
Ask HN: Is a non-human surrogate mother possible? - zunzun
Is a non-human surrogate mother possible? More generally, among mammals, can very different species act as surrogate mothers for fertilized egg cells and have the resulting baby mammals successfully brought to term?
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kazinator
One issue there is that the placenta generated by the fetus has to attach to
the uterus of the foreign species. It's a tight integration of two tissues.

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Someone
I think the first is likely (hybrids often exist, as with ligers and tigons,
mules and hinny’s) but _very different species_? IMO less likely.

I don’t want to know the answer, and it may be because of my limited
understanding of biology, but it wouldn’t even surprise me if humans could
interbreed with some of the great apes (rationale: I wouldn’t know why that
would be much different from lions and tigers or horses and zebras. Those are
within-genus, but I don’t think ‘genus’ is that well-defined, and, certainly
historically, biologists have wanted to keep humans well-separated from
animals, so there’s a decent chance they exaggerated the separation between
humans on the one hand and chimpanzees and bonobos on the other)

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celticninja
Pigs perhaps? Right sort of size, currently being looked at for organ
transplant. It really I think if we get to the point where we could use a pig
we are more likely to be able to build a womb from stem cells and grow a baby
in that. I imagine that the latter would be an easier sell to the public,
however the former would create quite a furore with 2 of the 3 Abrahamic
religions.

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vkaku
Good Point.

Reminds me of that study on the Internet which said that Humans = Monkeys who
mated with Pigs; I'm speculating that the Abrahamic religions knew about the
DNA link and made it sacrilegious.

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fosco
Why not?

This is the sort of question that gets raised at the end of Sapiens and
throughout homo deus two books by Yuval Noah Harari.

The next 100 years are going to be very interesting as science is really
testing the boundaries of what humans are capable of and I suspect more and
more experiments will occur just to trial and error and see what happens.

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ausbah
i think we'll see artificial wombs before non-human surrogates, either due to
moral or technological limitations

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devereaux
Don't get any naughty idea!

