This really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, thinking it's possible to get out a chemistry set and just make a living thing. To be clear, they started with stem cells, and teased them into doing the right thing - they did not create a new living artifact from scratch;
> Instead, they used stem cells - the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type - and then mimicked natural processes in the lab.
Depends on what you mean by "can". From the Wikipedia article:
"A living "artificial cell" has been defined as a completely synthetic cell that can capture energy, maintain ion gradients, contain macromolecules as well as store information and have the ability to mutate. Nobody has been able to create such a cell."
> they did not create a new living artifact from scratch
that is where this is headed, that is where they want to go, that is not what they've done... till they do it. That is the dark side. Humans in a competition with one another are not capable in a broad sense of reining in every worst impulse, as we saw with recent "gain of function" experiments.
Not sure why the parent thinks so, but my only concern is with new lifeforms.
We constantly mess up the ecosystem, merely by introducing existing species into environments which cannot handle them.
Soon we will be able to engineer exotic forms of life, yet we cannot currently control, reign in, or manage current, naturly evolved forms of life.
For example, we have to spray deadly chemicals on crops, to kill fungus, bacteria, etc. Of we have a pest problem, we have to entice them to eat poison, or trick them into traps.
Our control of existing orgamisims is essentially non-existent. The above methods just reduce population, often very ineffectively.
This means that almost certainly, when things we create end up free, we will be incapable of removing them from the ecosystem.
We could literally destroy the biosphere more readily than nukes, or global warming ever could.
aside from bad actors, i think that safe guards could prove effective.
synthetic organisms would have no natural predators, but the would also have no natural defenses. we could make them without an immune system or make it depend on a molecule that does not exist in the wild. so they would quickly die out.
Yet if wrong, what then? What if it is a mold or fungus which eats crops, yet was designed to be resilient? And cannot be killed without killing the plant?
Now you have a year or two, as it spreads, until starvarion causes total societal collapes, wars, dead, destruction.
And meanwhile all grasses around the world die, photosynthesis drops, animals, insects, and plants are dying off.
The problem is, any solution which hopes to contain, can mutate out. Cross-species genetic transfer is a thing. Mutation is a thing.
Expecting what you make, as a biological organism, to work as you wish is... not sensible.
Compared to programming languages, biological processes allow for change. Yet we can barely make secure code, and are endlessly surprised at our own lack fo security, and bugs, and issues in code due to unforeseen circumstances.
If you came to me and said you can make perfect code, make it secure, and bug free, I'd laugh and laugh until I wondered if I should fire you for incompetence.
And working with genetics, and with entirely new orgamisims, is more complex that the largest of codebases.
And at release, into the wild, there aee no issue trackers, no patches, no fixes.
It's shipped and gone.
To me, your comment highlights how unready we are.
Selective breeding/reproduction/engineering combined with evolutionary pressure in order to guide a genetic lineage in a particular direction. In the example of disease, say you wanted to make a human virus be able to infect mice.
You keep releasing a human rhinovirus into a cage with "humanized mice" (mice genetically altered to have specific receptors in common with humans). There is strong evolutionary pressure in this environment for the virus to evolve to infect these mice. A viral variant eventually catches on and begins infecting the humanized mice. Then you take that viral strain and start exposing normal mice. Now there is an evolutionary pressure for the virus to be able to infect those mice. This virus will have essentially "gained that function."
Wouldn’t the living artifact that results from this embryo just be horribly incompatible with life and die quickly or at best live for a brief time before expiring?
I suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist.
The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do with them, might be wilder than we could imagine.
Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.
That's the best case, even though "not abusing them" is a low hurdle.
Such life would not be limited to human forms.
Even with just human forms, if you're going to all the trouble to engineer custom life, why make that life anything other than your idea of perfect? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves.
Last I checked — a few years ago, and this is a fast moving field — we can't currently 3D print large complex living structures, only simple and small because of the oxygen diffusion limit; if we can engineer around that, even if you still needed to replace the brain with a computer and nerves with metal, you can have a "real life centaur ride" or dragon drones.
If you do that but deliberately replace the brain and nerves with electrical equivalents, you have remote controllable meat[0] puppets making bodyguards redundant (the person being protected can just be remote); making worthless eye witness accounts, DNA tests, and fingerprints; and what happened with DeepFake porn then happens IRL with sex workers puppeting everyone and everything from Addams Family's Thing to Westworld LARP.
The landscape of possibilities and preferences for these things may be radically altered by other related tech. For example, skin samples can be grown in vitro and transplanted back to a human (IIRC this is already done for severe burns victims), combine with suitable GM (IDK, spider silk perhaps?) and someone could become naturally bullet resistant, radically changing not only the nature of bodyguarding but also soldiering.
[0] well, not necessarily meat, it might be made from GM fungus cells or plant cells, but it could be made to look arbitrarily close to or far from any of those things
I think most people don't truly grasp how much this will change the world. IMO the advances in Synbio will be vastly more influential than the advances in AI (though AI is utilized heavily for the former)
Both are too large in scope to really grasp. One has the power to make us all permanently redundant and unable to tell fact from fantasy[0] by being too good a story teller, the other can make them indistinguishable by making the fantasies[0] real.
[0] In the broadest sense that also includes nightmares
> I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves
I'm working on a novel about this (but with a twist). I think this is exactly what's going to happen.
None of that sounds like a disaster. What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied? Doesn't seem all that different from a normal human who works for pleasure, or even an artist who may work without pay but only for personal satisfaction.
You seem to be forgetting that people will get things banned if they're obviously bad. If simulating another person becomes a problem, we'll just write a law for that, same as we already do for fraud. You can sign somebody else's name on a document, you know! s How do banks survive the onslaught of fraud! /s
> What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied?
Creating such a being in the first place when one could've been a better small-g god.
Now this may just be naturalism bias on my part, a large number of people are a lot more comfortable with a thing if it's natural rather than the same thing artificial.
> You seem to be forgetting that people will get things banned if they're obviously bad.
The American Civil War was fought over a disagreement about what the north and south thought was obvious.
> How do banks survive the onslaught of fraud!
More than just laws punishing those who do it. Sarcasm aside, a better question might be, how does the USA stop hackers from all over the world from breaking into USA hospitals, encrypting all the documents, and getting hard to trace ransom money in return for the decryption keys?
Nonsense. Farm animals are unnaturally bred and essentially slaves. We somehow have them. Are you opposed to their existence too?
Yes, people have disagreed about slavery and farm/working animals and all those grey areas of animal and human rights. But it's arrogant of you to take your personal opinion and try to impose it on an entirely different society with creatures that you know nothing about "just in case" the members of that society happen to be morally wrong by your standard. Let them make up their own mind just as we make up our own minds today. They'll be in a much better position to do so.
> Farm animals are unnaturally bred and essentially slaves. We somehow have them. Are you opposed to their existence too?
Yes, absolutely.
As virtually every situation where a human is treated as an animal is seen as abhorrent, so by symmetry I expect most animals in contact with humans to be miserable most of the time.
The only reason I am not going to go as far as to claim the meat industry is multiplicatively worse than literal Auschwitz by the degree to which literal Auschwitz is worse than a single homicide is that I am uncertain how much to value the life and suffering of non-humans.
> But it's arrogant of you to take your personal opinion and try to impose it on an entirely different society with creatures that you know nothing about "just in case" the members of that society happen to be morally wrong by your standard.
Good thing you're putting words in my mouth then.
From my POV, this thread, from root, can be summarised thusly:
"Amazing, but there is a dark side" "Don't they die really fast?" "Give it 25-50 years, and think of Blade Runner."
Then you: "Why would we abuse them", me: "<a list of things that can go wrong, or just plain weird>", you: "What's wrong with a defacto slave enjoying their life doing what makes them most satisfied?"
(As an aside: that's already abuse, so you apparently defending it, even if that wasn't your intent, should demonstrate why we may end up being awful to such life).
Me: "because we've had wars about this kind of thing where both sides thought they were right", you: "nonsense!" followed by projecting that I have (or think I have) any capacity for imposing my personal opinion as a future moral code — I clearly can't even do that imposition today with regard to meat.
In fact, it's even worse than that, because while I would support the outlawing of meat, leather, and even dairy (as they exist today, but I expect all to be vat grown by 2030 and that's fine), I don't have the strength of will to avoid cheese, and that's a failure to impose my own morality on the inside of my own head.
If you declare just about everything to be a disaster then, yea, I agree the future will probably be full of disasters. But Blade Runner iirc is about people who seem normal but have some "bad" origin which makes them eligible for abusive treatment. We wouldn't do that today any worse than we already do, of course with foreigners/etc. but I'm assuming the doomsayers are worried about something worse than what we already widely do and accept.
> (As an aside: that's already abuse, so you apparently defending it, even if that wasn't your intent, should demonstrate why we may end up being awful to such life).
I gave the example of an artist who works for personal satisfaction. You call that abuse to have allowed that person to be born? I don't. If someone is intrinsically motivated to be a slave, then being a slave may not only be the best possible life them but could even be better than the life of a normal free person. If it's actually abusive like using human slaves, then people will see than just as we can see that today.
"testube babies" have parents.
These will have owners. I think it's a valid fear that once someone is able to create living things out of nothing, they'll treat them as products and tools
We already do it with animals....
There is a book by Ned and Constance Sublette called "The American Slave Coast" that goes deep into detail how slavery worked in USA. It was essentially same as what you're saying, slaves were considered a self-replicating financial product and a tool for work
Oh and of course patent it. And build in copy protection meassures, meaning someone cloning your "tools" would result in not working products, aka death or disabled
Who says they'll be property and not have the same rights as normal people? Slavery was banned. If this becomes so objectionable, it'll be banned too. Why are all you people assuming laws and civilization will stop existing in the future? Are you afraid that future people might not share your current political views? Get over yourself and let them have their own sovereignty and vote for what they want.
> Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try.
People always say this, and yet the universal ban on human cloning has, at least so far, held strong and prevented further research more or less entirely.
Primates have been cloned [1], human embryos have been cloned (supposedly) [2], and there are confirmed gene edited babies [3]. But, I doubt the existence of a ban means humans haven't been cloned, because I have trouble believing that a group that would successfully clone a human would be dumb enough to tell the world, state sponsored or not.
Primates are not humans, cloning embryos for stem cell research is different from creating human clones, and the scientist who produced the two CRISPR-edited children went to jail, and he and his associates are banned for life from working in this type of research or even providing care in this area.
Those specific primates weren't human, but humans are primates [1].
Here's a quote from the Boyalife CEO, before the ban in China [2]:
> The technology is already there," Xu said. "If this is allowed, I don't think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology."
> The firm does not currently engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be "self-restrained" because of possible adverse reaction.
I don't believe laws have the ability to stop greed, or the desire for longevity (organs [3] without lifelong immunosuppressant therapy is very appealing). They just add a risk factor. This is why criminals still exist in the world.
We shall see, but illegal research is not the same as other types of crimes - it requires vastly more resources and people, and it may not pay for a long time.
Now, if animal cloning becomes commonplace, I do believe it will be way easier for someone to sneak in human cloning alongside it.
Aren't primates at least similar to humans? We're both mammals, have similar physical characteristiscs. Why shouldn't cloning people work?
I come from a law background so I am not familiar with the science. I've heard biological goods such as stem cells, eggs, spermia etc. are becoming very valuable and they are not very protected. I suppose underground groups could easily get they're hands on whatever they need. Securing illegal goods from a physician doing IVF on humans could be all they need.
I think this is only true because people don't know how/the tools have been restricted/the freedom not given to people
I think what the above person is saying is that one day, even if people try to restrict the ability, technology will advance to a point where anybody will be able to do it.
Technology does advance regardless of your ability to ban it, because bans only form a system that locally restricts research- but globally, research will march forward somewhere. Banning research on a topic is fundamentally like burning books- but enforcing some consistent concept of ethics within a field of research is critical.
Again, you claim that, but evidence shows that banning research on human cloning has indeed stopped it from happening, even though a sheep was successfully cloned almost 30 years ago (and the technology is not significantly different).
Possibly? I expect we'll figure out how to do this with a high chance of success within the next few decades if not sooner, unless for some reason every country capable of supporting the research bans it.
What's the point in cloning people? I'm pretty clueless about biology, but as I understand it the process to generate new semi-randomized humans using a woman is fairly well understood and straightforward
Now the title is arguably confusing and significantly different from that of the original linked article. It seems unnecessary to mangle the title to that extent, to create a wider difference.
It's standard for users to clamor for changes to misleading titles, and standard for moderators to accede to the clamoring. We do that because otherwise the thread fills up with ever more complaints about the title.
The OP is a press release and such titles are usually overstated and need to be changed anyhow. This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). This one seems designed to aggrandize the study (as well a press release should, I suppose), so the complaining commenters had a point or two.
A few years ago, someone did home experiments (posted to a FB group) with raising chickens outside of their egg shells. It caused a lot of controversy, but damn, so fascinating at the same time. This has actually been a whole thing for a while...
> to understand why so many pregnancies fail and how we might be able to prevent that from happening
Are we sure that's a good idea? I've read that one of the reason for early pregnancy failure is that the embryo is not fit enough and it would be a waste of time and resources to commit to it.
Another very counterintuitive finding is that if you try to implant embryos in various tissues (brain, liver, ...), the one in which is the hardest is the uterus! Because it's actively fighting against the embryo.
The question is why is the embryo not “fit enough”. One way to increase the chance of success is by making the embryo “more fit”, but that requires an understanding of what that definition of fitness is, and that is what I understand this study is about.
The genetic recombination process often results in failure, shuffling genes around and associated mutations breaks important things and the embryo gets to the point where it can no longer survive. It is sort of the first filter in evolution, surviving the single-cell to infant process.
That might be true, but I know for a fact it’s a truism that doctors tell women to not feel as bad about miscarriages.
My wife has had multiple miscarriages, to the point where it’s expected. Until doctors are informed of her history, they always say “the embryo wasn’t healthy enough to survive on its own …”
My wife has a number of hormonal issues, but doctors can’t find a single diagnosis.
We've swung from "God's will" to "Fitness" a bit prematurely. Sure, there are many underlying causes for miscarriages (which we've experienced in our house, as well), but the sense I got from talking to our docs was that luck has as much to do with it as anything. The signals and systems that benefitted homonids a million years ago still affect our chances in the modern world, and are full of false positives and negatives, and luck (blood type, etc) plays an outsized role.
My wife has always had insanely irregular cycles. We ask the docs if that could be part of the problem and they’re like “maybe.”
The insane thing is that insurance doesn’t cover fertility treatments.
So she can ask about her irregular cycles, but the moment she asks if this will interfere with having a baby, the doctors say “if I answer that question, I’ll have to code this appointment in a way insurance won’t cover.”
Apparently in the eyes of insurance companies, a 30 year old woman who can’t get pregnant is perfectly healthy.
This is not true, in this context. 75% happen within the first two weeks. No excess nutrition is required in that time. Folic acid is important, but someone having multiple miscarriages, under the care of a doctor, will obviously be taking the recommended supplements.
This sounds like the sort of giddy overfocusing we do when we project a certain lifestyle (usually one we already live, ourself) as a cure-all onto everything else including people we know nothing about.
I remember being jacked at 20 years old, eating spinach and egg whites at the university cafeteria, looking somberly around at everyone—who I'm sure didn't do 100 air-squats each day—while they devoured fried chicken strips. I felt bad for them. How many ailments could we fix if everyone did 20 push-ups when they woke up in the morning and then snorted a cup of oatmeal? Real cocksure of myself, I'd shrug and think what a shame.
What I'm trying to say is, did OP's wife try doing pull-ups while eating paleo?
What good is finding it out anyway? First, we don't know how to define fitness, and certainly not how to measure it in an embryo. All we have is a bunch of genes that correlate with known diseases.
Suppose they find that 24.7% of miscarriages arise because of some other reason than fitness. Fixing that before pregnancy will probably require substantial intervention, where that is not needed at all: in most cases, subsequent pregnancies are successful.
Knowing what causes miscarriage in other cases is only there to satisfy curiosity. It has no practical application whatsoever.
However, the dark side is clearly there, and is what sponsors this kind of research: creating artificial life.
> By progressing development just one day further, they have proved development of the whole brain.
If you progress development to 20 days (gestation period for mice), do you get a live mouse? I assume not, but the article doesn’t tell us what happens to the embryo if you continue the experiment.
> UK law permits human embryos to be studied in the laboratory only up to the fourteenth day of development.
The restriction on human embryos seems to imply that non-human embryos are not restricted the same way. So I presume they didn’t terminate the mouse experiment for legal reasons.
Sounds really cool. Can someone smarter than I explain what are the main differences between this and the recent study carried out at the Weizmann Institute of Science? Is it mostly the successful development of the brain?
- https://www.jpost.com/science/article-713690
This is great news, which of course will generate a lot of heat in some circles.
Before someone screams "playing god" and similar nonsense, I would ask them if they would have the same reaction when a new advanced weapon is introduced, because you know, if playing god applies when giving life, then it also does when giving death.
What, scientifically, differentiates a human embryo from a mouse embryo, beside what it may eventually become? Why find the experimentation of one appalling, but not the other, when neither is allowed to grow?
(I am not arguing one way or the other, merely that it is illogical and unscientific to differentiate.)
It's the abortion debate. I'm against abortion. The way I see it is a person has rights no matter the person's age. Earlier in development just means younger.
Everyone agrees people have rights, it’s that they disagree on what constitutes a person. Some religious people currently believe a person exists at the point of fertilisation, but they used to believe ‘ensoulment’ happened some weeks after.
One question to ponder - “Why would God give personhood to a fertilised egg that (via omniscience) he knew was fated not to be carried to term?”. If earthly life is essentially a test of moral virtue (“Here’s free-will, let’s see what you do with it”) then “eggs as persons” doesn’t really make sense - the test can’t start / a true person doesn’t exist until it has some form of effective agency.
That same argument applies to all the babies who die between being born and turning 1. It's more an argument against God than an argument against rights starting from the first moment of life. If we assume God doesn't exist, then the argument doesn't really work.
If we assume God does exist, one possible rebuttal is that the purpose of life isn't to test moral virtue. For example the purpose of life could be to provide an opportunity to know, love, and glorify God. But it's just an opportunity, not the only opportunity. After death there continue to be opportunities for that, so people who die immediately after ensoulment still have an opportunity for that.
I agree we should be doing research to promote healthy life, but I don't agree that we should be creating people for the purposes of killing them and deriving scientific info from their deaths. The research in this article is fine, it's on mice. If it were to be done on humans it wouldn't be.
It's not ok to kill an innocent person, regardless of how much scientific data that provides and how many lives that data might save.
Not an abortion debate -- a human exceptionalism debate.
That is -- what makes a human embryo special compared to a mouse embryo? (Beside what it eventually grows into -- since that is not allowed to happen in these experiments.)
We're back to my original comment: the human embryo is just a young human. The mouse embryo isn't.
Saying we're going to kill it before it grows up ("since that is not allowed to happen in these experiments") doesn't make the human embryo less of a young human.
The difference is you don't know if there's a difference: when does the soul come in? Maybe you don't believe in souls but can you disprove that they exist? is the personality only some sort of construct that's formed as a child is raised? Or is there something eternal spiritual inside? It doesn't have to trip your anti-religious ADS, maybe it's a fact about the universe we haven't found a way to measure yet.
Giving you don't know and can't be sure don't you think it's better to err on the side of caution?
But putting that aside like I think it should be possible to create embryos that don't have souls but these non-soul persons are they any less human or deserving of human Rights than soul persons, given they can experience pain and suffering just the same as soul embodied humans?
The future is just a giant big can of worms I don't think anyone can strive so confidently into it sure of that they're coming down right on the ethical issues.
How would we be able to tell that a person has no soul? How can we even say that we have a soul? The problem with the existence of the soul is that there is no definition of what the soul is for science to prove or disprove its existence. Right now it's just a fuzzy term to be employed in religious rhetoric.
Too logical. Don't be so materialistic. People talk about souls right there has to be something to that. No definition doesn't mean doesn't exist, maybe means we don't understand. We don't understand everything. We should err on the side of caution.
It's not just religious. Too much of an onerous connotation. Unnecessary. It's part of our history, our cultural, our art. It's something we as humans know to be true. Like consciousness. Can we "tell" that we are conscious. Can we "say" that we are conscious, as you say.
The problem with the existence of consciousness is there is not definition of what consciousness is for science to prove or disprove its existence. Right not it's just a fuzzy term employed in grant applications.
C'mon. We have to recognize the limits of what we know and not be so fucking arrogant to think we can just pontificate, but more importantly, act, beyond that.
If we don't know it has a soul, how we kill it?
It's like saying: "You can press a button, and that will release a poison gas into a box, and there's some probability that there's something alive in that box."
The thing is, you don't know. Is there a life in there, or is there not? You don't know. But you really think it's ethical to take that chance? Or...to fallback on some psuedo-scientific notion that "we (our instruments) can't definite it yet" so it can't exist.
I'm sorry, that's not good enough. We might just be talking about the eternal part of ourselves, or at least at part that survives incarnation in this body. How are we so arrogant to say: Yeah, we totally know the truth, let's just kill everything (or experiment on everything) that we're sure there's no life in.
Ugh...anyway, thank you for engaging. I'm not taking a pot shot at you. I'm not saying you think all these things. Just a chance to expound on this subject. Have a good night! :) ;p x ;p
...and that kind of thinking illustrates the kind of dehumanizing attitude that is harmful to the "products" of such experiments, such as the person that would develop from such an embryo. Very worrisome research.
Assuming the embryo eventually developed, it would eventually become a person. But just like sperm and egg cells are not persons, and fertilized eggs are not persons, embryos are not (yet) persons.
> Instead, they used stem cells - the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type - and then mimicked natural processes in the lab.