Human Sperm Produced In the Laboratory 368
duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The BBC is carrying a report from a team of researchers at Newcastle University who claim to have developed a the first 'artificial' human sperm from stem cells. The research, reported in the journal Stem Cells and Development, involved selecting meristematic germ cells from a human embryonic stem cell culture and inducing meiosis, thus producing a haploid gamete. The authors claim that the resulting sperm are fully formed, mature, human sperm cells but the announcement has been greeted with mixed reaction from colleagues who claim the procedure is ethically questionable and that the gametes produced are of inferior levels of maturation."
I SWEAR (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I SWEAR (Score:5, Funny)
I DIDNT DO IT!
This is Slashdot. That goes without saying.
This story is just too hard to swallow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I'm still trying to figure out how they knew I call my bathroom "the Lab"
Huge waste of tax dollars (Score:5, Funny)
We give these scientists grant money to build labs to work on scientific discoveries. And they turn around and spend all day masturbating in the labs!
So what? (Score:5, Funny)
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And you almost generated humor there. If you had a lab maybe you could have actually been funny.
The big deal though is, I would assume actually several things
1. It's interesting enough that we can generate them in vitro. How sperm are made is better known than some other cell types, but now even the parts we don't know can be more easily studied, since you can watch it in a microscope easier. Changing conditions to determine what sperm need to develop is also going to be easier in a dish than it would t
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
I have a lab and he *HATES* it when I try to generate sperm.
Re: (Score:2)
And you almost generated humor there. If you had a lab maybe you could have actually been funny.
And maybe some blackjack and hookers.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Funny)
I wasn't sure where you were going until the end there. That would be entertaining. How long before we'd see the first attempts at defining a person as the result of a straight man's sperm fertilizing a straight female's egg in a marriage. Probably called "Defense of humanity" act.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't sure where you were going until the end there. That would be entertaining. How long before we'd see the first attempts at defining a person as the result of a straight man's sperm fertilizing a straight female's egg in a marriage. Probably called "Defense of humanity" act.
except gay people can have straight kids, so you'd actually want to somehow ask the sperm (nicely) whether he was gay. Then if he says yes, you'll need to freeze him until scientists develop a cure (for homosexuality or religion, take your pick)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you could take a stem cell from a man and generate an ovum, and take a stem cell from a woman and generate a sperm, and then put them together and conceive a child.
As far as I know, we haven't made eggs from stem cells. Did a google search for "eggs from stem cells" but everything that came up was talking about the reverse (paying women to donate eggs to harvest ESC from) and didn't want to sort through those. It might be more difficult to make eggs from male stem cells, in fact we might find it's much more difficult to make eggs from any pluripotent stem cells, even if you do have 2 X chromosomes. And actually, I haven't been able to access the real article in ste
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
You wouldn't want to do that though, since this would basically be incest++. If we ever get the tech to make impregnating yourself with yourself possible, it'll probably get banned because it'd lead to a higher chance of birth defects.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. Incest++. That's a term that I had hoped would never be invented.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Not a clone at all. Instead you'd get the most inbred offspring imaginable. You as a person already have a pretty diverse genetic makeup - your DNA is made up of pairs of chromosomes. When you reproduce those pairs split to form some sequence (which side of the pair gets split off is essentially random).
So for example you might have the following
AB
CD
EF
GH
If the sperm created from you picks up the following:
A
D
F
G
And the egg picks up:
A
D
E
H
Then the resulting person's genetic code would be:
AA
DD
FE
GH
That's differ
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sperm doesn't have pairs of chromesomes, it has only one. But you're right, if you make sperm from female stem cells it could only have an X chromesome, never a Y chromesome, so you'd only get female offspring.
The only inherent loss of genetic diversity would be the Y chromesome, which doesn't have much genetic information on it anyway. The wiki page on the Y chromesome [wikipedia.org] points out that "the human Y chromosome itself contains only 78 working genes, compared to close to 1500 working genes on the X chromosome" and none of the 78 are "vital." For women anyway for obvious reasons.
As long as the female that the sperm are derived from isn't closely related to the female that produces the egg, it wouldn't seem like there would be diversity loss.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... (Score:3, Informative)
There goes the male sex...? :P
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
As long as women don't find out about jar openers I think we're safe.
Re: (Score:2)
There's also the whole moving furniture about the room and hanging paintings business, too. I think we're safe for a while, until they manage to train the apes properly.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean? I think we are pretty well trained right now!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Spend some time around some militant feminists. Yes, yes you do.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
A man and a woman get into an elevator and press the button for the top floor. Halfway up, the elevator stops. The man picks up the emergency phone, and is told that they'll be stuck for at least an hour.
The woman looks at him slyly and says "want to make me feel like a woman?"
"Sure", the man says, immediately taking off his shirt.
"Iron this for me!"
I can't believe it's not butter! (Score:2, Funny)
For real, doesn't the fact that it was made in a lab mean it's NOT human?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If it has the DNA, its human.
Thats the ONLY THING that ENCODES humanity....
Food for thought, thats all Im saying.
Re:I can't believe it's not butter! (Score:5, Informative)
It actually turns out that's not true -- if you had nothing but the DNA sequence, you could not (even in theory) construct a human from it. For one, the mitochondria organelles have their own genetics independent of our own. The organelles are inherited directly from the mother's cells. For another, how DNA is used and rendered into proteins, etc. is altered by chemicals that are carried along with the cell. If those are stripped away, information is lost.
The DNA code is universal (Score:3, Informative)
Not true. The way DNA is encoded into aminoacids is a universal code [rcn.com] which follows the same standards in animal, plant, or microorganism cells, with very few exceptions.
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To what degree of variation? How many pairs have to change before the genetic program is *not* human? Where would Neanderthals fit in? Or chimps? Or something in-between like my cousin Harry?
.
Inquiring minds want to know!
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doesn't the fact that it was made in a lab mean it's NOT human?
No. Not unless you want to start claiming that all the people born because of IVF aren't human, which strikes me as a rather bizarre proposition.
Wow science is amazing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow science is amazing (Score:5, Funny)
One step closer to not having hormonally imbalanced pregnant women...
My wife and I really wish the human reproductive cycle involved external incubation. I'd create a device to post to twitter whenever the baby kicks.
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Eh... One step closer to not having men, more like.
(I only read the headline. I apologize if this is an erroneous comment)
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Nope. But the shoe is on the other foot, now, isn't it...
20 Minutes Into the Future (Score:2)
My wife and I really wish the human reproductive cycle involved external incubation. I'd create a device to post to twitter whenever the baby kicks.
You could call them Baby Growbags [wikipedia.org]!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, guess how the "pill" works: By partially simulating the same hormonal imbalance of a pregnant women!
So she is constantly "pregnant" somehow, as long as she takes them.
If you think about, how animals, when pregnant, are way more defensive and aggressive,
and when the "pill" started to be used, this could somehow explain the feminist movement, which started at the same time. ^^
I wonder what would happen, if we would get our women off the "pill" and used condoms for a year.
Maybe it would be worth the lack
Actually... we are one step closer to... (Score:2)
Embryo space colonization - just send a lab. [wikipedia.org]
No humans need to make the trip.
Not so great for the human civilization, but various religious and minority ideological groups will love it. [wikipedia.org]
Now how will Slashdotters get laid? (Score:2, Funny)
If sperm could easily be reproduced, I'm SURE the average Slashdotter's sex life will plummet.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
no problem... [slashdot.org]
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Plummet? So now people will start promising Slashdotters they will have sex with them and never deliver? THE AGONY!
Where's the story? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Where's the story? (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8138963.stm [bbc.co.uk]
This also from science today: (Score:2)
They're also working to develop a process that allows the transformation of gold into lead.
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They're also working to develop a process that allows the transformation of gold into lead.
They're late - the economists already have that process perfected.
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Mandatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one, welcome our female overlords. I hope they find me useful and will not use me for food.
Re:Mandatory... (Score:5, Funny)
speak for yourself, I don't mind if I she swallows.
Misread (Score:5, Funny)
That's not news (Score:2, Funny)
Human sperm has been produced in laboratories ever since they got Internet connection and you could download porn to your lab PC.
Oh, they mean artificial sperm. Nevermind then
Damn! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As long as they don't invent a device that opens jars, we're safe. What? [about.com] NNNOOOoooo!!!
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Until women find a better way to quickly get real estate and lifetime income for the small cost of a divorce lawyer they'll still want men around.
Hmm, I wonder what will happen when a woman divorces a woman. How would the judge figure out which one to give the house, car, and alimony to?
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My first thought on this was that this would be Valerie Solanas' dream [sbc.edu] come true.
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Re:Sperm Shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Here's one reason. According to this article [bbc.co.uk], 85% of sperm is damaged which leads to all sorts of "bad" things. So IMHO, something like this can perhaps help to fix damaged sperm or better understand why it is damaged.
damaged sperm (Score:3, Funny)
I must be more careful to make sure all of my sperm is fresh. Perhaps there's some way I could extract the old sperm for disposal. Hmm, this will require some thinking.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I know a couple who'd love to conceive a child but he was diagnosed as impotent.
If this process can be perfected, and if they can harvest Adult Stem Cells from him, then this would allow them to conceive a child together.
Something that I know would make them both very happy.
It's about time... (Score:5, Funny)
Er.... (Score:2)
What's unethical about this?
Re: (Score:2)
The use of that sperm for procreation would be unethical (human cloning).
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It's not cloning, because it's a haploid cell. Cloning requires that an embryo be formed from a diploid.
In other words, in a clone, the clone is a genetic duplicate of the parent. In this procedure, a cell is induced into meiosis, which creates two half-sets of DNA. This is combined with a half-set of DNA in an egg, just like in non-lab sexual reproduction. With the genetic juggling that goes on during meiosis, it wouldn't even be cloning if the sperm and egg were from the same individual. (I guess that wou
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What's unethical about this?
The use would be the unethical portion and science because there is no guarantee that what results from the sperm-egg coupling using one of this would be a viable, working person. Religious and moral beliefs aside I think this is a great thing. It may not now help us understand how our bodies work but it may lead to it in the future. I'm a firm believer that cloning has a huge potential in the long term for helping out humanity as a race.
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"What's unethical about this?"
A fair question, but the answer is obvious. The scientists think the product is perfect, but what if it's not? At this stage of our understanding in the process, you can't ethically ask some woman to bear a potentially deformed or unviable fetus. We have no idea how it would go. Even if it were to survive the gestation, we may only discover after a year or two that the child has some debilitating problem: now we've created a human being from scratch who must die prematurel
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Not to mention that we've decided it's worth experimenting, essentially, on human babies. Not even on human embryos or human fetuses or whatever, now we are talking about human kids. Outside the womb. This really does seem like a downhill slope. I'm against abortion in the first place, but to "grow" a human to see how it turns out?
There are organizations with vehement supporters for "ethical treating of animals" and "no animal testing" and yet we are willing to start testing, uh, human farming... or som
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course regular parents take this chance every time the conceive a child.
I'm not sure I see the ethical dilemma in using this technology to allow a couple with fertility problems to reproduce. Sure, in this case you don't know what the odds are, and its possible something will go wrong that couldn't go wrong normally. But everyone who has a child takes the chance that the child might be deformed or sick or die shortly after birth. Its part of the human condition.
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What's unethical about this?
Not saying I believe any of these to be valid, but these are the concerns people are likely to have:
1. "Playing god."
There is a major taboo with messing with our reproductive systems, and every time any major advance in reproductive science occurs, there are religious arguments against it. Compare it with IVF and birth control, both of which attracted a lot of attention from a number of religions and are considered unethical by many.
2. The technique enables a major change in the
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4. You may end up with a "human" that is somehow not "human" due to strange things going on with the sperm that wasn't "naturally" produced and the egg from wherever. So now you have, in your mind, "produced" or "manufactured" an "inferior" human. Is "it" worth keeping?
If no, and killing "it" is allowed, then we've just legalized killing human beings because someone else deemed them not worth keeping around.
That is a pretty dangerous path to go down without some serious thought.
People get majorly upset wi
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RTFM (Score:2, Informative)
The sperm meet the 4 basic descriptions for sperm: have 23 chromosomes, have head and tail, have egg-activating proteins, and swim. They are not exact copies of sperm, and, more importantly, only sperm made from male cells actually matured; those from female cells didn't.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909164,00.html [time.com]
Post AC because I'm in a grouchy mood and commenting on something I usually don't comment on.
What's the problem? (Score:5, Funny)
"the procedure is ethically questionable and that the gametes produced are of inferior levels of maturation"
So... they're suitable for producing politicians, lawyers, and bad Slashdot comments?
Ok, let me be the first to say this... (Score:5, Funny)
Every sperm is sacred.
come on, people... (Score:4, Funny)
Every sperm is great.
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God gets quite irate!
finally (Score:2)
the human female can get rid of the strutting, violent, undependable worthless parasite known as the human male and replace him with a dildo and some stem cells
oh wait, shit, i'm a male
feminist science made me extinct!
Now here's an interesting future (Score:2)
A future break-up email? Or perhaps, mind mail?
"We are all engineered beings .. I'm sorry that your makeup shows that you have a high risk for heart attacks, .. so you are not for me. The lab made the miistake, its not your fault and don't blame god especially Pfizer or you'll vanish like the rest. But, my kids must be adequate for space careers, so I simply can not date you now, in grade 3. When I cease fertility, we can reconsider!"
Blood==Stem Cells==Babies????? (Score:5, Interesting)
If a woman gets your blood, then she can bear your children? Wow! This will be a great argument for deadbeat dads! Now they can truthfully say "I never had sexual relations with that woman."
Black markets for the blood of rich men . . .
Personal IP rights in your personal blood composition . . .
Wow, the world got more interesting on 7/08/2009!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
MarkvW wrote:
This could be a serious legal problem for men in the future. I'm not a lawyer, but based on what I've read the general guide is that if male reproduct
The GF:s reply to this... (Score:2)
"Cool! We don't need you guys anymore."
One implication (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, this opens the door to biological children from homosexuals couple. Sure it's been foreseen for a long time, still big big can of worm.
Re:One implication (Score:4, Insightful)
How is it any more a "big can of worm" than infertile hetero couples having children? Are you suggesting that there is some kind of ethical or moral problem with homosexuals having children with this tech that would not apply to heterosexual couples?
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Besides the obvious? Homosexual couples can't currently conceive children. This could grant that ability. That's pretty huge.
Re:One implication (Score:5, Interesting)
Infertile heterosexual couples can't currently conceive children. This could grant that ability. That's huge. So how is the sexual orientation of the couple relevant?
If the OP had said "This will allow people who couldn't have conceived the ability to have children, this opens up a can of worms" then sure - but he (and you) specifically mention the sexual orientation of the couples as being relevant. I'm just trying to understand why.
Is it because gay people would be able to have children that share the dna from 2 same-sex parents? Is it because gay people having kids is an ethical concern? Is it squeamishness about gay folks being able to have children?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything you know about creating life is wrong...
1. You need two parents.
False: cloning, X0 conception (Also called Turner syndrome).
2. The parents must be of the opposite sex.
False: Stem cell research can now create both eggs and sperm using DNA from another. DNA from a male can be inserted into an egg, and DNA from a female can be inserted into a sperm, although this has only been accomplished in a laboratory so far, and did not lead to viability.
3. You need a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to make a 'Having chromosomes can really bring you Down!' joke but feel the need to point out that humans have 2 * 23 = 46 chromosomes. Having 52 chromosomes means you're a platypus.
Men No Longer Needed (Score:2)
Not that we necessarily were, according to some...
If this procedure became easy/commonplace, it would greatly facilitate lesbian genertic reproduction of two women, vs. one woman and a sperm donor. Since the stem cell used to create sperm would be XX, all resulting children would be female. Interesting to think of a slight but perceptible shift to a significant female majority world population (or population in developed countries).
Possible consequences: less war; economic trouble for the TV and gaming indu
So Clevon should regain full reproductive function (Score:2)
Bad news for JAV actors (Score:4, Funny)
This will revolutionize the Japanese Adult Video industry! They won't need to hire 50 guys to make a bukkake video.
One upped (Score:5, Funny)
Ah man... (Score:2)
There goes my second job.
Moral issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ethical concerns? I'm getting tired of silly ideological grounds against genetic manipulation. "Natural" does not mean better," and so long as nobody is hurt by doing this then there's no problem. People worried about ethical concerns over things like this are just luddities afraid of human biological progress. All humans are essentially biological machines, and there are no souls, and the faster people realize that the sooner we can progress past our silly human limitations.
Re:Moral issues? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, actually "natural" means "millions if not billions of years of testing in the field, resulting in an unbeatable guaranteed fitness". Of course you could have luck and come up with something better. But it is highly unlikely. And you most likely would forget all kinds of little cycles in nature that are needed to keep things working in the long term.
Wait for the second, third or fourth generation showing all kinds of problems, up to being unable to create the next generation at all.
It's way more complicated than you can imagine. We got the tools, but we do not have the brains to use them properly. That is my standpoint. :)