That is truly amazing, it's great that almost weekly I see something created that seemed like it might be decades away.
There are a lot of political/legal consequences of research like this, paternity tests can be used to rob unwitting men if someone decides to create a child without their knowledge. Also, this may eventually change the burden of proof in various forms of assault as the presence of sperm doesn't actually indicate that the individual involved was there.
On the flip side the upside is amazing, allowing sterile fathers to have children. And of course the technology is involved is amazing.
Some of his early work led to stories about “an end to men”, enabling lesbian couples to have their own biological children without male involvement but, according to Prof Nayernia, these were based on a “misunderstanding”.
“IVD sperm can only be produced from stem cells with male [XY] chromosomes,” he said. “Stem cells with female [XX] chromosomes can be prompted to form early-stage sperm but do not progress further. This demonstrates that the genes on a Y chromosome are essential for meiosis and sperm maturation.”
Why? Male couples should be able to reproduce in the same way --- given enough money to rent out a womb (or the technology to create one). As an added bonus they can also create females.
an upside i haven't seen mentioned is birth control - if the technology were perfected, men could sterilize themselves without giving up the possibility of having children.
Are adult stem cells equivalent to embryonal ones?
From how I understood it, they just separated germline cells from very early embryos and let them develop into sperm in an incubator (that is, these germline stem cells would anyway develop into sperm, if left in the embryo).
While this is certainly interesting, for "curing" infertility, wouldn't you still need to find a way how to turn adult stem cells into germline stem cells?
This seems like equivalent problem to "growing hearts in a vat".
There are all sorts of different singularities, in my opinion. Cold fusion would be a singularity. Biological immortality/gene modification in the living is another. Self-improving AI is the singularity that encompasses all of the possible singularities.
There are a lot of political/legal consequences of research like this, paternity tests can be used to rob unwitting men if someone decides to create a child without their knowledge. Also, this may eventually change the burden of proof in various forms of assault as the presence of sperm doesn't actually indicate that the individual involved was there.
On the flip side the upside is amazing, allowing sterile fathers to have children. And of course the technology is involved is amazing.