[HN Gopher] 'Human Embryo Model' Without Sperm or Egg
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'Human Embryo Model' Without Sperm or Egg
Author : testelastic
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-09-06 18:43 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il)
(TXT) w3m dump (wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il)
| testelastic wrote:
| A team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute have successfully
| created an 'embryo model' that closely resembles a 14-day-old
| human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or womb.
| [deleted]
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| The question I have is why they call it a model?
|
| It is certainly not a simulation, and although it apparently
| started with different components they manipulated those to
| behave the way the normal versions do.
|
| What would happen if they implanted it in a womb?
| Stevvo wrote:
| [delayed]
| Retric wrote:
| It's a model because it's not completely equivalent. Medicine
| has learned a great deal from studying rodents, but humans
| are quite different.
|
| For one thing human embryos would have already been implanted
| in a womb for a week at that point and a great deal of
| signaling occurs between embryo and the uterus.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Signalling? Thank you for expanding my horizons. Could you
| please share some more? Even a link or two would suffice.
| danielschonfeld wrote:
| I am not expert but I think OP means different hormones
| would start to get produced and others would become
| suppressed to support the creation of a placenta, to
| support the the lining of the uterus and to cease
| ovulation and menstrual cycle as well as to start
| supporting the growing embryo in terms of nutrients by
| means of generating and connecting blood vessels.
|
| I read somewhere that pregnancy (unlike what is normally
| described) is a tug of war between the embryo which is
| the leach if you will on the mother which is the host.
| The embryo basically try consumes the host and so long as
| everybody is doing what they're supposed to, all the
| mechanisms end up keeping that war at bay with both
| participants making it alive at the end. If some
| mechanisms (and signals) were to misbehave one of the two
| would cease to exist.
| jtbayly wrote:
| >"For one thing human embryos would have already been
| implanted in a womb for a week at that point"
|
| At what point? Implantation typically occurs 6-12 days
| after fertilization. This experiment starts at the
| equivalent of day 7. IVF is a thing.
|
| It sounds like you're just guessing.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| "Print a slave" sounds good to me.
| kleiba wrote:
| I used to be a researcher in NLP until not too long ago. Over the
| last few years, increasing pressure has been put on on everyone
| trying to publish papers related to training data collected
| through human trials to provide ethics statements as a way to
| ensure that certain standards are met regarding that data. Not
| everyone is able to see too much sense in this process, and I've
| heard comments from non-US colleagues that it reflects a purely
| American world view. But I think that there are at least some
| applications where ethical consideration are definitely worth
| talking about, eg., in applications such as hate speech
| detection.
|
| And of course, even if you don't agree with the necessity for
| ethics statements, because it is just one more thing that takes
| up time you could otherwise spend on your actual job (doing
| research), you certainly don't want to risk having your paper
| rejected just because you don't meet whatever ethics standards
| the conference or journal seeks to uphold.
|
| But remember, I'm talking _natural language processing_ here.
|
| In that light, it is a complete mystery to me how research like
| the one described in the article could have possibly, ever made
| it past an ethics review. Unless, of course, completely different
| standards are applied - which in itself would be rather
| questionable.
| dekhn wrote:
| Why do you believe this work would not have passed an ethics
| review?
|
| (your comments are a bit obscure, in a way that suggests you
| aren't familiar with how modern biological research is
| evaluated)
| kleiba wrote:
| I have no doubt that it passed an ethics review. I'm sorry if
| my comment seemed to suggest otherwise.
|
| I suppose what I was trying to get at was a suspicion that
| ethics reviews in today's research landscape (not only in the
| medical field, but others as well) seem to me more like a lip
| service. And don't get me wrong, that's just an opinion, I'm
| sure a lot of you think otherwise.
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| Reducing human suffering is a noble goal and infertile couples
| could benefit from this research. I would rather have western
| world make giant leaps in this field and also set the direction
| of ethics here rather than just banning it and leaving it up to
| Russia and China to conduct this sort of research in their secret
| facilities.
| patall wrote:
| It's one of the two publications that raised a controversy in
| June, for example discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36330732
|
| A summary on Nature news at the times: https://archive.ph/Xnx5n
| frank_bb wrote:
| [dead]
| rmbyrro wrote:
| That sounds to me like opening console and messing up with the
| website's JS code :D
| [deleted]
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