
Science Is Getting Us Closer To The End of Infertility - sethbannon
https://www.wired.com/story/reverse-infertility/
======
Lionsion
Infertility is terrible, but I worry that technologically-assisted
reproduction is a mistake that could cause far worse problems. It will remove
selective pressures that keep human reproduction viable without technology.
That's true for any step of it: from gametogenesis to birth. If that happens,
a whole host of nasty problems erupt:

* What happens to humanity when technological civilization has a hiccup, if it can only reproduce with access to advanced technology?

* What happens to human rights when reproduction can only occur with the assent of the authority that controls the technological means of reproduction?

* etc.

Perhaps the research should be focused on diagnosing and permanently curing
the underlying causes of infertility, than on trying to work around them?

~~~
coding123
That second point could happen without tech.

~~~
nostrademons
The first point could too - modern technology has turned a number of
conditions that were extremely serious in the wild into mere annoyances.
Myopia, asthma, newborn jaundice, hernias, both high & low birth weight,
obesity - all of these could easily be fatal if you (or your mom) needed to
outrun a lion, but they're easily taken care of with modern medical
technology, and hence have become extremely common in the general population.

~~~
whatshisface
And yet, the population isn't exploding in developed countries. This implies
that _something else_ must be receiving the selection pressure instead. I
wonder what it could be?

~~~
nostrademons
Economic ability to pay for these medical treatments (well, in the U.S. at
least), as well as all the other things needed to keep the lions away from the
kids. There's a big fertility bust among what used to be the middle class, as
many people don't see how they could possibly afford the necessities needed to
raise a child (health care, housing, education, safe environment, parental
attention) as they were raised.

(I suspect that there's also simply _less selection pressure_ , in the sense
that more people are having 1 or 2 kids, vs. in historical times where the
emperor my have had 1000, a wealthy man dozens, and lots of paupers ended up
with no kids at all. That has the effect of letting lots of genetic variation
into the genome without immediately weeding it out, at least until some
selection event occurs in the future.)

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aaavl2821
This is really amazing. We can take skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and
turn those into viable eggs. The science behind the first step won the 2012
nobel prize in medicine [1]

This advance, combined with our ability to rapidly and precisely genetically
engineer zygotes with CRISPR, has some incredibly amazing and some incredibly
scary implications. We can already generate viable eggs from cells in mice's
tails, fertilize those eggs, and edit the genomes of those zygotes precisely
to produce custom genetically engineered mice (genetically engineered mice are
a core tech in the biopharma research industry).

These technologies enable an unprecedented advance in the precision and
throughput of this process and it seems very likely we will be able to do this
in humans in 10-15 years. Factory-scale generation of zygotes and high
throughput editing of those zygotes. I'd argue this topic deserves the same
level of ethical scrutiny as AGI, if not more, as at least to me it seems that
this tech is far closer to becoming a reality. My imagination may be getting
away from me, but industrial scale human zygote editing seems like it could be
the most significant (for good or evil) technological advance in our lifetime

[1]
[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2...](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2012/press.html)

~~~
magduf
This is great news. Before long, we can stop having kids naturally and just
create them artificially in factories, like in the prescient 1949 novel "Brave
New World", and let governments raise them in institutions run by
professionals. Having amateurs raise kids has had mixed results at best, with
many people proving to be absolutely terrible parents, and usually the people
who are the worst parents having more kids than those who are actually good at
it. Finally, we're now finding that when people are financially comfortable
and busy with fulfilling lives and careers, they don't want to have kids, or
very many of them (not enough to maintain the population). Outsourcing
reproduction and child-rearing to the state will fix all of this.

~~~
CodeCube
I honestly can't tell if you're saying all of this sarcastically

~~~
mlrtime
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)

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haZard_OS
This portion of the article must have a typo:

> "What if there are parents who wanted to select for Tay-Sachs disease?"

I doubt there are any would-be parents out there who want a child with a
5-year death sentence. Judging by the sentence immediately following:

> "There are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who are somewhere on the
> spectrum, and some of them will want children who are neuro-atypical.”

...I suspect the author intended "Tay-Sachs" to be "Autism".

~~~
nwah1
And that entire paragraph touches on random fears about fertility technology
that have almost nothing to do with the subject of this article, which is
gametogenesis.

~~~
patall
Yes and no because the article is also about the future possibilities of
getting kids with desired traits (as you can generate those much better when
you have a truly unlimited potential of egg cells). And there was for example
recently a court case that (deaf) parents in Germany won so that thier (also
deaf) child wont get a hearing implant.

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bobthechef
Treating infertility through technological means is not necessarily wrong. For
example, taking a safe medication that corrects for some defect of the
reproductive system is fine. But this, and IVF, are no such medication.

"Yet a funny thing happened, or didn’t, in the decades that followed: Millions
of babies were conceived using IVF."

This doesn't address everything. Certainly, the health of the baby is
important, but that's not the only problem. Another problem is the destruction
of fertilized human embryos that IVF currently entails. However, even if we
assume that we can perfect the technology to such a degree that none of this
is an issue. We still have to contend with things like the commodification of
human beings and the transformation of human beings into products to be made
and sold, and made the subjects of economic transactions. Our acceptance and
aggressive defense of such reproductive technologies may be another example of
consumerism's hold on our values.

[0]
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8d/eb87bcc3e610b8ff51b9f1...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d8d/eb87bcc3e610b8ff51b9f15017b5ac3f0c24.pdf)

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Alex3917
Wired is definitely overselling the safety of IVF. Right now the oldest IVF
baby, using the first generation technology, is less than 40 years old. So it
will be several more decades until we really know even approximately how safe
it is.

So far it doesn't seem to be excessively dangerous, but we really just don't
know.

~~~
klipt
IANAD, but I believe that even after implantation, there's a lot of natural
selection going on that helps remove unhealthy embryos. "30% to 40% of all
fertilized eggs miscarry, often before the pregnancy is known"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#First_trimester](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#First_trimester)

~~~
Alex3917
That's a good point. But as we say when determining how fast a given piece of
software will execute, "tools, not rules."

In other words, the fact that something should logically be safe certainly
counts for something, but not as evidence.

~~~
ewjordan
Ok, but...is there any particular reason to think IVF is _not_ safe, other
than a superstitious ookiness about the methodology of the thing?

40 years without any such indication is fairly strong evudence, IMO.

~~~
Alex3917
1) There are a lot of studies showing an increased risk of various conditions,
e.g. heart problems for babies conceived with ICSI.

2) It stands to reason that while some infertility is caused by issues that
having nothing to do with the genetics of the sperm or egg (e.g. vitamin E
deficiency), other cases may be caused by genetic conditions that have
coevolved to cause fertility issues to prevent them from being passed along.

3) You'd have to completely rule out the possibility of sexual selection at
the gamete level, even though this idea has been gaining traction in the last
few years.

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speg
As someone who went through multiple IVF cycles I am very happy to hear news
of a less invasive process. The idea that you might be able to create gametes
from adult cells is the stuff that makes me wish I took more biology in
school.

(Our son is now 16 months old and amazing.)

~~~
aogl
Congratulations, it is a very tiring process

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chiefalchemist
The earth doesn't have an infertility problem. The First World does. This
research and solutions are a function of affluence, a market that can afford
to pay for them.

The population is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.

~~~
decebalus1
Your comment reminds me both of a Chomsky opinion piece [1] and a Swift essay
[2]. I couldn't agree with you more. The same can be said about 'food
shortages' but in that case it's the other way around.

[1] Recognizing the “Unpeople” -
[https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/](https://chomsky.info/20120107-2/)

[2] A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a
Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the
Publick -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)

~~~
chiefalchemist
I should probably add that empathy, and perhaps the understanding of the true
meaning of love is also unevenly distributed.

It would be interesting to see long terms studies of the families of IF or
similar technology driven conceptions.

If Mother Nature is speaking, how wise it to ignore her?

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JohnClark1337
Great, now that people don't want to have kids because of over population and
a negative impact on the environment, it's easier than ever to have kids.

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Simulacra
What I fear is when science gets us to the point that humans are no longer
necessary for reproduction

