gwap posted:

what im trying to say is you humanities fuckers should have to have to struggle at least a little bit before talking about this shit

i did a university genetics course but it was 4 years ago now...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Men, Who Needs Them?
By GREG HAMPIKIAN
Published: August 24, 2012

MAMMALS are named after their defining characteristic, the glands capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science.

That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.

The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered the legal responsibility of our parents.

With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.

That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead.

Think about your own history. Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.

After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages that Mom packed for you.

Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA, less than one-millionth of your mass.

Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones and oxygen from her blood, and you received all your nutrition, energy and immune protection from her. By the time you were born your mother had contributed six to eight pounds of your weight. Then as a parting gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and groin that continue to protect your skin, digestive system and general health. In contrast, your father’s 3.3 picograms of DNA comes out to less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107 billion babies ago.

And while birth seems like a separation, for us mammals it’s just a new form of attachment to our female parent. If your mother breast-fed you, as our species has done for nearly our entire existence, then you suckled from her all your water, protein, sugar, fats and even immune protection. She sampled your diseases by holding you close and kissing you, just as your father might have done; but unlike your father, she responded to your infections by making antibodies that she passed to you in breast milk.

I don’t dismiss the years I put in as a doting father, or my year at home as a house husband with two young kids. And I credit my own father as the more influential parent in my life. Fathers are of great benefit. But that is a far cry from “necessary and sufficient” for reproduction.

If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw or turkey baster, and the basic technique hasn’t changed much since Talmudic scholars debated the religious implications of insemination without sex in the fifth century. If all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.

Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis.

It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law) triumphs.

Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?

Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put into what he called an “artificial cell.” This was actually a bit of press-release hyperbole: Mr. Venter started with a fully functional cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can.

When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.”

Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/men-who-needs-them.html

Scientists all around the world, including some men, are also working on the problem:

Sperm cells have been created from a female human embryo in a remarkable breakthrough that suggests it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children.

British scientists who had already coaxed male bone marrow cells to develop into primitive sperm cells have now repeated the feat with female embryonic stem cells.

The University of Newcastle team that has achieved the feat is now applying for permission to turn the bone marrow of a woman into sperm which, if successful, would make the method more practical than with embryonic cells.

It raises the possibility of lesbian couples one day having children who share both their genes as sperm created from the bone marrow of one woman could be used to fertilise an egg from her partner.

Men and women differ because of what are called sex chromosomes. Both have an X chromosome. But only men possess a Y chromosome that carries several genes thought to be essential to make sperm, so there has been scepticism that female stem cells could ever be used to make sperm.

In April last year, Prof Karim Nayernia, Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University, made headlines by taking stem cells from adult men and making them develop into primitive sperm.

He has now managed to repeat the feat of creating the primitive sperm cells with female embryonic stem cells in unpublished work.

The next step is to make these primitive sperm undergo meiosis, so they have the right amount of genetic material for fertilisation.

Prof Nayernia showed the potential of the method in 2006, when he used sperm derived from male embryonic stem cells to fertilise mice to produce seven pups, six of which lived to adulthood, though the survivors did suffer problems.

He is now optimistic about the prospect of lab-grown sperm from women.
“I think, in principle, it will be scientifically possible,” Prof Nayernia told New Scientist.

He said that he has applied for ethical approval from the university to use bone marrow stem cells from women to start experiments to derive female sperm.
“We are now writing the application form,” he said, adding that experiments will begin in Newcastle if and when they get approval.

However, Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell and sex determination expert at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, doubts it will work: “The presence of two X chromosomes is incompatible with this. Moreover they need genes from the Y chromosome to go through meiosis. So they are at least double-damned.”

In Brazil, a team led by Dr Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute in Saõ Paulo claims to have made both sperm and eggs from cultures of male mouse embryonic stem cells in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells.

The researchers have not yet shown that their male eggs can be fertilised to produce viable offspring, but they are thinking about possibilities for same-sex human reproduction.

If all these experiments pan out, then the stage would also be set for a gay man to donate skin cells that could be used to make eggs, which could then be fertilised by his partner’s sperm and placed into the uterus of a surrogate mother.
“I think it is possible,” says Kerkis, “but I don’t know how people will look at this ethically.”

The UK parliament is now debating changes to the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, and the government is under pressure to include an amendment that would allow the future use of eggs and sperm grown in the lab from stem cells.

However, a clause added to this amendment would restrict this to sperm from genetic males and eggs from genetic females.

Read more: http://www.cosmostv.org/2011/09/prof-karim-nayerniasperm-cells-created.html#ixzz2Z5G1Ok54

Then as a parting gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and groin

roseweird posted:

gwap i've read that male stem cells can be induced to transform into sperm cells, at least in mice. if this can be achieved in humans, what do you think would be the effective barriers to achieving replacement levels of fertility (let's suppose a population of 40,000) using stem cell cultures? do you think it may be possible to induce female stem cells to turn into sperm cells in an androgenic environment?

no, the driving force of cellular differentiation is gene expression and the XY chromosomes are required for spermatogenesis. im not sure what the exact proteins are that the Y chromosome synthesizes that are used in spermatogenesis, but it is possible that they could be artificially synthesized, though we run into the other problem i was talking about: what about the non-coding loci on the Y chromosomes? they certainly have some part in spermatogenesis and i dont know how long it will take for us to decode what that part is exactly, though it is likely that whatever it may be, we will not be able to artificially reproduce it. we can make proteins for sure, but non-coding genes' functions probably will have mechanisms which require said gene in the first place.


also about that nyt article, i've heard of gene synthesis being done with a computer before, but the article fails to mention the chemistry lab work-up that lets you get to the point of actually sequencing DNA. my o-chem 2 lab final report was about synthesizing a side chain for an amino acid with the purpose of creating proteins with a machine (though we didnt get to that), i can imagine synthesizing small nucleotides to be used by a gene synthesis machine, to build even one chromosome would take months. machines can't work in a lab, that's the part about human intuition i was talking about, the point at which they can in time you might as well kill off all humans and have a robot society. i can see a single human's genes being artificially made by this process, I just don't see those humans being able to replace even the smallest society. it would take years to sequence the genome of only one human.

roseweird posted:

jools posted:

people are basically locked up underground to produce all kinds of shit nowadays though

right but i thought everyone here agreed that was bad? maybe i misread the crowd idk

im just saying, given human extinction is on the cards for you, why not?