9 ms·

The first early human eggs from stem cells

178 points by dsr12 3mo ago

gnabgib 3mo ago
Related (2021) Turning stem cells into human eggs (97 points, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040823
shevy-java 3mo ago
A japanese scientist again (Katsuhiko Hayashi is in Osaka). Shinya Yamanaka created iPSPs in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka 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.
misiek08 3mo 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?
- sudo_cowsay 3mo ago
  Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.
  - lsbehe 3mo ago
    What exactly is the good idea? It's ignoring my accessibility options. I'm getting motion sickness.
    - sudo_cowsay 3mo ago
      If you have motion sickness and have a macbook, use the motion sickness dots.
- happymellon 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    - happymellon 3mo ago
      Designers dream to have that shitty glass look, straight from Vista.
scotty79 3mo 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.
- treyd 3mo ago
  I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells.
  - Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
    Reverse Cremaster cycle?
- rf15 3mo ago
  genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?
  - scotty79 3mo 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 3mo ago
      And with this you get a hundred times the damage (mutation) but still only the same amount of selection.
  - jmcgough 3mo 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.
Schlagbohrer 3mo 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 https://youtu.be/PwO3TEj9-5g
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- ACCount37 3mo ago
  Can we not devolve into "think of the poor stem cells" bullshit at least on HN? Especially given that the link in question describes this as the source of stem cells: > After performing a simple blood draw, we converted blood cells into stem cells, and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries that contain the early eggs. That stupid controversy set the field back a decade, and that was a decade too much. People who get their science news from celeb gossip are a blight.
londons_explore 3mo 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.
- warent 3mo 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
  - Davidzheng 3mo 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 3mo 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.
aaronyi 3mo ago
[flagged]
imadierich 3mo ago
[dead]
emsign 3mo 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.
- b3lvedere 3mo ago
  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/
- latexr 3mo 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.
  - jfyi 3mo ago
    It doesn't need to make clones into absolute copies of them to be problematic. It's just an obfuscation of a very old idea, the divine right of kings. It could be argued they would likely be worse than the original. They would be even more detached from the rest of humanity because of their position. They wouldn't be just a person that found an extreme level of success, they would be the undying legacy of that person. This is not a way to build a healthy human psyche.
- punkbit 3mo ago
  Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.
tsss 3mo ago
We need less people not more.
- voxadam 3mo ago
  "Fewer." -Stannis Baratheon
aitchnyu 3mo ago
To confirm, we get a clone of the blood donor right, whether man or woman?
- quux 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
- grumbelbart2 3mo 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?
- userulluipeste 3mo ago
  That is a good question. Excepting the sexual ones, all the cells in an organism are diploid¹, including the ones found in blood (excluding erythrocytes, since those do not have a nucleus, therefore -- do not have chromosomes). Yet in natural development of the organism, a bunch of stem cells, which are of regular (diploid set of chromosomes) type, are evolving to form the ovaries, containing from very beginning all the ova (egg cells) that the female may have in her life. Ovum does only have a haploid¹ chromosomes set, until fertilization. In their procedure the (full, diploid) genetic content of a "induced pluripotent stem cells" gets placed into an ovary-like culture of cells in order to make it ultimately evolve into an ovum. This evolution involves a "meiosis" type of cellular division, in which the end result are haploid cells, and the genetic load gets thinned out. Therefore, it will need fertilization -- a complementary chromosome set from another source. What they don't talk about (but should) is telomeres², that normal cells, upon division, loose genetic material and thus -- degrade from reproductive point of view. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
truthbe 3mo ago
This is how the clone wars began
trebligdivad 3mo ago
Very impressive work! (Hmm, I wonder if this can be done for chicken eggs)
Ylano 3mo ago
I'd be very curious how they even define "safe enough" for this. With most therapies, the risk is mostly to the patient. Here the risk could be passed on to a future person who never consented to the experiment.
- vagab0nd 3mo ago
  I get where you're coming from, but this seems no different from the risks associated with having a baby. Pushed further, babies never consent to any of the traits they inherit from their parents.
- ACCount37 3mo ago
  Same as the rest of the IVF-associated assisted reproductive technology stack. Tampering with the reproductive process is not exactly new.
ACCount37 3mo ago
This is a good tech to have, with applications both in IVF and in research. Currently, egg retrieval is a significant part of the IVF process - one that's notoriously taxing on the women. Once this gets refined enough for clinical uses, it can become as simple as "take a blood sample once, produce as many eggs as you need". With an added benefit of being able to get eggs when traditional retrieval fails.
iberator 3mo ago
How can I compete with a 60B$ supercomputer(AI) AND with DNA modified superhumans from rich families? We are DOOMED.

178 points by dsr12 3mo ago

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

shevy-java 3mo ago

A japanese scientist again (Katsuhiko Hayashi is in Osaka). Shinya Yamanaka created iPSPs in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka 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.

misiek08 3mo 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?

sudo_cowsay 3mo ago
Good idea in theory but terribly impractical in practice.
- lsbehe 3mo ago
  What exactly is the good idea? It's ignoring my accessibility options. I'm getting motion sickness.
  - sudo_cowsay 3mo ago
    If you have motion sickness and have a macbook, use the motion sickness dots.
happymellon 3mo 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 3mo 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.
  - happymellon 3mo ago
    Designers dream to have that shitty glass look, straight from Vista.

scotty79 3mo 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.

treyd 3mo ago
I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  Reverse Cremaster cycle?
rf15 3mo ago
genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?
- scotty79 3mo 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 3mo ago
    And with this you get a hundred times the damage (mutation) but still only the same amount of selection.
- jmcgough 3mo 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.

Schlagbohrer 3mo 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 https://youtu.be/PwO3TEj9-5g

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ACCount37 3mo ago
Can we not devolve into "think of the poor stem cells" bullshit at least on HN? Especially given that the link in question describes this as the source of stem cells: > After performing a simple blood draw, we converted blood cells into stem cells, and then coaxed those stem cells into becoming miniature human ovaries that contain the early eggs. That stupid controversy set the field back a decade, and that was a decade too much. People who get their science news from celeb gossip are a blight.

londons_explore 3mo 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.

warent 3mo 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
- Davidzheng 3mo 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 3mo 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.

aaronyi 3mo ago

[flagged]

imadierich 3mo ago

[dead]

emsign 3mo 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.

b3lvedere 3mo ago
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/
latexr 3mo 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.
- jfyi 3mo ago
  It doesn't need to make clones into absolute copies of them to be problematic. It's just an obfuscation of a very old idea, the divine right of kings. It could be argued they would likely be worse than the original. They would be even more detached from the rest of humanity because of their position. They wouldn't be just a person that found an extreme level of success, they would be the undying legacy of that person. This is not a way to build a healthy human psyche.
punkbit 3mo ago
Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.

tsss 3mo ago

We need less people not more.

voxadam 3mo ago
"Fewer." -Stannis Baratheon

aitchnyu 3mo ago

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

quux 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
grumbelbart2 3mo 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?
userulluipeste 3mo ago
That is a good question. Excepting the sexual ones, all the cells in an organism are diploid¹, including the ones found in blood (excluding erythrocytes, since those do not have a nucleus, therefore -- do not have chromosomes). Yet in natural development of the organism, a bunch of stem cells, which are of regular (diploid set of chromosomes) type, are evolving to form the ovaries, containing from very beginning all the ova (egg cells) that the female may have in her life. Ovum does only have a haploid¹ chromosomes set, until fertilization. In their procedure the (full, diploid) genetic content of a "induced pluripotent stem cells" gets placed into an ovary-like culture of cells in order to make it ultimately evolve into an ovum. This evolution involves a "meiosis" type of cellular division, in which the end result are haploid cells, and the genetic load gets thinned out. Therefore, it will need fertilization -- a complementary chromosome set from another source. What they don't talk about (but should) is telomeres², that normal cells, upon division, loose genetic material and thus -- degrade from reproductive point of view. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploidy ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

truthbe 3mo ago

This is how the clone wars began

trebligdivad 3mo ago

Very impressive work! (Hmm, I wonder if this can be done for chicken eggs)

Ylano 3mo ago

I'd be very curious how they even define "safe enough" for this. With most therapies, the risk is mostly to the patient. Here the risk could be passed on to a future person who never consented to the experiment.

vagab0nd 3mo ago
I get where you're coming from, but this seems no different from the risks associated with having a baby. Pushed further, babies never consent to any of the traits they inherit from their parents.
ACCount37 3mo ago
Same as the rest of the IVF-associated assisted reproductive technology stack. Tampering with the reproductive process is not exactly new.

ACCount37 3mo ago

This is a good tech to have, with applications both in IVF and in research. Currently, egg retrieval is a significant part of the IVF process - one that's notoriously taxing on the women. Once this gets refined enough for clinical uses, it can become as simple as "take a blood sample once, produce as many eggs as you need". With an added benefit of being able to get eggs when traditional retrieval fails.

iberator 3mo ago

How can I compete with a 60B$ supercomputer(AI) AND with DNA modified superhumans from rich families? We are DOOMED.