Posted on 04/04/2016 6:36:38 AM PDT by C19fan
oh ya.....watta nuisance ......sex....blech.....
You won't need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
Well I no longer participate in the endeavor(making babies that is) I can’t imagine why one would want to change the present system!!!
Gattaca.
Robots and VR are for sex.
Test tubes are for making babies.
I wish someone would work on the other end of the process, I have itty bitty hips. Still wear girls sizes.
Not married yet but sure not looking forward to building ships in the basement. :(
Technically, you don’t need sex now. I know two [single] women who got knocked up by “turkey basters”. Both wanted kids, but couldn’t find (or keep) husbands.
kinda takes the fun out of it.
oh well, one way to lower the birth rate
It isn’t building a boat in the basement that causes concern. It’s getting one through the little basement door!
My with underwent 3 cesarean section surgeries for our family! She’s a champion shipbuilder!
*wife
Yep, the brave new world is around the corner. If we think traditional values have taken a beating, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
It’s been a while since I read that book, how does it end?
The “savage” commits suicide.
Kanye West approves!
A bit of a tangent here......but in Britain, if a woman cannot get pregnant the ‘normal’ way, she is allowed one child through artificial insemination. No second child paid for by the NHS. But most Britons wouldn’t consider actually paying for another try as they believe the “government’ should pay for all healthcare.......but most couldn’t afford it (with the much lower wages to pay for all that Socialism) anyway.
That said, the article is just talking about a variation on the in vitro fertilization we already have. There are a lot of other issues and levels of complexity the article doesn't begin to address. For example: 1. The simplest problem with the way the article is addressed is using an iPS cell from a skin cell as an ‘egg’. An iPS cell created this way from a skin cell would be ‘diploid’ (carrying two sets of chromosomes like most adult cells), not ‘haploid’ (one set) like sperm and egg do. That's just an obvious one.
2. Making iPS (induced pluripotent stem cells) from a skin cell or from some other cell isn't the same as making a human ‘egg’. The information in a cell is not just carried in the DNA sequence alone. There is also a significant amount of information carried epigenetically (e.g. in chemical modifications of the DNA), and this too is heritable.
Currently, this epigenetic information is not ‘reset’ when inducing a fully differentiated cell, like a skin cell, to a pluripotent state. This can be very important when using these cells as ‘eggs’. In addition, it has also been shown that there is often the induction of DNA mutations when making iPS cells, thus lots of considerations/concerns.
3. Yes, you can do whole genome sequencing, and this is done quite commonly these days. That said, there are ~3 billion bases in a haploid (e.g. sperm or egg) cell, and 6 billion in a diploid cell. We accumulate a significant number of DNA mutations during life, and most of these are ‘silent’ with no discerned influence on biology. Sorting out which are of no concern vs those that are a concern, and correlating those to address complex traits - like how one will perform in school etc., is very far beyond where we are right now. Also, gene editing has been around for over a decade now, and will get better, but also has issues with ‘off-target’ effects etc.
In short, the article overstates where we are. Of course, somewhere in the world there will be someone who ‘wants to be first’ and will push this way before it is ready.
When a majority of population lives off the equivalent of 4K or less a year, no, this won’t be the norm except for the upper class.
To what degree this entrenches an upper class by ensuring they meet all definitions of the top of the meritocracy, I don’t know.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.