyond that can be made fluid.

It also attacks the usual consolations: hope, love, that there's something human that remains untouchable. It shows how humanity is a fragile construct, and meticulously presents a procedure for how to break it

It shows precisely that no matter who you are or what you think you can do, a well-established system that seeks power for the sake of power will crush you just because it can. And if you're about to be crushed, they already declawed you systematically. Propaganda controls the present, manufactured records dissolved the past, Newspeak narrowed what you were able to think, manufactured dissent absorbed any idea of rebellion. And if the system wants you to love the act of being crushed, it has methods for that too. And why would it do that? Because power is an end in itself. And that's all you need to understand about unchecked power.

It also directly addresses that it's a new system and, unlike the Catholic Church during the Inquisition and unlike the communists, it is honest about its relentless accumulation of power, and doesn't need any kind of external legitimation from God or some placard of equality and prosperity for those who don't know better.

Let it also sink in that the book being ultra class-aware seemingly passes by almost everybody.

> Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984.

The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.

1984 was as much (or more) about Stalinism and totalitarian tendencies in 1948 as it was a cautionary tale about the future.

Also a lot of criticism of the UK at the time.

Well, it's just like this except that... oh, you said no spoilers :)

Without spoiling anything, I wouldn’t say anything “goes wrong” in Brave New World, at least as far as procreation is concerned.

> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”

Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.

It seems bizarre to model the end goal of this research as "grow more birds". Obviously that's not the point

If you're not familiar with the stats on cats killing birds, look it up. It's pretty crazy.

https://archive.is/FwKsk

Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?

They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.

I'm holding out hope we can get the moa birds back in my lifetime.

Or the South American terrorbirds, the extant species are tiny, seriemas, and they're very interesting. I bet one that weighs 700 pounds would be even more exciting

Terrorbirds? Based on the name alone, are we sure this is a good idea?

Yes, yes. Dodos.

The endgame of this is Dodos.

Yes, first they'll focus on normal dodos. Then, they'll try very large Dodos. After that, very, very ancient dodos. Followed by island dodos. Then they might set up a whole island that people can visit, full of all kinds of dodos. They'll do tours with self driving cars so people can see all the dodos from a safe distance.

One thing is for sure: they'll still be using a UNIX system

Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.

Tbh, I kinda always assume they were going to pivot into designer kids as opposed to dinosaurs.

They shall spare no expense.

A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.

[Colossal Biosciences] has raised over $600 million and carries a valuation exceeding $10 billion.

You're not making a return on that from selling velocirator skeletons. Nor is that sort of money in dodos and maos.

Human cloning on the other hand...

It's been a while since high school biology class, and I can't ask my sister right now, but I don't think humans are born in eggs. What does an artificial egg hatching chickens have to do with cloning humans?

Arguably humans are born from large, soft-shelled, ambulatory eggs.

ewww eggs with legs

Technically speaking, we could engineer it in a way where humans are born from eggs. It would just have to be a very big egg and would also have to continue growing in an incubator after hatching much like chickens rather than the standard womb senario.

... probably just easier to grow babies in a tube

How about a theme park? With velociraptors and other jurassic era animals?

I would pay money for that, it would give Disney a run for their money. Throw in some woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers as well.

Disney makes more from theme parks than from everything else combined. Dinosaurs would be better than anything Disney has ever made.

You can have that kind of revenue cloning cows and horses. Easily so. A bit harder for chickens, but it's possible.

But I fail to see how cloning humans would get it.

I mean, if you can make a velociraptor, the skeleton isn't the bit you'll make money on.

And I feel like lab grown Velociraptor skeletons aren't going to fetch $10 million. Rarity and something new to study is part of the value.

Surely the rarity is partially due to the velociraptor skeleton cartel limiting the supply. And really, a velociraptor skeleton wasn't even a traditional engagement gift until they created the demand for it with that advertising campaign back in the day.

Yeah. Imagine how much you can make on live velociraptors.

Maybe short term, pumping out chickens. For food.

Long term, maybe chickens are just the test case and they will pump out human slaves. Replicants.

So the question of what came first is answered then?

Slightly misleading title: It's an Artificial Eggshell/Membrane.

They took regular eggs, broke the shell/membrane and emptied the contents into a silicone based eggshell/membrane for incubation.

Still good science, but greatly tempered implications. Allegedly a group of Japanese school students did this previously using cellophane wrap.

I always knew that egg came first.

  requires real hen for fertilization and laying

Huh… from the original Nat Geo article:

  scientists inspect eggs newly laid by real hens within 24 to 48 hours. They select the most promising ones, crack them open, and delicately pour the contents—everything but the shell—into the artificial egg structure. But everything that happened before then, from fertilization to egg laying, required a real chicken.

How will they resurrect a dodo? Is the idea that they have some DNA somewhere?

The Wikipedia article suggests they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo

WE have one leg from one individual, and so egg fragments, should be doable, but not enough diversity

Am I the only one wondering if it's 26 chickens at once from a single artificial egg or they just succeeded 26 times with different eggs? Rationally it probably has to be the latter, but the title confuses me.

You could RTFA and find out.

(26 different artificial eggs. The artificial egg is the main development. Basically they take a chicken embryo (by cracking open a fertilized egg) and allow it to develop inside the artificial egg, and from which it can eventually be "hatched". Other methods for growing chickens from embryos outside their eggs have not had very high success rates.)

Yeah..., or you could read the rest of the comment section and learn that I have RTFA, but that TFA was changed with one that explains it better:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257929

This was what I read: https://colossal.com/colossal-biosciences-artificial-egg-dod...

The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.

Why? The current method is cheap.

Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous

At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.

I agree we should focus more on reviving ancient horrors.

Agreed. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn: there's a reason it's a classic.

The complete omittance of even acknowledging we have invented modern animal horrors far worse to work on first makes it sound like we just need to do better than other animals. Willfully ignoring that to act like doing so is a form of agreement between the statements is a bit gruesome itself.

I'm glad you want to handle some of the problem, but let's not act like we just need to do better than other animals is all to discuss. It's easy enough to agree with the full problem unless you're fine with the other parts.

like draw and quarter?

Creating a food system that is more cruel to animals than what we already have is a very high bar. Not that I doubt we can clear it.

Is that a problem?

If you consider factory farming horrific, then yes

Factory farming refers to a wide set of practices that range from loathsome to banal.

I don't see how the use of this technology makes factory farming any worse than it already is. Maybe it saves male chicks from the shredder, making it slightly less loathsome.

We already have Soylent

Colossal Biosciences has other ongoing projects including reviving the "Red Wolf" using DNA from coyote/wolf hybrids and CRISPR. They also want to introduce a Wooly Mammoth/elephant hybrid.

The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/1135222/red-wolv... (paywall)

  Colossal Biosciences

and its

  goal of resurrecting extinct bird species

"bird species"?

C'mon.

They want to do a Jurassic Park.

Baby steps:)

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could…

life finds a way

This article is so strange. It is written by the company, but written in a way that an outsider would write.

> Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.

It says at the bottom:

> This story is based on original reporting by Christina Larson for National Geographic. Read the full feature on National Geographic

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/artificia...

Ok, we've switched the URL to that link from https://colossal.com/colossal-biosciences-artificial-egg-dod... above. Thanks!

Press releases are often written for lazy publications to copy and paste.

Also, that is the kind of corporate PR articles that are made to be quasi copy/pasted by journalists.

For a sec there I thought the National Enquirer had gotten a new lease on life.

So, this means the egg came first, right?

Eggs are IaC.

Have we already forgotten about chaos theory?

For a book/movie with a decent (if optimistic) grasp of genetics, its grasp of chaos theory was utterly ignorant.

From this I can deduce that your grasp of chaos theory is better than your grasp of genetics. People who know about genetics thought the genetics sucked. People who know about computers thought the depiction of computers was awful. Don't ask get anyone who knows about nutrition started on acting as if there are no sources of lysine found in nature. And economists...

It is, literally, a movie with something for everyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com