Comment by aaavl2821 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaavl2821 | Hacker News Reader

This is really amazing. We can take skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and turn those into viable eggs. The science behind the first step won the 2012 nobel prize in medicine [1]

This advance, combined with our ability to rapidly and precisely genetically engineer zygotes with CRISPR, has some incredibly amazing and some incredibly scary implications. We can already generate viable eggs from cells in mice's tails, fertilize those eggs, and edit the genomes of those zygotes precisely to produce custom genetically engineered mice (genetically engineered mice are a core tech in the biopharma research industry).

These technologies enable an unprecedented advance in the precision and throughput of this process and it seems very likely we will be able to do this in humans in 10-15 years. Factory-scale generation of zygotes and high throughput editing of those zygotes. I'd argue this topic deserves the same level of ethical scrutiny as AGI, if not more, as at least to me it seems that this tech is far closer to becoming a reality. My imagination may be getting away from me, but industrial scale human zygote editing seems like it could be the most significant (for good or evil) technological advance in our lifetime

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2...

This is great news. Before long, we can stop having kids naturally and just create them artificially in factories, like in the prescient 1949 novel "Brave New World", and let governments raise them in institutions run by professionals. Having amateurs raise kids has had mixed results at best, with many people proving to be absolutely terrible parents, and usually the people who are the worst parents having more kids than those who are actually good at it. Finally, we're now finding that when people are financially comfortable and busy with fulfilling lives and careers, they don't want to have kids, or very many of them (not enough to maintain the population). Outsourcing reproduction and child-rearing to the state will fix all of this.

I honestly can't tell if you're saying all of this sarcastically

Go read some Huxley and you'll find out!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Some thoughts:

> We can take skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and turn those into viable eggs.

How accurate of a copy of the parent's genetic material is this likely to be, compared to a naturally-produced gamete? Skin being the exterior organ that forms the body's first line of defense, it is subject to constant attacks and damage from without. As an example, the amount of accumulated genetic damage from sunburns is going to increase as a person grows older. So then, for this to be used on humans, would not the ideal place to take skin from be someplace that gets infrequent sun exposure, like say, the buttocks or thighs?

> These technologies enable an unprecedented advance in the precision and throughput of this process and it seems very likely we will be able to do this in humans in 10-15 years.

If it's available in 10-15 years, it probably won't be available to me and my partner, but it (or perhaps something better) may be available to any future children when they are ready to have children of their own. Something to keep an eye on.

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