The first early human eggs from stem cells
conception.bio
conception.bio
Currently, egg retrieval is a significant part of the IVF process - one that's notoriously taxing on the women. Once this gets refined enough for clinical uses, it can become as simple as "take a blood sample once, produce as many eggs as you need". With an added benefit of being able to get eggs when traditional retrieval fails.
there are many reasons for this chimera not to be viable, mitochondria co-evolves with the nuclear DNA, you can't just take a mitochondria from a totally different species
Because it is unlikely that you just punched a hole through the plan of the several dozen people in bioengineering, life sciences, and other related fields that are at this company.
Coz really that seems like the foundational problem here: claiming something rather crazy with obvious problems, like multigenerational mitochondrial damage in an organism which replicates literally billions of them just to be born.
As long as mitochondrial damage is not uniform, you can sample for cells with low mtDNA damage and no known-harmful mutations, and base your eggs on those cell lines. Do "in vitro" what natural selection would have done "in vivo", reduce damage accumulation that way - potentially to zero.
And if you really want to, you can make eggs off a "known good mtDNA" cell line, then swap a new nucleus into them (cloning-like process), and get a cell line with target nuclear DNA and known good mtDNA. Mitochondrial replacement therapy. Then make eggs off that hybrid line.
Involved lab work, but, perfectly doable, and rides the same stack you already use for IVF. Mitochondrial replacement is already a known tech, but only worthwhile for cases of known harmful mtDNA anomalies currently. "Good mtDNA" eggs are sourced from donors instead of produced from cell lines currently, but this tech might change that too.
Can we stop adding unnecessary JS to website to stop global warming by calculating AND ALTERING SCROLL?
Firefox on Samsung S23, not exactly a new or a powerful phone but rendered it fine.
That being said, the scroll was as smooth as regular webpage scrolls. Usually these JS scrolls aren't able to avoid dropping frames or otherwise introducing judder, but this one does appear to run at a consistent and high framerate, which is technically impressive.
Shinya Yamanaka created iPSPs in 2009:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka
Guess the japanese excel at micromanaging. Although one could say that the research here in the article is more epic than Shinya's discovery, but I remember having watched one of his presentation and it convinced me of pure epicness, if you understand how his team found the "Yamanaka factors". That was by human (work) consistency. About as epic as Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her mutant screens, that also involved tons of micro-experiments.
We are DOOMED.
The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.
I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.
And if those effects are bypassed with artificial conception, we might end up with humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc.
The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness - or perhaps a lack of gain of fitness that would have otherwise occurred.
Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.
Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.
Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.
It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway".
I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.
We actually have and is called RISK.
RISK = Probability * Damage.
Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents.
Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%
We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically.
Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?
As if they were a tool you created. Obviously, if I carve a piece of wood into a spoon, it's I who get to say that what used to be a piece of wood now has a purpose of moving soup to mouths. The carved piece of wood now has a purpose, but it's wholly subordinate to my purpose (whatever it is).
You don't have to actually design people to play God - you can subordinate others to your purpose without doing that, that's what various God-kings in history did. But it certainly gives you a head start if you make them.
You can make something and don't subordinate it to your purpose. In our culture, we see children that way. We claim, basically, that we didn't deliberately design a child, we only obeyed our own natures without really having much choice in the matter, and thus we and our child is on the same teleological level.
This is not a cultural universal. In many cultures, parents (in particular fathers) would say basically "I made you, so you must do as I please, you have no reason for existing except for my purposes". It was a hard won battle for our culture to assert that children matter for their own sake and not just for their parent's.
Many things in this thread makes me want to say "Y'all MFs need Jesus". I won't say that, but I will say that you should stop and think about why it is that the Catholic church is so difficult about contraception, why Christians in general have historically made such a big deal of the difference "born of God" vs "Created by God" (arianism, etc.), and what that story of Abraham and Isaac was really about. Whether you agree or not, there's much about other people you will never understand if you don't think about teleological levels.
You'd have a rather different opinion if you had to squeeze out a water melon out of your genitals.
>>, etc.
How do you know it? Sci-fi tropes are not a good argument.
I didn't have "creationism" as the top answer to a HN post in 2026, yet here we are...
Just an half hour ago, TomasBM wrote in another thread [1] why people first want to filter out AI slop, which IMHO fits perfectly:
> Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind.
To that, I'd add my personal take: I go to HN, Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter to engage in meaningful conversation with other people (ranked in inverse likelihood of coming across sloppypasta). If I wanted to talk to a robot, I'd prompt ChatGPT myself. When others use AI for more than translation, this violates this core assumption of how human communication, how society has worked for all of human history.
Unfortunately, and I've been on the receiving end of this myself, anything longer or more substantive than a tweet will immediately evoke the "is this AI" assumption, and it's gotten worse as ChatGPT et al managed to eliminate the usual "tells".
To me suggesting that sounds pretty anti-intellectual!
> I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.
I can't see where it mentions "creationism".
Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.
We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."
I could make the same claim of a bridge before it collapses, without realising the steel was weak, or had micro fractures.
Where's the proof? What an outlandish claim! Don't you see traffic flowing as normal?
Of course, we shouldn't drop all advancement due to worries. I do think we should study the results a bit more closely though.
Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.
They are flaws. Flaws which should never happen, separate from normal environmental degradation.
You may debate the point, but that is irrelevant, for I am referring to abnormal issues with bridges. Flaws in construction. Taking this parallel to humanity, or any evolved species, what "forges" a strong species is constantly being tempered by their environment.
Predation. Disease. Parasites. Even lack of proper nutrition. Environmental adversity, eg exposure to heat, wind, sun, etc. Reproductive errors. Reproduction issues. Etc and so forth. We've eliminated almost all of this, which means that standard methods of evolutionary pressure are almost all removed.
Species do deteriorate by default, if they remain static. Or additionally, if they allow genetic errors (which happens every generation, yes every) to seep into the gene pool without being winnowed back out by the stresses above.
These days, we save babies which are born early. Ones which have a dozen birth defects. Ones which have 100 other issues. Adults (before breeding age) with issues. Note that I am not saying we should not do these things! Only, that there is a price. A long term price.
Now... that being said, I think this is the best part of genetic engineering. It allows us to fix issues like this in the womb, and to get rid of these sorts of errors whilst still helping the current generation live, and have good lives.
But to pretend that evolutionary pressure doesn't exist, is weird. And everything we have which is an enhancement to our survival capabilities, is evolutionarily pressure based.
So back to the start? Those microfractures and weaknesses in steel are not noticeable when the bridge is deployed, as the steel's production is actually the problem. It's years later, with bridge inspections (if done! and they should be!) that these issues are discovered.
But much like global warming, or said steel, you don't want be be performing corrective action. And you can't see it before the issue becomes apparent. People didn't notice the Earth getting warmer when they were burning coal in year 1000 or some such.
We barely see the evidence of global warming now. And it's already too late to arrest some change.
Is that what you'd prefer for humanity? Wait until genetic defects are so rampant that it is "in your face" apparent?
Haven't we?
It doesn't "lead to". Supporting a wrong conclusion even with a valid argument is as old as time. Fans of eugenics don't need an excuse to go down that path.
Our natural and artificial environments shape us for better or worse. We're bigger and more intelligent as a direct outcome of better nutrition. But we also have far more people with deadly allergies because we're so good at managing them now.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Look at Fig. 3. The world seems to be experiencing a reverse Flynn effect.
> Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specific abilities not attributable to changes in the latent GMA factor. Our findings further challenge the validity of claims that changes in the general factor drive the Flynn effect and its reversal. Furthermore, they caution against using these scores for longitudinal studies without accounting for changes in test characteristics.
> the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests
What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.
Counterpoint: If I don't teach a kid to read and then ask them to do a test that has reading as a requirement, I can say two contradictory things:
1. This kid isn't intelligent. 2. I don't know what this kid's intelligence is; I gave them a test on something they weren't taught.
What you're describing is in line with 1. That's completely fair and definitely part of what I'd consider intelligence.
This paper is making a statement more in line with 2. I've seen similar conclusions elsewhere; the theories are things like "education is less and less aligned with what IQ tests measure."
In the context of fitness, I feel like 2 is more in line with what we'd be thinking about?
In any case I didn't know this number and it's quite relevant to the discussion of how much we got rid of natural selection.
But have worse hormonal health (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063751/), and are less fit (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4033061/). The flynn effect also seems to decline in some parts of the world: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301679
It just doesn't compensate the immense gains tech created.
Turns out it's ok to be weaker if you don't have to worry about dying of parasites, malnutrition, cold.
Which, you could conclude, means the individual is weaker, but the species is stronger.
But can they pay and vote? If yes, that is good enough for the people calling the shots.
What?... Our computers can't simulate anything similar to a real world. You're comparing apples to galaxies.
> meaningful loss of fitness
What makes you think we don't have "loss of fitness" already?
150 years ago child mortality was around 30% in the developed world, now it's less than 1%. A lot of kids with weak health survive now. I'm one of them - I got pneumonia when I was ~2 y.o. and probably would have died without antibiotics. Then I had something which required antibiotic treatment pretty much every year. My wife also had a pneumonia in early childhood. And so did my daughter...
Why do we need to talk about some mysterious problem in 10 generations when modern medicine removes a lot of fitness pressure by itself?
Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent.
It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.
So it's quite likely that modern population is not fit according to old criteria.
> It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia.
That's not true at all. People can make new breeds of dogs and cats in just a few generations. You can literally SEE how a change of fitness function affects the phenotype.
> You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection.
There are many studies which describe genetic changes within latest 10,000 years or less. E.g. paper "1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe": "We identified 25 genetic loci with rapid changes 21 in frequency during these periods". You can find many similar papers if you do a search
One of studies identified changes in loci associated with Y. pestis immunity during the Black Death (i.e. something like a century). Black Death mortality is similar in scale to early childhood mortality 150 years ago.
Besides which, why does it matter that Humans may or may not be fit according to old criteria? Whatever they might have been.
Tech like this gives some people a chance to be born. If they aren't born, this may damage the rest of the world in subtle, very hard to predict way. The invisible graveyard of medicine, caused by risk aversion, is real. In the name of safety, you may miss out on the next Freddie Mercury or David Attenborough, or Jonas Salk or Paul Erdös.
Also, the 5-10 generations you mention is 150-300 years in current humans. It is very unlikely that biological science will stagnate on current level of knowledge and blindly repeat beginner mistakes from 2026 for 150-300 years.
For comparison - 150 years ago, germ theory was still a contested newcomer. 300 years ago, medicine still believed in Galen's humor theory.
But why do you think evolution doesn’t explain existence of humans? What’s missing?
Also, as someone else has replied to you, we’re way past “natural” existence of humans. The vast majority of 8+ billions wouldn’t have survived in the past.
In routine IVF, parents select for the strongest embryo to implant. This cannot happen in the case of traditional embryo development, where the released egg meets the sperm.
The assumption that IVF could produce weaker humans is an assumption rooted in what? Sci fi?
Now if the sperm cell were from the same donor I don’t know what would happen
Probably nothing special except some inbreeding with the loss of 25% of genetic material of the donor individual (each gamete containing a random 50% of the donor's genetic material). Not sure how fast this level of inbreeding would be deleterious.
I don't know enough to say if that allows extracting eggs from males. Could two males have a child together using this technique?
In their procedure the (full, diploid) genetic content of a "induced pluripotent stem cells" gets placed into an ovary-like culture of cells in order to make it ultimately evolve into an ovum. This evolution involves a "meiosis" type of cellular division, in which the end result are haploid cells, and the genetic load gets thinned out. Therefore, it will need fertilization -- a complementary chromosome set from another source.
What they don't talk about (but should) is telomeres², that normal cells, upon division, loose genetic material and thus -- degrade from reproductive point of view.
(Hmm, I wonder if this can be done for chicken eggs)
It could be argued they would likely be worse than the original. They would be even more detached from the rest of humanity because of their position. They wouldn't be just a person that found an extreme level of success, they would be the undying legacy of that person. This is not a way to build a healthy human psyche.
-Stannis Baratheon
Especially given that the link in question describes this as the source of stem cells:
> After performing a simple blood draw, we converted blood cells into stem cells, and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries that contain the early eggs.
That stupid controversy set the field back a decade, and that was a decade too much. People who get their science news from celeb gossip are a blight.