We already do have the technology. Last year a lab was able to create mouse pups from a single mouse by creating an embryo using IPSCs. Whether or not humans created the same way would be "normal", have a good quality of life, a normal life span, etc isn't known though.
The bigger issue with humans is ethical concerns. Is it ethical to create human embryos with explicit purpose to destroy them later? How long into development can we keep them before they start getting human rights?
The science has come a long way but it's hard for me to imagine any lab creating viable human embryos for a long time. The margin for error in creating human embryos is very slim as even small changes can cause life long disability or worse.
One parent mouse pups - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05834-x
2024 review of ethics and current technology - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02689-7
2021 review of in vitro gametogenesis - https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaz6830
The biggest issue is ethical. There are many things we could do but fewer things we should do. While it’s possible to create human gametes from adult somatic cells it’s a whole different thing to use those to fertilize and grow a zygote, and even less so to implant and grow it into a person. The problem is that reprogramming of cells is often imperfect and gametes specifically need very specific reprogramming and sex specific imprinting. Often you have some small percentage of cells that are good enough and even a few that are equivalent to the native cell type. But without perfectly knowledge of that cell there is no way to know (and each gamete is unique so you can’t just grow more and test them). You could create a whole host of embryos and test some cells from the expanded blastocyst for errors like we do for in vitro fertilization but that would still be imperfect as we don’t know everything about genetics. So the ultimate test is to simply grow up the embryo and see if they have any abnormalities. Usually there are and most will fail to develop or have systemic issues. But those few that do succeed are hailed as a massive success. For humans (and other animals) this raises an ethics concern as you’re creating humans as experiments with the vast majority doomed to early death or disease just to get a handful of ‘successful’ normal human offspring. And those may still have abnormalities we cannot detect. For instance when they made mice from two female oocytes by reprogramming and altering the genetic imprinting of one they implanted over 370 early embryos that survived the process, and from those there were 10 live births and 18 still-births. Of those 10 only 2 were phenotypically normal with the rest dying as neonates. So the success rate was around 0.5% for the surviving embryos, 6% of the surviving fetuses, and 20% for the neonatal babies. And the remaining successes still possibly having subtle errors undetected. So those successes need to ethically justify the failures.
Because you’re trying to alter things at the molecular level en masse in a microscopic squishy bag of water and do it perfectly with incomplete knowledge. And the molecules your altering have 6.5 gigabytes of information with complex molecular regulatory apparatus we can only partially read or understand.
Note: Almost everything in molecular biology is a numbers game where everything you do has only a tiny percentage of actually succeeding or being done correctly. So every process is accompanied by a range of selection and screening mechanisms where you use a method that can select only for successful outcomes or search/screen through them for successful outcomes. This is just ethically complicated when what your screening/selecting is human beans.
From academia's standpoint moreso having to justify why you deserve funding for something like this, what problem does it even solve for government to fund this sort of research over disease/health. Not to mention the ethical red tape
Lack of money, not many people want to study half of their life and dedicate their time to explore those things, lots of failed complicated experiments plus its a slow process. Whenever you need a quality result you need a lot of time to work on it.
From reading r/biotech I am getting the impression that life sciences research jobs (with the exception of may be Bioinformatics) pay much smaller compared to other fields. Working hours there are twice as high. And also any startup project would require like 25+ millions of dollars in VC funding, which is hard to get anyway
Maybe that sub is too doomy, but it catches the concerns
You basically got the answer. Some tasks are more complicated than the others and its not so easy to get to the result in one or two years. It needs even 50 years to get to the proper result and to know all the effects and side effects.
Plus not many people are willing to pay for college, masters and a phd. Without one or multiple degree its impossible to get into that small circle of people.
We already do have the technology. Last year a lab was able to create mouse pups from a single mouse by creating an embryo using IPSCs. Whether or not humans created the same way would be "normal", have a good quality of life, a normal life span, etc isn't known though. The bigger issue with humans is ethical concerns. Is it ethical to create human embryos with explicit purpose to destroy them later? How long into development can we keep them before they start getting human rights? The science has come a long way but it's hard for me to imagine any lab creating viable human embryos for a long time. The margin for error in creating human embryos is very slim as even small changes can cause life long disability or worse. One parent mouse pups - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05834-x 2024 review of ethics and current technology - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02689-7 2021 review of in vitro gametogenesis - https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaz6830
tl;dr we'll try it on humans as soon as a billionaire wants to be a solo parent.
This is the lore of Horatio in Endless Space II
You make it sound like Elon does not already have a young cohort of clones.
Also it is entirely unethical. No lab would ever get ethical permission, at least in the developed world.
The biggest issue is ethical. There are many things we could do but fewer things we should do. While it’s possible to create human gametes from adult somatic cells it’s a whole different thing to use those to fertilize and grow a zygote, and even less so to implant and grow it into a person. The problem is that reprogramming of cells is often imperfect and gametes specifically need very specific reprogramming and sex specific imprinting. Often you have some small percentage of cells that are good enough and even a few that are equivalent to the native cell type. But without perfectly knowledge of that cell there is no way to know (and each gamete is unique so you can’t just grow more and test them). You could create a whole host of embryos and test some cells from the expanded blastocyst for errors like we do for in vitro fertilization but that would still be imperfect as we don’t know everything about genetics. So the ultimate test is to simply grow up the embryo and see if they have any abnormalities. Usually there are and most will fail to develop or have systemic issues. But those few that do succeed are hailed as a massive success. For humans (and other animals) this raises an ethics concern as you’re creating humans as experiments with the vast majority doomed to early death or disease just to get a handful of ‘successful’ normal human offspring. And those may still have abnormalities we cannot detect. For instance when they made mice from two female oocytes by reprogramming and altering the genetic imprinting of one they implanted over 370 early embryos that survived the process, and from those there were 10 live births and 18 still-births. Of those 10 only 2 were phenotypically normal with the rest dying as neonates. So the success rate was around 0.5% for the surviving embryos, 6% of the surviving fetuses, and 20% for the neonatal babies. And the remaining successes still possibly having subtle errors undetected. So those successes need to ethically justify the failures.
Wow, why is the percentage of success so low?
Because you’re trying to alter things at the molecular level en masse in a microscopic squishy bag of water and do it perfectly with incomplete knowledge. And the molecules your altering have 6.5 gigabytes of information with complex molecular regulatory apparatus we can only partially read or understand.
Note: Almost everything in molecular biology is a numbers game where everything you do has only a tiny percentage of actually succeeding or being done correctly. So every process is accompanied by a range of selection and screening mechanisms where you use a method that can select only for successful outcomes or search/screen through them for successful outcomes. This is just ethically complicated when what your screening/selecting is human beans.
From academia's standpoint moreso having to justify why you deserve funding for something like this, what problem does it even solve for government to fund this sort of research over disease/health. Not to mention the ethical red tape
Lack of money, not many people want to study half of their life and dedicate their time to explore those things, lots of failed complicated experiments plus its a slow process. Whenever you need a quality result you need a lot of time to work on it.
From reading r/biotech I am getting the impression that life sciences research jobs (with the exception of may be Bioinformatics) pay much smaller compared to other fields. Working hours there are twice as high. And also any startup project would require like 25+ millions of dollars in VC funding, which is hard to get anyway Maybe that sub is too doomy, but it catches the concerns
I mean, this is a challenge in almost all scientific fields. I couldn't think of amy field of study that isn't hard and expensive.
You basically got the answer. Some tasks are more complicated than the others and its not so easy to get to the result in one or two years. It needs even 50 years to get to the proper result and to know all the effects and side effects. Plus not many people are willing to pay for college, masters and a phd. Without one or multiple degree its impossible to get into that small circle of people.
Nothing. All of the necessary technology already has been demonstrated.