rHXN - The first early human eggs from stem cells

The first early human eggs from stem cells

https://www.conception.bio/science-and-updates/the-first-early-human-eggs-from-stem-cells

By: dsr12

HN Link

londons_explore - 3 hours ago

I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc.

The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.

I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.

And if those effects are bypassed with artificial conception, we might end up with humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc.

The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness - or perhaps a lack of gain of fitness that would have otherwise occurred.

comp_bio - 21 minutes ago

I think it’s important to remember that the process of selection acts directly on human traits. For example being exposed to high summer heat temperatures may eliminate some people who have unproductive sweat glands, or needing to run down your food may eliminate people who have a muscles that easily tire. Selection (largely) does not act on far removed traits like egg cell characteristics as a proxy of human traits like muscle performance because the genes that are used by egg cells are quite different than those used by muscle cells. So if you worry about some kind of human trait decline you should be much more worried that people have access to air conditioning and grocery stores.

DanielHB - 2 hours ago

25% of humans died before reaching 5 in 1800s US, today it is <1%. Its been at least 5 generations since this value dropped dramatically.

We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."

qsera - 2 hours ago

> We have not ended up with "humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc."

Haven't we?

100ms - 1 hour ago

Probably throwing quite the grenade here, but around 29% of pregnancies end in termination globally. Absent cultural considerations, it's questionable whether life expectancy has improved in absolute terms in modern times

flexagoon - 1 hour ago

Child mortality rates are rapidly dropping globally as well

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

https://ourworldindata.org/children-saved-global-health

Mistletoe - 2 hours ago

I like the spirit of what you are saying but the smart part isn’t true at all. IQ peaked around the mid 1990s and as someone that lived back then that tracks.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

Look at Fig. 3. The world seems to be experiencing a reverse Flynn effect.

throwaway676712 - 17 minutes ago

IQ is not a unit, it's a z-score. Z-scores can only be compared within the same cohort against which they are computed and given the same test. Given that the cohorts and tests keep evolving over time, it makes no sense to track IQ across large time periods.

latexr - 1 hour ago

The reversal of the Flynn effect is more likely explained by other factors such as the explosion of social media, endless addictive entertainment, and all the attention manipulation that comes with it. Conception didn’t change that much at a large enough scale during this short time period to explain it.

wossab - 2 hours ago

How would you know?

krageon - 2 hours ago

When you make an outrageous claim the burden of proof is on the claimant. Given that there isn't a real indication of anything to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume reality is still the way it always was and humans are too.

graemep - 1 hour ago

Which is the outrageous claim? We normally require new medical treatments to be proved safe, rather than assume they are safe until proved dangerous.

b112 - 1 hour ago

This feels hand wavy.

I could make the same claim of a bridge before it collapses, without realising the steel was weak, or had micro fractures.

Where's the proof? What an outlandish claim! Don't you see traffic flowing as normal?

Of course, we shouldn't drop all advancement due to worries. I do think we should study the results a bit more closely though.

grumbelbart2 - 1 hour ago

Bridges deteriorate by default. That is a well understood process with well understood reasons, which we monitor and work against. Salt, thermal cycles, load, rust.

Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.

colordrops - 48 minutes ago

We haven't created humans from scratch using genetic engineering yet, why would you think our current state has anything to do with the comment you are replying to?

f6v - 43 minutes ago

Several of your claims are unsubstantiated. Sure, species co-evolve together, environment shapes evolution.

But why do you think evolution doesn’t explain existence of humans? What’s missing?

Also, as someone else has replied to you, we’re way past “natural” existence of humans. The vast majority of 8+ billions wouldn’t have survived in the past.

warent - 3 hours ago

You’re layering several hypotheticals on top of each other, which leads to progressively distant possibilities. Good on you for caring about humans though

tskj - 3 hours ago

I think this is decisively the wrong way to think about it. Yes, layering hypotheticals like that means that any one scenario is extremely unlikely to be the thing that gets you, but that doesn't mean the shape of the problem is wrong.

It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in using seat belts when driving. "Why should I put them on?" they say, and when you try to explain what might go wrong they won't listen to any explanation that isn't a hyper-concrete hypothetical. So finally you give in and say, "Well, when we get onto the highway, a truck might lose control and hit us", and their response is "I don't think that's very likely, it seems highly improbable that today we will be hit by a truck when getting on the highway".

I agree with OP that this seems like the kind of thing where the unknown unknowns are so great that the correct approach is serious caution, and that any demand to know exactly how or why it will go wrong, falls in the trap where every specific example is very unlikely to be the thing that goes wrong, but still in total there's like an 80% chance that it goes horribly wrong. I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode. "You shouldn't play God" maybe? At least you shouldn't ask for specific examples of how things could go wrong, if you're going to turn around and claim each one highly improbable.

vintermann - 17 minutes ago

"To play God" isn't just to do something spectacular which wasn't possible before. It's to use other people - to put yourself on a higher teleological level than other people, declaring their purpose (whatever it is) as fully subordinate to your purpose (whatever it is).

As if they were a tool you created. Obviously, if I carve a piece of wood into a spoon, it's I who get to say that what used to be a piece of wood now has a purpose of moving soup to mouths. The carved piece of wood now has a purpose, but it's wholly subordinate to my purpose (whatever it is).

You don't have to actually design people to play God - you can subordinate others to your purpose without doing that, that's what various God-kings in history did. But it certainly gives you a head start if you make them.

You can make something and don't subordinate it to your purpose. In our culture, we see children that way. We claim, basically, that we didn't deliberately design a child, we only obeyed our own natures without really having much choice in the matter, and thus we and our child is on the same teleological level.

This is not a cultural universal. In many cultures, parents (in particular fathers) would say basically "I made you, so you must do as I please, you have no reason for existing except for my purposes". It was a hard won battle for our culture to assert that children matter for their own sake and not just for their parent's.

Many things in this thread makes me want to say "Y'all MFs need Jesus". I won't say that, but I will say that you should stop and think about why it is that the Catholic church is so difficult about contraception, why Christians in general have historically made such a big deal of the difference "born of God" vs "Created by God" (arianism, etc.), and what that story of Abraham and Isaac was really about. Whether you agree or not, there's much about other people you will never understand if you don't think about teleological levels.

xi_studio - 1 hour ago

"I don't know if we have the terminology to talk about this kind of failure mode."

We actually have and is called RISK.

RISK = Probability * Damage.

Applied to the seatbelt event we have a death level damage and a high probability of happening given recent studies, so using a simple belt could easily save you from deadly accidents.

Applied to any unrealistic scenario we have insane level damages but also an incredibly low probability (near 0) so RISK = ~0%

nme01 - 3 minutes ago

This framework would be hard to apply to unknown unknowns. That's why in software engineering you'd apply canarying. Then the longer timeframe for potential negative effects, the slower the adoption of a new process should be.

tskj - 6 minutes ago

Well that's the point about unknown unknowns though, we actually have no idea what the probability is. But we do know it's not low, that's the only unlikely scenario.

We only know it's a very complicated system with many interlocking dependencies, and based on what we know about complicated systems in general, as well as biology in particular, is that if any one of these unknown dependencies break, the whole system can fail catastrophically.

Therefore the probability that something will go wrong is very high, and the damage could easily be irreparable damage to the species, if not extinction. Does that not give an intolerably high risk?

zigzag312 - 3 hours ago

But many of the listed hypotheticals are not dependent (on top) on others, and since there are multiple that actually increases probability of an undesirable outcome.

Davidzheng - 3 hours ago

But it reads to me like the thread parent's point is that there are many unknown risks which can exist? I also wonder about long term effects to the health of the genome from IVF and other forms of fertility treatment as infertility could be acting as some sort of protection mechanism of the genome. But I suppose such objections form a continuum which extends to treatment of all genetic diseases or diseases in general--all of which probably applies some evolutionary pressure towards more healthy individuals but which we as a society have to balance against wellbeing of individuals and their human rights.

londons_explore - 3 hours ago

There is precedent for infertility being beneficial for a species in the animal kingdom. For example the vast majority of ants and bees are infertile. Yet the infertile ones still contribute meaningfully to society.

Humans could easily be successful with a similar model, and did so in the past before fertility treatments.

vintermann - 48 minutes ago

Well, something could be successful, in the biological survival sense anyway. Not sure it'd be right to call it human at that point.

HPsquared - 1 hour ago

That's happening now, more or less, across the entire developed world. Not sure about the "successful" part though.

close04 - 2 hours ago

If I understand your point correct it could work as easily as communism: theoretically sound but undermined by human psychology. Natural evolution is slow and gives the species time to adapt to anything. Artificial evolution by comparison is very fast. But the real issue is that humans have intelligence, individuality, and egotism. We don’t see ourselves as just part of a collective.

Societies functioned in the past while taking away some rights from its citizens (like ownership) but nothing as fundamental as only a few able to reproduce.

tskj - 3 hours ago

This seems distantly impossible right now, but for this reason, I predict that any species that survives this kind of "great filter" effect of accidentally messing up their genome long term, will develop a strong taboo against fertility treatments and treatment of genetic diseases.

Like it seems horrible not to help the individual, when we have the technology to; but it's also horrible to hurt your species by selfishly propagating faulty genes. And this seems like the kind of problem cultural taboos are good at solving, and I don't really see any other mechanism by which a species can avoid this filter trap.

qsera - 2 hours ago

> humans which aren't as strong, aren't as smart, aren't as well adapted to a changing environment, etc.

But can they pay and vote? If yes, that is good enough for the people calling the shots.

saturn8601 - 2 hours ago

Very interesting...maybe this is another great filter preventing a species from becoming multi planetary or expanding beyond a type 0 civilization?

pelagicAustral - 2 hours ago

I would've thought that generic engineering was the biggest ticket to getting a civilization out of their home planet...

noosphr - 3 hours ago

>I am worried about the long term impact of research involving human conception, IVF, etc.

You'd have a rather different opinion if you had to squeeze out a water melon out of your genitals.

dashtiarian - 2 hours ago

Nobody HAS to do that. If people WANT to have children they should give them the best chances they can. If science proves IVF is the best, every parent must do it, if it's risk freedom has not been proved yet, no person that has other options available should do it. Chances are they would be ruining their children's life by expecting and comparing them to the best, so they can at least not give them handicap from birth. The world is now much more competetive and unfair to our children than it was in our time. My mother has told me countless times that childbirth is one of easier parts of motherhood.

noosphr - 2 hours ago

Taking advice for raising children from the childless is like asking virgins for advice on sex.

endymi0n - 2 hours ago

Now that's a very high ratio of personal beliefs to character ratio. I'd be delighted to see some evidence behind your opinions.

piker - 2 hours ago

What?

latexr - 2 hours ago

What? IVF doesn’t mean that the human is gestated in a glass tube like some 80s sci-fi, the pregnancy and birth still have to occur, carried out by a human.

noosphr - 2 hours ago

> What? IVF

>>, etc.

killerstorm - 2 hours ago

> A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.

What?... Our computers can't simulate anything similar to a real world. You're comparing apples to galaxies.

> meaningful loss of fitness

What makes you think we don't have "loss of fitness" already?

150 years ago child mortality was around 30% in the developed world, now it's less than 1%. A lot of kids with weak health survive now. I'm one of them - I got pneumonia when I was ~2 y.o. and probably would have died without antibiotics. Then I had something which required antibiotic treatment pretty much every year. My wife also had a pneumonia in early childhood. And so did my daughter...

Why do we need to talk about some mysterious problem in 10 generations when modern medicine removes a lot of fitness pressure by itself?

plasticeagle - 13 minutes ago

It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive."

Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent.

It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.

dsign - 2 hours ago

> but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness

Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.

inglor_cz - 45 minutes ago

There is nothing such as riskless technology, but you can't escape some risk anyway.

Tech like this gives some people a chance to be born. If they aren't born, this may damage the rest of the world in subtle, very hard to predict way. The invisible graveyard of medicine, caused by risk aversion, is real. In the name of safety, you may miss out on the next Freddie Mercury or David Attenborough, or Jonas Salk or Paul Erdös.

Also, the 5-10 generations you mention is 150-300 years in current humans. It is very unlikely that biological science will stagnate on current level of knowledge and blindly repeat beginner mistakes from 2026 for 150-300 years.

For comparison - 150 years ago, germ theory was still a contested newcomer. 300 years ago, medicine still believed in Galen's humor theory.

Arodex - 2 hours ago

>The reason is that genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist. A computer genetic algorithm run for a billion generations doesn't lead to anything anywhere near the the complexity of a human.

I didn't have "creationism" as the top answer to a HN post in 2026, yet here we are...

dryarzeg - 2 hours ago

Have you read the next paragraph?

> I suspect there are as-yet undiscovered effects which shape the next generation. Whether that be DNA methylation, gut bacteria passing from mother to child, selection of the 'correct' egg or sperm out of millions, or something new and un-discovered etc.

I can't see where it mentions "creationism".

qsera - 2 hours ago

How is that creationism? Saying that we don't have a good answer is not the same as suggestion one particular hypothesis.

To me suggesting that sounds pretty anti-intellectual!

fragmede - 2 hours ago

Anti-intellectuallism is everywhere, especially amongst the intellectuals. The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.

someonebaggy - 2 hours ago

AI writing is anti-intellectual. It demands the time of thousands of people to read when they could be reading something with actual meaning. You're demanding scholars to read comic books all day in case they have content worth engaging with (spoiler: they don't).

mschuster91 - 2 hours ago

> The latest bent of this is to ask if an AI wrote this, rather than engage with the substance of what's written.

Just an half hour ago, TomasBM wrote in another thread [1] why people first want to filter out AI slop, which IMHO fits perfectly:

> Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind.

To that, I'd add my personal take: I go to HN, Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter to engage in meaningful conversation with other people (ranked in inverse likelihood of coming across sloppypasta). If I wanted to talk to a robot, I'd prompt ChatGPT myself. When others use AI for more than translation, this violates this core assumption of how human communication, how society has worked for all of human history.

Unfortunately, and I've been on the receiving end of this myself, anything longer or more substantive than a tweet will immediately evoke the "is this AI" assumption, and it's gotten worse as ChatGPT et al managed to eliminate the usual "tells".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743798

XorNot - 2 hours ago

That's a lot of words to act like a total tool towards people born from IVF and their parents.

weregiraffe - 2 hours ago

>The effect will be small for each generation, but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception

How do you know it? Sci-fi tropes are not a good argument.

truthbe - 35 minutes ago

This is how the clone wars began

gnabgib - 6 hours ago

Related (2021) Turning stem cells into human eggs (97 points, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040823

aitchnyu - 2 hours ago

To confirm, we get a clone of the blood donor right, whether man or woman?

grumbelbart2 - 1 hour ago

No, we get an egg (i.e. the part usually provided by the female), which must then be fertilized by sperm.

I don't know enough to say if that allows extracting eggs from males. Could two males have a child together using this technique?

quux - 1 hour ago

No, I don’t think so, because the egg still needs to be fertilized by a sperm cell to develop into an embryo.

Now if the sperm cell were from the same donor I don’t know what would happen

seszett - 52 minutes ago

> Now if the sperm cell were from the same donor I don’t know what would happen

Probably nothing special except some inbreeding with the loss of 25% of genetic material of the donor individual (each gamete containing a random 50% of the donor's genetic material). Not sure how fast this level of inbreeding would be deleterious.

vintermann - 42 minutes ago

That's some Cleopatra-level inbreeding. The child's - or should we say the victim's - DNA would have longer runs of homozygosity than a child of incest.

misiek08 - 5 hours ago

How hard you have to work to break scroll on web page? Nice article, but going through it was a technical nightmare.

Can we stop adding unnecessary JS to website to stop global warming by calculating AND ALTERING SCROLL?

happymellon - 4 hours ago

Odd. It was a designers dream (and a readability nightmare) but I didn't have an issue with scroll.

Firefox on Samsung S23, not exactly a new or a powerful phone but rendered it fine.

tskj - 3 hours ago

Why is it a designer's dream to hijack and control my scrolling experience? The scroll they've implemented is slow to respond, and has a weirdly low capped max speed. I don't understand why that's what a designer dreams of doing to me. I like my scroll (and other computer interactions for that matter) to be responsive and fast. You know, the kind of thing that puts me in control, not the designer.

That being said, the scroll was as smooth as regular webpage scrolls. Usually these JS scrolls aren't able to avoid dropping frames or otherwise introducing judder, but this one does appear to run at a consistent and high framerate, which is technically impressive.

sudo_cowsay - 4 hours ago

Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.

scotty79 - 4 hours ago

That can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate.

Protostome - 4 hours ago

Mitochondria can be translplanted/replaced. There already therapies and babies born out of these kinds of procedures

scotty79 - 4 hours ago

Can you point me to anything about mitochondrial transplants? I'd love to see bat mitochondria transplanted into other mammals. They must have really superior ones given the energy expenditures needed to support flight and their long lifespans.

Protostome - 4 hours ago

I will let the experts continue from here :) This review is from 2020, i bet things have progressed since then

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7169912/

scotty79 - 57 minutes ago

It's not so much a mitochondrial transplant, as it is fertilized egg nucleus transplant. Not just mitochondria are used from the third donor but their whole egg (sans nucleus). So unless a human might develop from a bat egg just from swapping out nucleus, which I'm sure it's not the case, super-powered batman must remain a fantasy.

Protostome - 23 minutes ago

Oh, so that's what you were aiming for, LOL

there are many reasons for this chimera not to be viable, mitochondria co-evolves with the nuclear DNA, you can't just take a mitochondria from a totally different species

type0 - 3 hours ago

I don't, isn't this the recipe to get IRL Morbius?

Schlagbohrer - 3 hours ago

Batboy, real at last

treyd - 4 hours ago

I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells.

Schlagbohrer - 3 hours ago

Reverse Cremaster cycle?

Jackobrien - 4 hours ago

Really interesting point if true. Makes sense to me, and I’m sure the team is trying to solve it

rf15 - 4 hours ago

genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?

jmcgough - 2 hours ago

I think they're arguing that a somatic cell from an older human contains mitochondria that's more degraded. Egg cells are all created before birth, and each is pre-seeded with a large number of mitochondria.

scotty79 - 4 hours ago

When the damage accumulates across generations the natural selection has opportunity to weed out particularly harmful instances. You can get a feeling for how important avoiding the mitochondrial damage is and how hard it is to mitigate, by looking at how fiercely the reproductive process protects them from aging.

someonebaggy - 2 hours ago

And with this you get a hundred times the damage (mutation) but still only the same amount of selection.

khazhoux - 3 hours ago

Instead of just dismissing this and saying this can't possibly work, it would be better to ask: how do they get around problems of mitochondrial damage, or have they not tackled that yet?

Because it is unlikely that you just punched a hole through the plan of the several dozen people in bioengineering, life sciences, and other related fields that are at this company.

XorNot - 2 hours ago

Or we could ask "what the hell are they talking about" and "can they cite even one single bit of useful peer reviewed evidence about this?"

Coz really that seems like the foundational problem here: claiming something rather crazy with obvious problems, like multigenerational mitochondrial damage in an organism which replicates literally billions of them just to be born.

emsign - 2 hours ago

Imagine guys like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Thiel cloning themselves. That's 100% dystopian. We would never be able to get rid of madmen! Power corrupts and makes the powerful just weird and unable to make rational decisions. That's why people in power need to be replaced regularly to have a stable society.

latexr - 2 hours ago

I agree with the second part, but I’m not convinced cloning those people would lead to other copies of them (not that I’m advocating for it, either). Your environment/upbringing/opportunities shape a lot of who you become. Musk famously has kids who find him abhorrent, I see no reason to believe that he’d be a competent father even to himself. Especially since the kid would have siblings who could open his eyes to the shit his father does, and if there’s one thing Musk is known for is gullibility to accept anything fitting his world view. I don’t think being a greedy unhappy (by his own admission) asshole is genetic.

b3lvedere - 2 hours ago

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/

shevy-java - 5 hours ago

A japanese scientist again (Katsuhiko Hayashi is in Osaka).

Shinya Yamanaka created iPSPs in 2009:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka

Guess the japanese excel at micromanaging. Although one could say that the research here in the article is more epic than Shinya's discovery, but I remember having watched one of his presentation and it convinced me of pure epicness, if you understand how his team found the "Yamanaka factors". That was by human (work) consistency. About as epic as Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her mutant screens, that also involved tons of micro-experiments.

aaronyi - 3 hours ago

[flagged]

imadierich - 3 hours ago

[dead]

tsss - 2 hours ago

We need less people not more.

voxadam - 55 minutes ago

"Fewer."

-Stannis Baratheon

Schlagbohrer - 3 hours ago

The origins of stem cells for use in the biosciences and in cosmetics are extremely brutal and should be illegal. Sandra Bullock explains it better than I could: https://youtu.be/PwO3TEj9-5g