Future reproduction for same-sex couples

Fertility is one of several equality battlegrounds. Same-sex couples don’t have equality when it comes to having babies. This time it isn’t just the law that needs changed but also biology before true equality can be claimed. Surprisingly perhaps, it is possible and almost certainly will happen. It will just take time.

In one scene in Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’,  one of the men demanded the right to have babies. Someone pointed out that he didn’t have a womb, so he accused them of oppression. He demanded the right to have babies, even if he couldn’t. Life imitates art. In real life, same-sex couples now are allowed to have babies; the debate has moved on to rights and the allocation of responsibility for paying for it if they want to do it via fertility treatment rather than adoption. But same-sex couples still can’t have babies where both partners each contribute half the genes.

Conventional fertility treatment using donor sperm already enables female couples to have kids. Men can make use of surrogate mothers. However, with conventional treatments, only one of the couple gets to be a genetic parent, a sperm or ovum donor being the other. There is far more to defining a person than their genes, but they do play an important role in determining our gender, nature and appearance. 

Technology will one day be able to let both partners in a same-sex couple contribute genes to their new baby. The general principle is easy enough to state. For women-only couples, use high-tech IVF to add the genes of one parent to an ovum from the other. For male only couples, just take the genes from each parent and put them in a donor egg that has had the genes removed from its nucleus.  

That still doesn’t quite deliver equality though. The female couples can’t make baby boys, because neither of them has a Y chromosome. The male couples can’t contribute the mitochondrial DNA or any of  the rest of an ovum, so some of the baby still isn’t theirs. So more progress is still needed. 

Reproductive equality will need the technology to take a cell from a man and make it into an ovum. There has already been some progress making eggs from stem cells in mice. e.g:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/05/hope-for-infertily-treatments-scientists-make-new-eggs-from-mouse-stem-cells/

so making them work properly and extending it to work in humans sounds feasible. Indeed, it sounds like the sort of thing we’d expect to hear about from stem cell research in the next decade.

Making Y chromosomes is harder. Some Y chromosome genes don’t exist in women, so Y chromosomes would have to come from donor men or else be assembled from scratch  We are very far from the level of genetic assembly needed to manufacture a human Y chromosome from scratch and even if we could, there still remains the decision over which genes to use. Picking from a library of Y chromosomes from male donors would be very much easier, and the rest of the chromosomes could come from the female couple.

So, men could get reproductive equality by using one of their own cells to make an ovum and adding their partner’s genes before implanting in a surrogate mother or artificial womb. Women can make baby girls but will have to compromise if they want a baby boy. They could self-source almost all the genes, but would have to import the Y chromosome. Not quite full equality, but close.

Eventually though, I think equality comes not by same-sex couples catching up with different-sex couples on old-fashioned biology, but by moving to synthetic biology. The far future of reproduction is that we will be able to design our offspring, look up which genes and other cellular components are needed, assemble the bits and incubate according to the required regime.

That won’t be easy, so it will be a long time off. You can’t directly calculate genotype from phenotype, but over time we can make databases of what leads to what. So it will realistically be several decades before we get there. Arguing over ethics and rights will probably take place in parallel so won’t necessarily slow development down much. So will development of artificial wombs.

The result is that any couple of any gender combination – and I’ve argued recently that we will get new genders in the future too – will be able to get their genes listed, combine them in any combination with those from their partners, friends, family and strangers and design any novel ones where nature doesn’t provide. Then they can simulate the potential combinations, tweak them to remove vulnerabilities or enhance qualities, eventually decide which ones they want to have as their kids, and essentially get them made to order. The gender of the parents shouldn’t make it any more or less difficult. Reproduction will then be a level playing field for same and different sex couples.

Future population v resources. Humans are not a plague.

Sir David Attenborough is once again in the news, arguing that humans are a plague on the earth. He has been an excellent presenter over the years, but he does himself no favours by making such claims. Doomsayers are invariably wrong. I’ve written a few times about this, but here’s a quick refresher to save you looking them up.

Let’s get rid of a silly straw man before we start – exponential growth continuing forever. Nobody sane think the Earth’s human population will carry on increasing exponentially forever. Obviously it will level off. Exponential growth all the way to infinity isn’t sustainable, but since the population will level off around 10 billion, we really don’t need to spend too much time worrying about the mathematics of infinite consumption. I would personally put the maximum capacity of the Earth at around 100 billion, but I don’t expect us ever to have more than 10 billion here, and nobody sensible does. Other planets will house some more, but they will have their own economics.

First, we aren’t running out of physical resources, just moving them around. Apart from a few spacecraft that have moves some stuff off planet, some excess radioactive decay induced in power stations and weapons, and helium and hydrogen escaping from the atmosphere, all of which is offset by meteorites and dust landing from space, all we have done is convert stuff to other forms. Almost all materials are more plentiful now than they were 40 years ago when Sir David’s predecessors warned of the world running out imminently. They were wrong, so is he. If we do start to run short, we can mine key elements from rubbish tips and use energy to convert back to any form we need. We can engineer substitutes  And we can gather them from space. Another way of looking at this issue is that we live on top of 6000km of resources and only have homes a few metres deep. When we fill them, which doesn’t take much, we dispose of one thing to make room for a new one. Recycling technology is getting better all the time, at the same time as material technology means we need less stuff to make something, and can do so with a wider range of input elements.

We are slowly depleting some organic resources. For example, fossil fuels, but there are several hundred years supply left, and we will not need any more than a tiny fraction of that before we move to other energy sources. Also, fish, many stocks are threatened around the world, so fishing needs some work in designing and implementing better practices, but that is not unachievable by any means. Forestry is being depleted in some areas and expanding in others. Some of the areas that are being wiped out are because environmentalists and other doomsayers have forced daft policies through that perversely encourage people to burn forests down to make the land available for biofuel plantations and carbon offset schemes.

We certainly are not short of space. If the inhabitable land in the world were inhabited at the same density as southern England, we could house 70-80 billion people. The UK sometimes feels full when we get stuck in traffic jams or queues for public services, but these are mainly a matter of design. Self driving vehicles can increase road capacity by a factor of 5, regional rail capacity by a factor of 200. Replacement of most public sector workers by machines, or better still, good system design, would eradicate most queues and improve most services.

Energy isn’t a problem in the long term in spite of what doomsayers claim. Shale gas is already reducing costs in the USA at the same time as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In Europe, where doomsayers and environmentalist have more power to influence policy, CO2 emissions are increasing while energy costs threaten many areas of the economy. Obama’s recent speech threatens to undermine the USA’s advantage but that’s another story. Nuclear energy currently depends on uranium  but thorium based power is under development and is very likely to succeed in due course, adding several hundred years of supply. Solar, fusion, geothermal and shale gas will add to this to provide abundant power for even a much great population, within a few decades, well ahead of the population curve. The only energy shortages we will see will be doomsayer-induced.

Future generations will face debts handed on to them without their consent, but will also inherit a physical and cultural infrastructure with built in positive feedback that ensure rapid technological development. Among its many benefits, future technology will greatly reduce the amount of material needed to accomplish a task. It will also expand the global economy to provide enough wealth to buy a decent standards of living for everyone. It will also clean up the environment  It will also produce far more food from less land area, allowing land to be returned to nature. Food production per hectare has doubled in the last 30 years. The technology promises further gains  into the foreseeable future.

The world Attenborough is scared of will actually be a greener and more pleasant land, with nature in a better state than today, with a larger world population that is richer and better fed, almost certainly no more than 10 billion. Providing that is, that we can stop doomsayers forcing their policies through – the only thing that would really wreck the environment. A doomsayer-free human population is not a plague but a benefit to the Earth and nature. The doomsayers themselves and their daft policies are the greatest proven threat. If Sir David really cares about nature, he should focus on letting us be inspired by nature as he does so brilliantly, and let technologists get on with making sure it can flourish in the future

 

 

Things that don’t work but could

The world is more complex than it seems. AARRGGHH!

Thanks @AKPosthuman for the title. I’ll be largely preaching to the converted here, but never mind.

Life seems to be cyclical in all sorts of ways. The one phasing me today is that all of a sudden I feel less sure about lots of things I was certain about a few years ago. Science, political allegiance, world order, basic values, even basic questions like who the hell am I really?

You start of as a child and know sod all, but by the time you’re out of nappies you persuade yourself (and fail to persuade your parents) that you know everything. Then you go to school and discover there are deeper problems than counting to ten. At each stage of qualifications you get to a point where you start thinking you understand stuff, or at least must be getting close. But it is an illusion. You only ever get to understand the answers to some of the questions you’ve been made aware of so far. A bit more education and a whole new range of questions appears. A garden snail is probably confident that it understands the world fine. And it does, it has answers to all it wonders about, it just doesn’t ask deep questions (guessing a bit here, I don’t really know what a snail thinks). It may well be true that ignorance is bliss. It certainly needs less effort.

After graduation, you get chucked in at the deep end in work, and are exposed to the full reality that you are a mere novice in a world of experts. A decade later, you’re starting to catch up and hopefully pushing ahead in at least some tiny areas. A decade after that, you’re flying high, in your own head at least. You’re confident in your field, understand how the world works, the arguments for and against X,Y and Z, and which is right. You have a well stocked basket of opinions on just about everything of importance to you, you know which flag to salute, who you are, what matters, what you believe and what you know to be trash. You know who to look up to, and who is full of crap. You know there is more to learn, that the world is much bigger and more complex than you thought, but that just drives you on, it’s what life is about.

And then you start to realise it isn’t even that simple. Just as you thought you realised the world was more complex than you thought, but you could allow for that, but you were at least starting to get the beginnings of a grip, you discover it is actually far more complex than you thought. Well, that’s where I realised I am this morning. Another cycle of discovery, starting all over again. I have to re-evaluate the whole damn thing from scratch again with revised thinking.

AKposthuman assures me that this is becoming wiser. God I hope he’s right. I’d hate to think my brain is decaying and yesterday’s easy problems now look hard because of that. If I can persuade myself  that what I’m seeing is just a glimpse of the next level of questions, and see how damned frightening it is, then I’ll be fine.

Thanks AK. Wonder if I’ll live long enough to see the start of the next cycle?