
Babies from Skin Cells? Prospect Is Unsettling to Some Experts - robteix
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/health/ivg-reproductive-technology.html
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l5870uoo9y
It seems to me that our social norms – including women foremost expected to
get an education and a career – are inevitable moving our societies in the
direction of artificially creating babies, if we want to survive longer term.
To an extend this process have already begone with screening babies for
disabilities and other invasive fertility treatments. Soon this will involve
screening for a variety of hereditary diseases. And from there why not go the
next logical step and improve the human body by modifying the genetics?

This is currently meet with reservations in much of the Western world due to
history, but it is doubtful that will China or India will show the same
hesitation. On the contrary their population might view it entirely positive,
who doesn't want to have a tall light-skinned son performing well in school.
In such a scenario we will be forced to partake or be overtaken.

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pjc50
> It seems to me that our social norms – including women foremost expected to
> get an education and a career – are inevitable moving our societies in the
> direction of artificially creating babies, if we want to survive longer term

This isn't really a technological question but a socioeconomic one. Gestation
is hard enough, but the much longer work of child-rearing: who pays for that?

Similarly with artificial generation: who is going to pay for it? The very
rich who've already exhausted conventional infertility treatment?

The fully artificial person raises a possibility from cyberpunk dystopia:
corporate-owned persons. After all, if someone is built out of artificial DNA
and has no direct link to human parentage, could they be made liable for their
own existence? Kind of like college loans, only starting from birth.

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gruez
>After all, if someone is built out of artificial DNA and has no direct link
to human parentage, could they be made liable for their own existence? Kind of
like college loans, only starting from birth.

No, because minors can't enter into a contract. Not to mention that they
didn't even consent to it.

~~~
tnzn
minors can't enter into a contract as for now.

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nkrisc
The most concerning possibility I find is the ability to surreptitiously
create offspring of two unsuspecting people with nothing more than some left
behind skin or hair (wouldn't the Bene Gesserit have liked this?). The rest of
it doesn't seem particularly concerning to me.

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dghughes
It reminds me of the scene in GATTACA where the imposter Jerome vacuums up any
of his skin cells to protect his identity.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kTdh-u5tis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kTdh-u5tis)

~~~
JauntTrooper
GATTACA is now 20 years old. It's amazing how memorable it is, and how well
it's held up.

~~~
dghughes
It seems the world is becoming a combination of 1984, Idiocracy and GATTCA.

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pmarreck
it is infuriating when the topmost comment on that article is about
overpopulation FUD while the comments have gotten closed, so I am unable to
retort.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-
is-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-
problem.html)

There is absolutely no hard evidence that world overpopulation should be seen
as a serious concern, because we do not know the actual food production
capacity limit of the earth, and clearly we are already wasting quite a bit of
whatever's there (such as eating meats instead of plants).

~~~
DamnInteresting
Also, the rate of population growth is slowing such that the UN projects a
peak population of 9.22 billion, occurring in 2075.

[http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor...](http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf)

~~~
LeeHwang
Population increases and declines are not evenly spread across the world. The
migration crisis leading to the rise of global populism seems to be set to
happen again.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-africa-
ana...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-africa-analysis-
idUSKCN12D1PN)

~~~
DamnInteresting
Yes, but the UN projection takes that into account. Not to imply that any
projection is perfect, but they are working with a lot of historical data.

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Ygg2
Probably the biggest long term concern is that this kind of reproduction, that
depends on machines will become prevalent to the point of non functionality of
normal reproductive systems. One freak solar flare and our species, can't
multiply.

~~~
chasil
More importantly, "transposons" (endogenous retro-viruses) spray damage all
over a normal human cell's DNA about once a month. The damage would be
cumulative.

Gamete cells have special mechanisms to control transposon activity that skin
cells lack. The child won't be getting a clean genome.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element)

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libeclipse
Regardless of possible misuse, the technology (apparently) exists. We can't
just ignore it and hope that it will go away.

Besides, it has numerous benefits too. I feel like the argument against it is
an example of the slippery slope fallacy[1].

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope)

~~~
DarkKomunalec
Oh the irony of invoking the slippery slope fallacy in a post stating "if it
exists, it'll be used" :)

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libeclipse
That's not exactly what I said but---even if I did---I don't think that it's
such a flawed line of reasoning.

Do you mean to imply that if something exists, it is likely that it will never
be used?

~~~
DarkKomunalec
No. I meant to imply that slippery slope isn't a fallacy in this case.

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moofight
underlying tech is the following:

\- reprogram cells (could be any cells, here they are considering skin cells
as they are easy to get) to become embryonic stem cells capable of growing
into different kinds of cells

\- use signaling factors that occur in nature to guide those stem cells to
become eggs or sperm

This has been done with mice

~~~
klibertp
Did it "work" with mice? Ie. were the created eggs and sperm able to combine
and start multiplying when put inside the appropriate part of a mouse?

That would be great, however the backlash from the more... conservative
population will be equally huge, I guess :)

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besselheim
The work by Hayashi published last year had derived precursor egg cells, but
the sperm was from normal mouse testes as usual. As described in the article,
they did successfully create healthy offspring, though the success rate was
very small.

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jansho
Yep welcome back eugenics.

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wyager
This isn't eugenics. I'm not sure why people use that label so much with
almost any reproduction-related technology. Birth control is "eugenics",
genetic disease screening is "eugenics", the creation of egg cells from other
cells is "eugenics".

Eugenics is, very specifically, the application of husbandry to humans. I'm
all for anything that has similar benefits without the associated human rights
violations.

~~~
jansho
Let's not pretend ... if babies can be artificially created, why not tweak its
genes a _little bit?_ It's harmless right; what's wrong with going for brown
hair, green eyes? What's wrong with cutting the risk of getting fatter/cancer?

Then there's the social consequences worthy of a _Black Mirror_ season.

It's a slippery slope me thinks.

~~~
afthonos
> Let's not pretend ... if babies can be artificially created, why not tweak
> its genes a little bit?

Why not indeed?

We have taken, or are trying really hard to take, natural selection out of the
equation for ourselves. Doing so without an alternative way to bring out
desirable traits and reduce undesirable ones condemns our descendants to
lifetimes of treatment for ever more exotic and complicated genetic diseases.
I don't think that's ethical, and I don't think stopping medical research is
either, leaving us with gene editing of embryos (and hopefully someday fully
developed humans) as the only way to ensure the health of coming generations.

Of course, you're right that this will have profound social effects. But so
will doing nothing while continuing medical advances.

~~~
jansho
The question is do you want to survive or do you want to be more _super_. IMO
the gene-editing/eugenics topic falls under the latter.

No one is saying that curing diseases is bad. But the fact is our lives will
always be blighted with something, if not Disease A then it's Disease B and if
not Accident C.

Nature has a wonderful way of intervening, somehow or another. If you find
one, then it'll just get more creative. And by the way, I would argue that
most of the current ailments are _human-generated_ \- like climate change and
lung cancer caused by smoking.

The only leeway I can sort of accept is serious hereditary diseases like
madness passed down through generations - but even then I'm cautious that
it'll open the floodgates.

No. The risk is too much - a new human race with a clearly defined code of
what's good and what's not good for them? What about those who can't "make
it"? What about the rest of us who can't afford fancy genes?

Geez, this is Darwinian struggle taken to the extreme.

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afthonos
> No one is saying that curing diseases is bad. But the fact is our lives will
> always be blighted with something, if not Disease A then it's Disease B and
> if not Accident C.

But our entire history has seen us making it safer to be alive. From cooking
to antibiotics to now immunotherapy, we have reduced the risk of death at
every turn. This even extends to mobility: we have reduced the ways in which
we move (what is a road but a disincentive to use any other path?) in exchange
for making them massively safer. Safety hasn't _monotonously_ increased, but
the pattern is clear. And successful. Saying that it can't be perfect isn't an
argument against continuing.

> No. The risk is too much - a new human race with a clearly defined code of
> what's good and what's not good for them? What about those who can't "make
> it"? What about the rest of us who can't afford fancy genes?

This is a very valid ethical concern, and I agree that getting it wrong is a
scary prospect. But I don't think that getting it wrong is inevitable, nor do
I think that inaction is better.

In particular, the "never" position relies instead on _blind chance_. It may
seem seductive because, hey, after all, blind chance is how we got here in the
first place, but we suffer from tremendous survivor bias; our fitness to our
environment is built on billions upon billions of failed experiments that
resulted in death for each of the test subjects. I think it's perfectly fine
to look for better models.

The societal problems you're worried about are very real, but I think the
solution is to talk about them and work them out.

~~~
jansho
> but I think the solution is to talk about them and work them out.

Hey you're right, and I appreciate that you're open about your thoughts. But
my position differs in that I think there isn't anything to "work out",
because it's a non-essential technology. Sure it might eradicate diseases, _it
might._ But there are other ways to tackle them that have far less
controversial impact.

> But I don't think that getting it wrong is inevitable, nor do I think that
> inaction is better.

With tools that have greater potential to be massively destructive, they
inevitably end up like that.

Look how we shot ourselves in the foot with the inventions of dynamite and
nuclear fission. Yes they did open doors, but arguably we've upped our own
risk of self-destruction too.

"Inactive" here just means rejecting this path and taking up another instead.
And, the latter may well open doors more beneficial to us.

Look, I have to say that I dislike looking at society and social issues from
the Darwinian perspective. It's just too cynical, and kinda missing the point
of living. We're not just here to _survive._ Whatever age we live to, every
one has a chance to witness the wonder of just existing. We keep passing the
torch of enlightenment, but we're not supposed to fall in the trap that we
have _control_ and therefore _power_. Trust me, Nature will laugh right back
at us.

And you can't compare this issue with our rich history of wit and innovation.
For a start, the generations before were trying to _change the world_ , and
this is radically different to creating a new "breed" of humans, where going
down this path is not only superficial, it's most likely very painful for a
lot of us.

Let's shift perspective a bit here: with this new "species", _ours can get
wiped out._

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awinter-py
babies the normal way is pretty unsettling if you've got one on the way.

~~~
psyc
Right? Imagine the reaction if we'd done it the test-tube way all along, and
somebody suggested the natural way.

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Namrog84
I feel like I've seen a movie or TV show that had this once with the
characters being totally grossed out and unsettled by the natural way and
thought test-tubes were clearly the superior way.

~~~
tnzn
GATTACA

