
Fertility 'breakthrough' as human eggs grown in lab for first time - vezycash
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/human-eggs-grown-lab-fertility-breakthrough-first-time-ivf-development-scientists-edinburgh-a8201001.html
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technotony
This has several big implications:

1\. Women will soon not need to go through the painful (and expensive) process
of freezing eggs. (soon being when this is shown to be safe and equivalent to
existing eggs). This will enable older women to have kids and solve some
reproductive issues.

2\. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for
scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs
(as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo research
and other genetic analysis of human germline

3\. Potentially this could lead to gay couples being able to have genetically
descended children (obviously male couples here, but similar work on sperm is
being done that could potentially enable lesbian couples to have kids too).
This can be done as skin cells can be turned into pluripotent stem cells, and
then maybe into the eggs (still some missing pieces in this process)

~~~
gwern
> 2\. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for
> scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs
> (as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo
> research and other genetic analysis of human germline

Don't forget embryo selection: if you can create on demand several dozen or
hundred eggs, the estimates of gains from embryo selection go from ~0.5 IQ
points to 5-10 IQ points (and similarly for any other trait you might want to
select for). 0.5 points is pretty trivial and no one will be beating down
doors for that; 10 points, however, is a different proposition.

Perhaps more importantly, it's a step towards _iterated_ embryo selection -
fertilizing, selecting, then regressing to stem cells, and progressing to
sperm/eggs - and doing so for multiple generations, getting +10 points each
time, for largely unbounded gains.

~~~
scarmig
What's the reason for thinking the gains are unbounded? AFAICT we could
reasonably suppose something like 50 IQ points is within reach via embryo
selection, but what would a something like a 300 IQ even mean, and even if it
does mean something tangible, why should we assume that's biologically
reachable in the same way that a 150 IQ would be?

~~~
gwern
Since historical estimates of figures like von Neumann or Sidis are more like
+70-100 points, I would add at least 20 to that as the lower bound on the
upper bound. Since such people existed, at least that much must be possible.

Of course, there's no way to definitively prove there's any potential to reach
above that short of the existence proof of actually creating such people, but
there's a lot of considerations which point to much more being possible: many
complex traits have been pushed by selective breeding by many SDs, no one has
ever been remotely close to genetically optimal and humans are minimally
selected for intelligence, there's a large mutation load in terms of gene
breakage, absolute measures of cognitive functioning like vocab size or digit
span or reaction time generally show humans are nowhere near limits, brain
scaling laws do not put humans at near any 0 marginal returns point, etc.

Even if there really is a bound at +100 and being able to increase IQ that
much doesn't impress you for some reason, then you can simply spend your
selection power on selecting for everything _else_... I shouldn't need to
point out that many other traits are very important aside from intelligence.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
When you wrote _" largely unbounded gains_" I thought not only in terms of
_genetic potential_ but also the impact on science / technology / society /
culture this would likely have.

Pulling numbers out of a hat here: if we could have even, say, 0.015% of the
global population, approximately 1 million people, with an IQ of ~200, the
effects on the evolution of knowledge could be staggering.

~~~
Retric
If you look at actual people with 190+ IQ's their contributions are generally
minor. We estimate that historic people that did great things had very high
IQ's but that's our biases talking.

EX: Garry Kasparov is often said to have a sky high IQ but he tested at 135.
He did however have an unusually good memory.

~~~
kbenson
Do we even know whether IQ is all that comprehensive a test of the different
aspects of intelligence? Memory obviously plays a large role in many ways.

~~~
gwern
But IQ tests are affected by memory, quite a bit. Memory tests are in fact
some of the best ways to measure intelligence, like backwards digit span.
Unsurprisingly, the genetics of memory and IQ overlap as do lots of other
cognitive traits
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Intelligen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Intelligence)).

~~~
kbenson
Lol, I'll take your word as a good authority, and read up. I imagine you've
looked into it more than the average person... ;)

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spraak
I feel like so much of these conversations lack the high level questioning
around why IVF and related technology has become so prominent and increased in
usage. Is the rate of fertility problems increasing? And why?

~~~
ereyes01
Maybe not in this particular article/thread, but it's been widely discussed
how starting a family can be disruptive to a woman's career and professional
development. The reasons it's disruptive could be due to companies / culture
in general not being flexible and accommodating enough to motherhood. Taking
time off from your career tends to be a very costly proposition in our current
time.

For these reasons, there's lots of pressure to delay starting a family, and
it's no surprise that IVF has seen increased demand. Some companies (i.e.
Facebook) even provide their female employees a benefit that covers freezing
their eggs. This is somewhat controversial, as some would argue that Facebook
(and other companies, and perhaps our culture in general) should instead focus
on reducing the professional cost of starting a family.

Therefore, these findings about growing human eggs could have great
significance. I have friends grappling with this issue right now, so I
understand how this discovery could be a great help to them. I hope that
provides some useful context...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>focus on reducing the professional cost of starting a family //

Few professions are important enough to spare a passing thought over compared
to the importance of raising children IMO.

I mean Facebook? Do people working there, for example, really think social
data mining for advertising is important in some way? Sure, income is
important, but people don't say they want to protect their income, they always
talk about career progression (which is conceptually unrelated).

We've got plenty of people, making ways for people to sacrifice everything to
a job without failing to reproduce seems pretty counter to any need.

~~~
namelost
This is part of a deeper problem in certain parts of America whereby one's
personal value is determined entirely by one's net worth (and perhaps also
education).

~~~
lostlogin
That’s not an American problem - it’s everywhere.

~~~
namelost
There are many parts of the world, even parts of America, where for a single
woman or married couple to choose to remain childless in the pursuit of wealth
would lower their social value more than the extra wealth would increase it.

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bitL
\- human eggs - check

\- artificial uterus - check

\- human factory - pending

~~~
pdx
\- Soma - pending

\- Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon - negotiable

~~~
zynthax
\- Make copy of human mind - Pending

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vitobcn
For those interested, here's the actual paper:

[https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gay002](https://doi.org/10.1093/molehr/gay002)

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tathougies
I wish doctors would spend more time figuring out why babies die instead of
figuring out how to make more. I have a friend whose wife has had five full-
term stillbirths, with no explanation. Babies all tested as perfectly healthy.
My wife and I just lost a perfect baby boy mid-pregnancy, with no explanation.
A few others I know have lost otherwise healthy infants in the first years of
life, again no explanation, despite multiple doctors.

It's wonderful we can make a human egg and all, but we still can't figure out
why babies die, so forgive me if we're still not that impressed by medicine,
and think we're misallocating resources.

~~~
lugg
[https://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx](https://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx)

2016 numbers because recent ones make me cry.

Infertility: 86m Birth /infant health: 240m SIDS: 16m

Not sure I see the misallocation.

~~~
tathougies
This study wasn't NIH funded?

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indescions_2018
Of related interest. And to put the complexity of fertility into perspective.
A recent study in fruit flies demonstrated the signalling, transcription and
synthesis of a protein called "Hindsight". Which triggers the breakdown and
rupture of follicle cells. Thereby releasing a single ovum to be fertilized.

An amazing result is that the proteins humans produce for priming their
follicles to release an egg. Can be transplanted into fruit flies. With an
analogous priming of fruit fly follicles for ovulation. Suggesting that genes
regulating fertility and reproduction are conserved across the full spectrum
of Animal Kingdom phyla.

Zinc-finger transcription factor Hindsight regulates ovulation competency of
Drosophila follicles

[https://elifesciences.org/articles/29887](https://elifesciences.org/articles/29887)

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jedberg
I wonder if the extraction of the ovarian tissue is less invasive than the
process of harvesting mature eggs.

Both my kids came from IVF, and we harvested eggs twice. Besides all the
shots, which are painful enough, my wife had to have a very invasive procedure
to collect the eggs that left her bruised for days.

If the collection is easier, I can see doctors opting for this as a way of
keeping the mother less stressed before implanting an embryo, increasing the
chance for success!

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yters
Since I am not a pod baby, this means it is unlikely pod babies account for a
majority of human population.

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blackrock
When can we grow babies in a pod? Matrix style.

Note: This is a serious scientific question.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Actually, the question that interests me is when, if we allow couples+ to skip
around infertility problems, will we have engineered in enough infertility
that we can no longer maintain the population if artificial means fail/become
unavailable?

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airstrike
I can't wait for humanity to build an "unmanned" spaceship filled with human
eggs that only get fertilized 1,000 years from now when it reaches [insert
exciting destination] and then the babies are raised by AI and trained so they
can populate other worlds.

~~~
magic_beans
Babies need love!! You’re going to need to put some people on that ship.

~~~
maneesh
Relevant: The Harlow Monkey Love Experiments:
[http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm](http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm)

~~~
magic_beans
Anytime I read about the Harlow experiment I just want to cry.

