Mice Produced Using Artificial Sperm

vasanth writes to tell us scientists have successfully grown mice from artificial sperm. The sperm was created from embryonic stem cells and implanted into female mice. There were a few problems, including that some of the mice showed abnormal patterns of growth and difficulty breathing. The hope here is to assist couples who are having difficulties with conception.

Help With Conception?!

[susano_otter]

The sperm was created from embryonic stem cells... The hope here is to assist couples who are having difficulties with conception.

So let me get this straight: you want to help a couple make a baby... by making a baby somewhere else, destroying it, harvesting its biological material, and using that material to make another baby, which you then give to the baby-challenged couple?

I guess the big advantages to working for the Department of Redundancy Department is, you get double funding for everything, and there's always someone else around to do your work for you. But it does seem kind of wasteful, sometimes.

Female/Female Reproduction

[spyrral]

Would this allow two females to produce an offspring together? Because that would be a species changing event for humanity.

Money Talks, God + Common Sense Walk

[RobotRunAmok]

Why can't more rich, self-absorbed and childless yuppies want to go to Mars? Then maybe our space program would get that much needed shot in the arm...

Damn.

Re:If god doesn't want you to to have kids...

[LnxAddct]

Screw your god, I'll do what I want.
Regards,
Steve

Re:If god doesn't want you to to have kids...

[bsartist]

If God didn't want you to have kids, this procedure wouldn't work. I always get a kick out of people who claim that God is all-powerful, and in the next breath claim that scientists are doing something that's against His will. They never seem to understand the inherent contradiction in those two statements...

Re:Help With Conception?!

[deviantphil]

I was thinking the same thing. Wouldn't it make more sense to harvest ADULT stem cells from the father's body to create sperm for his offspring rather than some other already fully formed embryo?

This way the gentic material is his and not someone else's.

Furthermore...you then get rid of the whole embryonic stem cell debate......unless.....of course....the whole idea was to get private money to blow... *shrugs*

Re:The Mice?

[Itninja]

Everbody knows that easily 'humanized' animals (i.e. cute and furry, big eyes, or perceived intelligence) get complete protection. Whereas ugly animals can just suck it. That's why everybody freaked out when they found out dolphins were being killed in tuna nets. But nobody cared that 1000's more TUNA were being killed in tuna nets. I mean, have you ever seen a tuna? They are ug-leee.

Re:If god doesn't want you to to have kids...

[operagost]

I don't agree with you, but I find it ridiculous that every unpopular opinion gets modded down by the Slashdot thought police.

Re:They don't need us

[Grishnakh]

Sorry, I disagree. While there certainly are some intelligent women out there who choose men based on criteria more useful in modern society, such as being able to hold a job, there are many, many women out there who just can't live without a guy that acts like an asshole, and frequently treats her poorly and/or beats her. These women just aren't smart enough to recognize the pattern and stop looking for the same kind of guy. Then these women have kids, raise their kids in that environment, and the vicious cycle repeats itself another generation.

My wife made this mistake with one guy when she was about 20, but it only lasted for a few months. After that, she recognized the problem, and never got involved with assholes again.

The fact of the matter is that there's a lot of women out there with poor self-esteem, and there's a lot of asshole guys out there who gravitate towards those women and get involved with them. Guys like that have little trouble finding women to accept them, much like con-men who know how to pick out their victims. These probably aren't the kind of women you'd want to spend time with, but they're still capable of reproducing.

Re:If god doesn't want you to to have kids...

[CosmeticLobotamy]

We freely chose to sex, and God (we're taking for granted) thwarted the baby-making there. Do God's baby-prevention force fields only work within the confines of a uterus? Are the Lord's powers limited to just the vagina?

Re:OK, I'll be the party pooper here

[Joey Vegetables]

[I]s everyone ENTITLED to have children?

Is anyone entitled to tell anyone else NOT to???

Teriatary effects

[phorm]

Well, there are quite a few people who are incapably or semi-incapable for medical rather than genetic reasons. They're born and develop perfectly able to reproduce, but do to accident. For example: getting hit in the nads too hard, or getting an inter-uterine infection, my mother was rendered incapable due to complications of a car accident (obviously after I was born).

It's also a survival method. What if some new nasty disease or bacteria, etc, rendered a large portion of the human race largely incapable of reproducing naturally. It's always a good idea to have a backup plan... it's just a matter of not abusing the ability.

Re:Help With Conception?!

[Hoi Polloi]

The thing that annoys me is that they'd come up with a procedure that would cost many tens of thousands of dollars vs adopting one of the kids who is already here and needs parents, having sex, or going to a sperm bank. This much effort to add another person to a 6 billion+ population seems obscene.

Re:If god doesn't want you to to have kids...

[tcphll]

By that same philosophy, if you get cancer, you shouldn't seek treatment because, apparantly, God wants you to die or you wouldn't have gotten cancer (or some other life-threatening disease) in the first place. After all, the world is already overpopulated, so instead of spending thousands of dollars researching and treating diseases, we should just allow the sick to die, as God intended.

Sad

[fish_in_the_c]

As can be seen by several post here this is sad news, it is degrading to males.
It is also degrading to babies.

Such technology is degrading to human beings.
It treats procreation as being nothing more then a biological process.
It makes something that should be held as a honor and a privilege ( being a parent )
into a commodity bought and sold in the laboratory.

When you reduce procreation to a commodity you reduce people to being a commodity.
Honestly this kind of technology is evil for the same reason slavery is evil.
people are not a commodity.

Re:OK, I'll be the party pooper here

[blahtree]

People are having kids later than they used to, often because women have their careers to consider, which wasn't an issue in the past.

So, either you create a society where women can have kids young and still lead a fulfilling life (i.e. do what they want to do, either work or not) OR you create the technology to allow a higher percentage of women to have kids when they're older.

Re:They don't need us

[SdnSeraphim]

"The fact of the matter is that there's a lot of women out there with poor self-esteem".

This can't be emphasize enough. Often the most beautiful women (both outside and inside) are the ones that have problems. Some think they can overcome it by becoming sluts. Others just don't date, or date men that know how to exploit poor self-esteem.

I see this in my own (extended) family. My wife's cousin, 20 years old, very beautiful, blond, sweet and loving, has a hard time dating. Two of her recent boyfriends have either been extremely needy and dishonest or been somewhat aggresive and helped her to make poor choices for her life. I just can't understand it. I just assumed beautiful people had it made. It turns out that even beautiful people can have self-image problems.

Re:OK, I'll be the party pooper here

[turgid]

I'm not convinced that 'helping infertile couples have children' is the ultimate rationale - is everyone ENTITLED to have children?

Some people [bbc.co.uk] are random and prolific producers of offspring while others can't produce a single child while trying purposefully for years.

Who are you to make a moral judgement on who should not be helped?

Re:OK, I'll be the party pooper here

[ivoras]

Who are you to make a moral judgement on who should not be helped?

That is NOT a moral judgement, it's common sense (or if you'd prefer - impersonally technical). No conception -> something's biologically wrong, possibly something with body plan/genetics -> even if conception is forced, there's a nonignorable chance that the children will have the same problem. Do YOU want to inflict that problems upon the children?

It's not strictly related to TFA, but these days, it's hard to tell if corrective medicine is actually helping "us" in the long term. In ages past, children who were not tough enough would simply die and, while grieving, nobody thought it "wrong". Now, such technically less viable children can be saved, but for who's good? Its or its parents? It sounds eugenical, but it's true that it makes the rich/medically advanced societies less resistant in the long term.

Re:Artificial Sperm?

[Lord Kano]

Don't forget putting shit together and carrying heavy things.

LK

Re:They don't need us

[Maxo-Texas]

First....

In the 1950's hamburgers were a fraction of their current size, and most people were in the 5' range. 6' was considered tall back then. They slept in these "full" and "double" beds- king size was unneeded and queen size was enormous (my bedroom -built in the 1950's is built for a queen size in the master bedroom).

And both men *and* women have gotten much bigger over the last 100 years. A lot of "knights" armor and castles were clearly made for very small, short people. And then their are pigmies and other groups of people who are still naturally small (a lot of asians are still very petite).

Even at our current large size, anything over 8" requires that you take extra time and go slow until the lady warms up. An 8x6 is a monster of a piece that puts you in the top 1 to 2% of the population.

So for -most- women, having a 10 inch piece would be counter-selective at this time since it is too much. In the very recent past, even more so when most women were about 5' tall or less.

Secondly-- it only counts if a baby results in terms of selection.

Thirdly There are many other more visable things that matter too. Do you have hair, does your mouth stink, do you have black teeth, do you stink, do you have blackheads all over your nose, then ... are you good looking in general, are you funny, sexy, confident, reliable, can you dance, are you good at other aspects of sex (oral, mental, tantric). On top of that, to some women these matter a lot more than size.

So pecker size is just a small piece of the puzzle. I would guess that a huge majority of straight and bi women want to do a guy with a big piece one time in their life as a checkmark.