The first early human eggs from stem cells

londons_explore•9 minutes ago

I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc.

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.

gnabgib•about 3 hours ago

Related (2021) Turning stem cells into human eggs (97 points, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040823

misiek08•about 2 hours ago

How hard you have to work to break scroll on web page? Nice article, but going through it was a technical nightmare.

Can we stop adding unnecessary JS to website to stop global warming by calculating AND ALTERING SCROLL?

happymellon•about 1 hour ago

Odd. It was a designers dream (and a readability nightmare) but I didn't have an issue with scroll.

Firefox on Samsung S23, not exactly a new or a powerful phone but rendered it fine.

sudo_cowsay•about 1 hour ago

Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.

scotty79•about 1 hour ago

That can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate.

Protostome•about 1 hour ago

Mitochondria can be translplanted/replaced. There already therapies and babies born out of these kinds of procedures

scotty79•about 1 hour ago

Can you point me to anything about mitochondrial transplants? I'd love to see bat mitochondria transplanted into other mammals. They must have really superior ones given the energy expenditures needed to support flight and their long lifespans.

Protostome•about 1 hour ago

I will let the experts continue from here :) This review is from 2020, i bet things have progressed since then

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7169912/

type0•16 minutes ago

I don't, isn't this the recipe to get IRL Morbius?

Schlagbohrer•25 minutes ago

Batboy, real at last

treyd•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells.

Schlagbohrer•27 minutes ago

Reverse Cremaster cycle?

Jackobrien•about 1 hour ago

Really interesting point if true. Makes sense to me, and I’m sure the team is trying to solve it

rf15•about 1 hour ago

genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?

scotty79•about 1 hour ago

When the damage accumulates across generations the natural selection has opportunity to weed out particularly harmful instances. You can get a feeling for how important avoiding the mitochondrial damage is and how hard it is to mitigate, by looking at how fiercely the reproductive process protects them from aging.

shevy-java•about 2 hours ago

A japanese scientist again (Katsuhiko Hayashi is in Osaka).

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.

Schlagbohrer•28 minutes ago

The origins of stem cells for use in the biosciences and in cosmetics are extremely brutal and should be illegal. Sandra Bullock explains it better than I could: https://youtu.be/PwO3TEj9-5g

The first early human eggs from stem cells

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