Nov. 19, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:19
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The latest iteration and the latest use for gene editing technology has to do with the creation of artificial gametes, or what technically is called IVG. | |
| Most people have heard of IVF, creating an embryo in the lab in a Petri dish. | |
| IVG involves reprogramming adult human skin cells, let's say, to become gametes, either sperm or eggs. | |
| What does this pretend? | |
| This has been done in mice and other mammals for a number of years. | |
| Up until a few weeks ago, had not yet been done in humans, but some researchers at Oregon Health Science University recently announced that they had used artificial gametes, artificial eggs in this case, to create human embryos. | |
| Most of those human embryos had genetic problems associated with them, but a few of them looked like they might be viable. | |
| They were killed at the blastocyst stage around day nine. | |
| And the people who are doing this say there's a lot of technical kinks to work out. | |
| There's a lot of genetic anomalies and problems with the embryos that we created. | |
| So this is not yet ready for use in human beings. | |
| But there are scientists that are continuing to work on it. | |
| So what would artificial gametes potentially open up? | |
| Well, they would open up the possibility of using skin cells from a man to create ovum, to create eggs, so that two men could have a genetically related child. | |
| So the possibility of same-sex reproduction, two men or two women having a genetically related child. | |
| Advocates of this technology have also talked about and written about the idea of what they call multiplex parenting. | |
| Let's say you have four people of whatever sex, let's say two men and two women, that want to have a genetically related child who's related to all four of them. | |
| You use IVF or artificial gametes from one pair of that four to create an embryo. | |
| You do the same thing with the other pair of that four to create another embryo. | |
| You extract embryonic stem cells from those two embryos, destroy those embryos, take those skin cells and use IVG to create gametes, sperm, and eggs, which you combine to create yet a third embryo, and then you bring that third embryo to birth. | |
| You now have an embryo that's genetically related to all four of those people. | |
| Technically, those people are the embryo's genetic grandparents, but the embryo's parents, or the person, if that embryo is implanted and brought to birth, that person's parents are embryos that were created and destroyed in a laboratory. | |
| So a radical remaking of the idea of families is one possibility. | |
| There's other strange possibilities as well. | |
| Let's say you're the maid at a hotel where a famous movie star is staying. | |
| I don't know, Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt. | |
| No, you can get a hair follicle. | |
| Exactly, exactly. | |
| You know, you fail, you want to have their baby, but you fail to seduce them the old-fashioned way. | |
| So, you know, you just go to the pillow and scrape off the skin cells of the hair follicle, take them to your rogue IVG clinic, create the famous movie star's sperm, undergo IVF, |
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