
3-D printed ovaries produce healthy offspring in mice - Kliment
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/may/3-d-printed-ovaries-offspring/
======
snerbles
The prosthetic ovary consists of a printed scaffold that carries ovarian
follicles (egg precursor cells), sourced from natural donor ovaries.

From the Nature article:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15261](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15261)

> Two mice with sham controls and seven mice with bioprosthetic ovaries were
> mated with males who had previously sired pups. Three bioprosthetic ovary
> recipients had litters of one or two pups each, while none of the sham
> controls had pups. Of the litters produced, at least one pup per litter was
> confirmed to have resulted from an egg ovulated from the implant.

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reasonattlm
This is a good demonstration of the point that artificial organs don't have to
be the same as the real thing, they just have to be similar enough for the
subset of tasks desired.

This is especially true for chemical (liver) or cell (thymus) factory organs.
Just because the research community can't yet manufacture blood vessel
networks needed for large organs doesn't mean they can't use fully or mostly
functional organoids to produce benefits. It is possible in principle to patch
a diseased liver with many organoids, or put thymus organoids into lymph
nodes, and so forth.

This sort of thing will get underway in earnest if there isn't any real
movement on the blood vessel network problem within the next few years.

~~~
Teever
I've been thinking the same thing for food production.

To me the whole in vitro meat burger thing is the wrong place to start. It's
too hard to get taste, texture, and appearance right.

I wonder if it is easier to develop a bio 'machine' that produces chicken
eggs. Imagine a world where eggs didn't come from chickens, but they came from
a small toaster sized appliance on your counter top. What if this little box
could produce eggs daily and you just needed to keep it plugged in and top up
the protein/carbohydrate slurry reservoir periodically.

It doesn't matter what this tissue would look like, or taste, or smell. All
that would matter is that it produced eggs.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Where does the protein-carbohydrate slurry come from? A farm?

Why not just let the chicken hang out on the farm in the first place, and eat
the nutrients itself?

I can't help but feel like the whole in vitro food movement is missing
something fundamental. Energy has to come from somewhere. You can make a solar
panel that generates food. You can make that food resemble what would come
from a farm.

But what's the benefit of having this solar food machine vs an expertly run
farm a la [http://www.polyfacefarms.com/](http://www.polyfacefarms.com/)? The
farm makes a bunch of animals and people happy. It is a beautiful place. It is
an efficient use of solar resources, probably more efficient than any machine
we'll be able to build in the next 50 years.

To me there are two facts that both in vitro meat people and vegans seem to
have a hard time accepting:

1) There's a limited amount of solar energy hitting the planet. It's either
going to your food, or it's going to a wild ecology. It's a zero sum game, and
animals either die, or are ecologically aborted in order for you to live. The
only question is the number, and what life is like for the animals in your
foodshed, whether you eat them or not.

2) For any given chemical process, there are already animals who are basically
doing that process close to optimally.

Replacing an animal with a solar machine isn't actually any kind of kindness.
They like existing. They enjoy it. Exterminating a flock of happy chickens and
replacing them with machines is mean.

In the long term, it seems obvious to me that some combination of plant-heavy
cuisine + expertly run, animal-included farms + ecologically sensitive hunting
in wild spaces is the solution that gets you the most animal happiness per
square foot of solar activity.

Maybe in vitro meat can help out during this period of excessive meat
consumption culture, but I just don't see how the math works out in the long
run. And there's still this whole hand-wavy "costs and energy will come down"
thing which hasn't technically happened yet, although people like to talk
about it like its a foregone conclusion.

Falafel sandwich for lunch, eggs benedict on Sunday, tempeh Reubans on
Tuesday. That kind of diet keeps humans and chickens happy and is as close to
absolute solar efficiency as I can imagine. I just don't see how a solar egg
fits into that picture. Is there some other animal living under the solar
panel that you prefer to a chicken? Solar farm snakes or something?

~~~
robbiep
I agree with your ecological point but photosynthesis is a 1% efficient
process and solar panels are easily available at 17%. So if you can gather the
energy to perform the reactions to make the substrates to. Hold protein and
carbohydrate in an industrial process, given the losses at each stage (some of
which, as you identify, may be highly desirable - cow poo is a great
fertiliser and there is a whole ecosystem supported in a hundred acres of land
which could easily support 100 head cattle) your efficiency of generation
would end up being orders of magnitude higher - quick fermi equation of 17x at
solar conversion and guess at somewhere in the order of 50x for direct
conversion to protein/cabs and you really do have a highly energy efficient
process

~~~
erikpukinskis
That 50x number... you just made that up? Are you thinking about all of the
different chemicals in food, or are you just imagining like, a dextrose
factory?

I'm deeply skeptical of that number, but let's assume you can make your
machine. Why? What good does it do? Why would you want to have a solar food
factory when you can just live in an ecology? What's your vision for the
Earth? Mine is that it's covered in healthy ecologies that sustain the plants
and animals that live in them. It's not just about food, it's about how to
enjoy being alive. It's about being connected with the plants and animals that
sustain you, not for their sake, but for yours: so you might learn about
yourself. Because we're just them, added together.

I don't think an egg protein solar factory that's attached to a VR pod
facility is an improvement on a rainforest. I'm happy for the VR pod/egg
factory to exist, but I don't think a world covered in them is anything but a
dystopian future for us.

~~~
robbiep
Mate

At no point did I say it was a good idea, you're projecting your fears of a
technical dystopia upon my pseudo-scientific hypothesising. In fact, if you re
read my thread you'll see that I say I AGREE with your ecological point - i.e.
I want garden earth. Don't be careless at comprehension. I just said it
appears practically possible to improve significantly on the energy conversion
of sunlight into not just dextrose but the full biological stack - fats, amino
acids and subsequently proteins.

Re the numbers, as I said that was my fermi equation method of getting to it.
I know ballpark figures for most of the numbers so in true fermi fashion it's
within an order of magnitude of the true figure. I don't care if you're
skeptical of the figure, that's not the point of a fermi equation (unless
you're the great man himself and get within 5kt of the yield of the trinity
nuclear test by dropping a piece of paper)

------
asciimo
Finally, a possible solution to mouse infertility! I dream of a day when we
can apply similar technology to humans and restore our dwindling population.

~~~
nsxwolf
This is pretty insensitive. There's a lot of women that would love to have
this technology available instead IVF or other options.

~~~
asciimo
I understand that perspective, but the #1 threat to our habitat is more
inhabitants. It's hard to celebrate investing in a longshot technology that
will ultimately exacerbate our problems. An individual's desires have to take
a backseat sometimes.

~~~
qb45
I think only Eastern Asia really has this problem at the moment while some
areas have the opposite.

~~~
hhw
Did you mean South Asia? China has gotten to the point where they are able to
lift the one child per family policy, after seeing that it made very little
difference when they previously relaxed the policy in cases where both parents
were only children. Meanwhile, Japan has to resort to advertising and public
service announcements to encourage young people to date due to their low birth
rates and declining population.

