Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191913/sperm-or-egg-in-lab-breakthrough-in-reproduction-designer-babies-ivg

by andsoitis • 3 years ago

113 78 3 years ago

npr.org

AuthorizedCust• 3 years ago

…explore the potentially far-reaching thicket of social, ethical, moral, legal and regulatory ramifications of the emerging technology.

Oh, hi, dystopia! Nice to meet you.

samtho7• 3 years ago

We are already here. Modern sperm and egg banks are just the eugenics industrial complex with a few branding tweaks.

runsWphotons5• 3 years ago

Imagine how many brad pitt babies

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

Imagine being one of the few natural born kids starting school in 2046. Half your class is named Chris because they are literally the clones of Chris Pratt/Pine/Hemsworth/Evans. It may seem impressive, but they really are only the generic bargain bin option for genetic engineering by then. The other half, the richer kids, are hyperintelligent chimeras of every most famous, intelligent, world class athlete, celebrity and model from the early 21st century mixed into a Select Blend. On your first day, the class watches Gattaca, and your teacher, GPT-12, discusses how many things the movie got wrong and how genetic discrimination is not bad at all.

bsaul• 3 years ago

I keep talking to people about that scenario, of basically adopting the reproductive model of racing horses for humans, but it seems that nobody realizes how far we’ve already gone in that direction.

xvilka• 3 years ago

There would be likely a law to keep the necessary genetic diversity for species survival, to avoid exact clones or similar copies.

gnicholas• 3 years ago

People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely.

A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not give you money.

Or skip step 2 and threaten to make the baby if they do not give you money.

Or skip step 1 & 2, merely pretend that a baby is related to the rich person, and go straight to step 3.

yCombLinks• 3 years ago

LoL, why are we threatening to harm the baby? Our current system would require the celebrity pay a huge amount of child support if the dna matches. No laws even look at how conception happened.

meowface• 3 years ago

It seems fairly probable that if this became feasible and an actual thing people were doing, the laws would carve out an exception. Though I guess it might be kind of difficult to prove, since the surrogate mother could just insist she had an affair with the person.

echelon• 3 years ago

That's too complicated.

Leave their artificial blood or sperm at a crime scene.

Or if you really like complicated, wait until they get kidney disease or whatever and then offer their clone as an organ donor.

interlinked• 3 years ago

Don't forget to add that you've got their IP address as well.

ericmcer• 3 years ago

Why hurting the kid. Just make a kid with both your DNA and then take them to court for child support. Easy.

seydor• 3 years ago

Why would the celebrity care?

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

Or get (1) from a rich, old person with no heirs, do (2), and then once the involuntary parent dies (3) show up and use offspring from (2) to claim the inheritance.

At least here in Norway, children are guaranteed part of the inheritance regardless of the will.

seba_dos1• 3 years ago

Why would I care about such baby being harmed any more than any other random baby being harmed? I'd probably notify authorities that there's some baby likely being harmed and be done with it.

The only reason to care is that the current laws would consider such baby mine. I wouldn't. In such reality, these laws would have to be adjusted.

jeroenhd3• 3 years ago

Why harm the baby? In many places a claim of a one night stand and evidence of biological fatherhood are enough for a life long of child support payments.

Threatening to release the documentation for the child support case to the media can be a good blackmail opportunity.

MisterBastahrd• 3 years ago

Nobody is going to care.

The larger problem is what happens if someone gets a significant piece of DNA from a celebrity and then decides to mass market this to many different people. There's currently a huge scandal such as this one:

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/du....

going on with the sperm donor industry because some individuals have donated under various aliases. The people who were conceived from those donations are now at risk of potentially getting involved in sexual relationships with their biological siblings without having any knowledge of it.

samtho7• 3 years ago

These ”mega donor” scandals happen near monthly as they are revealed via DTC autosomal DNA tests. It’s a combination of the unchecked power banks have to recruit and collect ad-nauseam sperm that sells very well. Donors may also go to other clinics where they are likely to be approved as well, but are not required to disclose their prior donor status. This results in an unmanageable number of sibling in these group.

Also, ever since the industrial process of sperm and egg freezing, the accidental incest argument isn’t statistically significant anymore. It used to be that donors donated to clinics who then stored and did rounds of AI, IUI, or IVF depending on the needs of the client. Because these clinics were hyper local, donors were often in the same city or at least metro area as the DC offspring. Nowadays, gametes are shipped all over the US and the world so the likelihood of encountering a half sibling goes down significantly even for very large cohorts.

andromeduck• 3 years ago

Reminds me of this Canadian show called ReGenisis where a cult trying to clone Jesus was one of the background stories.

Turing_Machine2• 3 years ago

A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person,

I can imagine a future where this is prosecuted as a copyright violation. I'm not saying I'd be in favor of such a law, just saying I can imagine it.

Something would definitely have to be done, or celebrities would be in big trouble every time they ate in a restaurant (or took a cab or limo, or whatever). I think the odds are pretty high that there are bus boys who would happily hand off Taylor Swift's used drinking glass for a thousand bucks in cash.

cjbgkagh• 3 years ago

If you could crest a sperm and egg from any cell, could it be from a cell from an newly created embryo? As in rapid multi generational directed evolution, the ability to highly concentrate polygenic traits much more efficiently than a bogosort type algorithm.

runsWphotons5• 3 years ago

Yes this is possible. Gwern wrote quite a lot about this several years ago I think.

chr12• 3 years ago

For evolution you need to actually wait while the organism becomes an adult and see how it behaves. Without it you don't know in which direction your changes move the organism. If you could know it only from genes you could simply edit the genes without having to create embryos from embryos.

saalweachter• 3 years ago

Honestly I'm not sure you're even likely to get a viable embryo at the end the GPs procedure.

A large -- up to 1/3 -- fraction of fertilized embryos are not viable, largely because of chromosome abnormalities. Sometimes this happens quickly, before you would really say someone was pregnant, but people don't usually talk about their pregnancies in the first trimester because miscarriages are likely for this reason.

Depending on how well you can sequence the genome and forecast viability of the intervening steps, you'd just be compounding this probability each time.

And as you say, without the intervening "natural selection", there's no real evolution, just an increased mutation rate.

There is one interesting thing you could do, which is probably unethical under many ethical systems, which is that you could use the process to generate "many-parent" babies. Take samples from N people, and in a few days or weeks you could produce an embryo which shares all of their DNA (equally, if you start with a power of two). Sure, it would be functionally (and actually, since you have the intervening embryos) grandchildren or great-grandchildren instead, but I could imagine someone wanting that.

Vecr2• 3 years ago

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.

XorNot6• 3 years ago

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.

runsWphotons5• 3 years ago

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.

Vecr2• 3 years ago

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.

solatic• 3 years ago

"One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely.

Exactly when and how is consent given?

Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction. If the requirement for consent implies a requirement for a written contract, then consent for sexual intercourse does not imply consent for reproduction. If the requirement for consent merely implies a requirement for a lack of coercion and allowing people to continue on with what they have found along the path of life, then surely one should be allowed to make do with the barber's garbage.

Eventually, the discussion should stop revolving around consent and start revolving around commitment. Women should have a right to expect men to decide whether or not to make a commitment by a certain deadline, and should have the power of the courts to hold men to that commitment, should it be made. And nobody should presume that celebrities are making a commitment (of any kind) to anyone who decides that a celebrity's trash is their treasure.

gearsandbeers• 3 years ago

could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction

You might also enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_abortion - I stumbled upon this last night and thought about it for a while.

sjducb• 3 years ago

Sex is not separate from reproduction. If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father.

Most western countries recognize verbal and other non-written contracts. The clearest example I can see here is the UK's law about weather the genetic father is the legal father. If the child was conceived through sexual intercourse then the genetic father is always the legal father.

samtho7• 3 years ago

Sex has been separated from reproduction, at least in the few species we know of that partake in it for pleasure only. Humans engage in a variety of sexual activities that ostensibly cannot result in a pregnancy.

You talk about verbal contracts, how is that different from misrepresenting yourself if you said you were on the pill or you had a vasectomy? The verbal contract of consent can be delivered or revoked during this stage as well.

XorNot6• 3 years ago

This is confusing the practical realities of today with ideal law. The burden of carrying or terminating a pregnancy, bodily and fiscally rests solely on the woman in any scenario.

The law can't meaningfully distinguish, or even collect solid evidence, of "consent for reproduction" nor can it handle third party equipment failure (or reasonably prove it was not due to misuse either way).

If a man has sex with a woman and she gets pregnant, every bodily consequence falls on her, and some magic "I didn't consent to reproduce" law would have the practical effect of legally compelling a woman's decisions about her body to her own detriment.

All of which is a long winded way of saying: having sex is not consenting to be a father, but it is consenting to having to deal with the possible consequences. Invent a world where men can disable sperm production entirely, and you'd be able to write very different laws.

lelanthran• 3 years ago

If you are a man and have sex with a woman then you're consenting to be a father.

That sounds primitive and regressive. "If you're a women who has sex, you're consenting to be a mother".

jeroenhd3• 3 years ago

The same argument is often used against abortion (of children not conceived by rape). After all, who are you to decide to end a life you've willingly conceived?

There are even rare cases where women went digging through the trash of famous people they've had sex with to impregnate themselves. There are also plenty of stories of women sabotaging birth control to "baby trap" a man.

With our current laws, in many places, the male is forced to pay child support in this case (a failed attempt made the news recently: https://www.jacarandafm.com/news/entertainment/model-wants-s..., with more details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_theft) or have other responsibilities not because of birth control being unreliable, but because of the malicious intent of others.

"If the baby is yours it's your problem" is too simplistic and causes legal issues in cases like these.

throw0101b2• 3 years ago

Going down this ethical train of thought, one could argue that sexual intercourse only implies consent for sexual intercourse, not consent for reproduction.

Then you may wish to have family law changed in (e.g.) the province of Ontario:

7 (1) The person whose sperm resulted in the conception of a child conceived through sexual intercourse is, and shall be recognized in law to be, a parent of the child. 2016, c. 23, s. 1 (1).

* https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90c12#BK9

Pregnancy is an easily foreseen consequence of having sex, and so being held (civilly) liable for actions is perfectly reasonable. Or, as old meme/trope goes: f*ck around and find out.

* https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/personal-injury/personal-...

* https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/foreseeability

russnes• 3 years ago

This will be great until we select away our natural ability to reproduce, and then the power goes out and nobody can reproduce anymore and humanity goes extinct in one generation

chr12• 3 years ago

Well if power goes out 99% will already be dead because of current dependence on technology. And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

Turing_Machine2• 3 years ago

And for the remaining 1% the religious conservative groups like Amish or Hashidis will be the ones who survive.

Not unless the Amish stopped being pacifists, they wouldn't.

HKH2• 3 years ago

You might be interested in a book called The Revolutionary Phenotype. The author goes through that scenario.

dsign• 3 years ago

This is funny. It's "my son if it has my DNA" is the copyright equivalent of "it's my song if it has my chords." I can't resist:

- "You got a copy of my DNA files. Then you had a child, and they look similar to one of ours. I don't care if you modified it by removing all my faulty genes, or if you wrote the DNA from scratch after looking at mine. I sue you for copyright deft, you ought to pay reparations and the kid should be terminated." ~~ SCO-genomics.

- "I don't care if you breastfed it, it's not a real person if their DNA was generated by an AI." ~~ Twitter mob.

Seriously though, I don't think that parenthood has anything to do with genes.

samtho7• 3 years ago

I don't think that parenthood has anything to do with genes.

Genetic mirroring is a powerful force and the role of nature plays a far greater part than most are willing to admit.

crubier• 3 years ago

« I don’t think that parenthood has anything to do with genes »

See, this is why 80% of people are annoyed by the « woke » and other progressive discourse: Taking minority or rare cases (Transgenderism, LGBT, Obesity, etc.) that are exception to the norm, and using them to completely and absolutely deny that any norm exists or that the norm exists for legitimate reasons.

I’m sorry, but for 100% of animals and 99% of humans, parenthood absolutely has a lot to do with genes. The whole point of natural reproduction in nature is for genes to transmit. That might be inconvenient for you and you are welcome to express it, but denying it and ridiculing the vast majority who understand that makes you sound annoying.

troad3• 3 years ago

While I appreciate there's a lot of new debates to work through, the possibility of a child with two same-sex parents would be revolutionary for gay and lesbian couples. It's striking how many commenters here thus far default to treating this as a college ethics question, concocting contorted hypotheticals.

runsWphotons5• 3 years ago

This technology goes way beyond that. I don't see why we should dismiss the many valid ethics questions because it is something that some gay people want. That may be a slight positive to weigh against all the other questions.

troad3• 3 years ago

I fully agree that we ought not dismiss valid ethics questions. These should by all means be discussed, and - as with any reproductive tech - they will be, before anything like this ever rolls out.

I don't think "but yeah what if you steal rich people cells and make a baby and then totally blackmail them" is quite the ethical quandary some people seem to think it is, however. It's clear to whom this is a purely navel-gazing academic exercise, and to whom this offers life-changing possibilities.

samtho7• 3 years ago

The only real “new” issue that would come out of this is the hypothetical problem of stealing DNA from someone else to create a gamete. Granted, this technology is still very much in its infancy and, while the promise implied here is that you can create the gamete from any cell, in practicality, it may require a good quality sample of a specific kind of cell to reliably make this happen.

As someone who is active in the Donor Conceived Community, being a product of donor sperm, this process would remove a lot of trauma from the offspring of these arrangements. A big problem is that a lot of offspring did not receive the benefit from genetic mirroring which causes some issues when the child is not informed at the earliest age.

Some of these problems stemming from this trauma include developing trust issues, feeling of not belonging, and even a poor ability to recognize faces later in life. There’s also the problem with large sibling groups even to this very day due to fragmented rules and sparse regulations.

Growing up with genetic family does prevent the bulk, if not all, of complaints fielded by offspring such as myself. This is it something parents, both perspective and current, never want to hear because it’s upsetting, uncomfortable, and it’s a threat to their self. If they accept this, they accept that no matter what they do, they may never be good enough if using an anonymous gamete donor. While this is not true if you take a child-centered approach, the conversation has usually ceased by now.

Newborn babies are not a blank canvas for painting upon, nor do they exist to please and serve their parents. The DNA they are born with links them back to their biological parents and absence of one or both without that knowledge is trauma, unfortunately.

The pedants are going to catastrophize with wild hypotheticals from their armchairs, but I know this can be transformative for many who seek gamete donation and greatly beneficial to their offspring who are born with this technology.

foreigner• 3 years ago

Nevermind the human applications, use this to bring back Dodos!

batch12• 3 years ago

A lot of discussion around theft or blackmail so I'll go another way. People could more easily stud themselves out. Imagine if 15% of the babies of 2036 were related to the sexiest social media model. Talk about designer babies. You'd begin to be able to tell when someone was born and how rich their family is by who they (do or don't) resemble. People could sling their own genes on online marketplaces where consumers pick a genetic partner (or two) like one would build a Mario kart.

Edit- And then there'd be the fraud. People buying knockoff celebrity DNA..

DonsDiscountGas2• 3 years ago

True, although if we actually can design babies the need for a "stud" drops a lot. Two people (or one person I guess) wants a kid, so they start from their DNA, and modify it as they please.

Pigalowda• 3 years ago

A few years ago i wrote up some questions related to this. Cool it’s on NPR now

Question:

Can an adult somatic cell be de-differentiated into an induced pluripotent stem cell and then re-differentiated into a working/healthy germ cell. Can this germ cell undergo meiosis and produce spermatocytes and oocytes?

Can one of these induced gametes fertilize another induced gamete and produce viable offspring.

Can this system be applied to humans?

Can a somatic Cell from an XX female be de-differentiated and induced to become a functional sperm by re-differentiation (and placement into reconstituted testis)

If sperm can be induced from the somatic cells of an XX female, can these sperm be used to fertilize an oocyte? (Whether it is an induced oocyte from a somatic cell or naturally occurring oocyte)

Objective: If possible, I want an induced sperm from an XX female somatic cell to fertilize a natural oocyte (or induced) and produce viable offspring capable of reproduction. The purpose is not to create a clone, such as seen in nuclear transfer, but to have a female derived sperm cell fertilize a female derived oocyte

DonsDiscountGas2• 3 years ago

The short answer to all of these questions is "Yes". Already in mice, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't be possible in humans someday. Although I think it's a ways out; we can induce pluripotent stem cells and do some differentiation into other cell types but I don't believe we're at fully functional germ cells in humans.

TexanFeller• 3 years ago

Creating a sperm or egg from any cell

That word "any" in there makes me nervous. How long will researchers resist trying this with a cell from a 100yo person or a cancer cell.

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

The obvious tongue-in-cheek follow-on - combine with lab-grown meat to get 'long pork' made of anybody you want. An enemy. A pop star. And so on.

johnross99• 3 years ago

does anyone have any idea on the timeline to make this available for humans?

Creating a sperm or egg from any cell?

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