Quest to create viable human sex cells in lab progressing rapidly, with huge implications for reproduction

Scientists are just a few years from creating viable human sex cells in the lab, according to an internationally renowned pioneer of the field, who says the advance could open up biology-defying possibilities for reproduction.

Speaking to the Guardian, Prof Katsuhiko Hayashi, a developmental geneticist at the University of Osaka, said rapid progress is being made towards being able to transform adult skin or blood cells into eggs and sperm, a feat of genetic conjury known as in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG).

His own lab is about seven years away from the milestone, he predicts. Other frontrunners include a team at the University of Kyoto and a California-based startup, Conception Biosciences, whose Silicon Valley backers include the OpenAI founder, Sam Altman and whose CEO told the Guardian that growing eggs in the lab “might be the best tool we have to reverse population decline” and could pave the way for human gene editing.

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm going to be the first to eat a Human omelette.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Ah yes great I feel at ease now, knowing Sam Altman gives the thumbs up to this

    That little voice telling me this is a very sharp double edged sword probably doesn't know shit

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I read five lines into the news and thought "oh well shoot, now billionaires are going to try reverse the population decline due to the shitty world they created so that they can continue to generate labour and revenue and make the rest of us fight for resources in an over crowded world". And what do you know Sam Altman was the first shit face to confirm my speculations.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I'm a bit dull to predict the future. But I can see we already have "ownership" of GMOs available for companies. The "Dire Wolves" that got resurrected that you don't hear about anymore belong to a company. We got plenty of examples of companies marketing something as positive, such as Monsanto saying they actually feed the planet and whatnot. Companies that start open source suddenly turning for profit. And unscrupulous governments and corruption.

    And now you have unlocked the possibility of creating fully customized humans in a lab.

    What could go wrong?

    Don't get me wrong I totally see how the technology can also be used for good. That's what OpenAI says about their product, too.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    "Just a a few years away" means, "We are attempting to grift a billionaire", and it won't be achieved. I wish the company many well funded years of unprofitable operation.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Production of humans without ties to historical family lines, would they have a number for a surname?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Welcome to the brave new world order

    And, in effect, eighty-three almost noseless black brachycephalic Deltas were cold-pressing. The fifty-six four-spindle chucking and turning machines were being manipulated by fifty-six aquiline and ginger Gammas. One hundred and seven heat-conditioned Epsilon Senegalese were working in the foundry. Thirty-three Delta females, long-headed, sandy, with narrow pelvises, and all within 20 millimetres of 1 metre 69 centimetres tall, were cutting screws. In the assembling room, the dynamos were being put together by two sets of Gamma-Plus dwarfs. The two low work-tables faced one another; between them crawled the conveyor with its load of separate parts; forty-seven blonde heads were confronted by forty-seven brown ones. Forty-seven snubs by forty-seven hooks; forty-seven receding by forty-seven prognathous chins. The completed mechanisms were inspected by eighteen identical curly auburn girls in Gamma green, packed in crates by thirty-four short-legged, left-handed male Delta-Minuses, and loaded into waiting trucks and lorries by sixty-three blue-eyed, flaxen and freckled Epsilon Semi-Morons.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokanovsky%27s_Process_(Brave_New_World)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Funnily enough I think I read that novel like twenty years ago

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    Aha. So that's why they don't care if everyone but the billionaires die.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 year ago (48 children)

    I'll never understand people who complain about population decline. It's a good thing. There are too many people here already. My thought on reading the headline was that it could be used in a different way. Everyone could be voluntarily sterilized, and then when they are ready and willing to have a kid they could use this new method to produce sex cells. No more unwanted pregnancies.

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  • [+] 105 points 1 year ago (34 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (27 children)

    Depopulation is a problem for any economic system. You can't run any form of government or economy when young workers aren't contributing to the tax base and the aging population requires more and more care.

    Sure as clockwork someone will come along and say tax the rich. That only works for so long in this scenario. The rich get rich off our backs. No backs, no rich.

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  • hideshow 27 child comments
  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (23 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (22 children)

    When you hit retirement, so will literally everyone else. You want to hire a nurse to wipe your ass because you can't, there's a 25 year waiting list because everyone is old.

    Your one grandchild has 6 older people to take care of in addition to their one child (spouse exactly in the same position)

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  • hideshow 22 child comments
  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (21 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (20 children)

    Doesn't matter, you need working age people. A society can't function if it's all old people. Period

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (19 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    Why accept the suffering of having fewer workers? If the fertility rate of the world is around 2, there are enough workers to sustain a perfectly good life for everyone

    You want it to get worse before it gets better, I don't believe it's necessary

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (17 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (16 children)

    Not necessarily at that exact number, replacement is 2.1 which is what I'm actually proposing

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (15 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    Depopulation to a lower level will bring unnecessary hardship to the older generations and slow down technological progress.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (13 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    My grandfather went to the bathroom in the outhouse (I know because I visited him). The improvement in the modern lifestyle is huge. You just don't know because you grew up with running water and didn't grow your own chickens for eggs

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (11 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    A stable human population of 9 billion cannot have endless growth in population, but you can conceivably endlessly improve people's lifestyles through technological improvement (well, until we know everything there is to know about science)

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (9 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (8 children)

    The markets would be growing as productivity is always growing, and there's real wage growth as well, so there's more goods and services people consume over time.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)

    It's not real consumer/producer, real compensation is inflation-adjusted

    Well, the mean compensation is always going to be higher than the median, right? The graph was originally posted to show that wages grow slower than the productivity. Both graphs are for the workers, but a lot of the difference is mean vs median. There are also other factors.

    For example, total compensation grew faster than wages because company health plans just cost companies more these days. Health care prices grew faster than inflation, so clearly companies had to pay more for them.

    In recent years the real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth has been solid

    The price of groceries in hours worked had been mostly dropping

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They are as good as what we had in the 70s, but women actually entered the workforce and China is manufacturing everything so all things considered economy under Biden was not so bad after all

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    People would have lots of kids if each subsequent child didn’t make their existing family’s life much more difficult

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    People used to have 5+ kids and it was considered fine. It's a cultural thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    The culture is linked to the income. People have more kids in poorer countries because they typically don’t have a social safety net so the only way to survive in old age is by having lots of children. When the countries become richer and get social security they start having less kids, especially when kids become a financial burden

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea. Let’s put the reproductive future of the species under commercial and/or governmental control.

    Both of those things are demonstrably trustworthy, especially in the last decade.

    We should cede all control to them. Indeed.

    (/s)

    Are you a young naive tech bro, or a Nazi Eugenicist? Is there a difference anymore? Have you even thought about what you are saying? That’s an insane take.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    Um I never said anything about giving control to anyone... in fact I specifically said "voluntarily"... you seem like an angry person who is looking for things to be mad about. I'm not sure how you jumped to calling me a nazi.

    I have thought about what I'm saying, have you? Unwanted pregnancies are something that by definition nobody wants. All I said was that this could be a way to address that, and you took that simple idea and ran to crazy town with it.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Who is going to take care of all the old people? AI?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Who's gonna take care of everyone when earth reaches it's carrying capacity? Which is actually decreasing as we continue to ravage the planet.

    Oh yeah who cares? It'll just be all the poor who suffer and die.

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  • [+] -15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Because the population decline is mostly a western societal phenomenon induced by the late stage capitalism we are suffering from, and our planet dying from our carelessness. Other countries, especially poorer ones, are still happily making babies. So "population decline" effectively means the decline of western populations, and I can see how people (including me) might have an issue with that.

    If all populations would shrink proportionally the same it would be a lot less contentious.

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    [+] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I prefer my omelette without sperm, but to each their own I guess !

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    There used to be a video on porn hub where multiple dudes nut in a frying pan. Some chick then proceeds to Crack a couple eggs to create a jizz omelet then feeds it to some other girl. Anyways

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Isnt this just cloning? Like if they grew sperm cells and eggs from my dandruff and combined them

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I guess, if you manage to create both sperm and eggs from the same sample and then use it to create an embryo. It sounds prone to a lot of defects though, for the same reason it's not recommended to have offspring with your siblings. I don't think that's what they're going after here.

    The presumption is that they would be able to combine sperm and eggs that are different enough to avoid this. Just like with any regular pregnancy.

    Keep in mind we already know how to manipulate/edit genes to enhance or suppress traits. Being able to conceive an embryo in vitro means you can now create a human tailored to your liking, without even needing a womb. That's a couple steps beyond cloning.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Oh good. Replicants. Can't wait to be an old man in the Bladerunner universe.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Military applications for ward of the state and "universal soldier" applications! Yay humanity.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I first read that as 'spam and eggs' and thought ... who the hell wants lab-grown spam?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    You are a true believer. Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. Thou art a subject of the divine. Created in the image of man, by the masses, for the masses. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard; increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    They are going after Hitler wet dream to create super human.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    give me a grant and I'll make sperm in a lab, it's a lot of handy work.

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