Writer Emily Witt, in her piece "Fertile Ground" in the New Yorker Magazine (5/1/23), reminds us that while advances in AI are taking up the oxygen in rooms discussing the end of our human mentality, biotech continues its progress towards altering human sexual reproduction and desire as we've known them.
The current biological revolution, Witt relates, started in 1978 with the first succesful in-vitro fertilization (IVF, from Latin, "in glass" i.e. in a petri dish) of a human egg by a human sperm, "making it possible to conceive an embryo outside the body."
Fast forward to 2016 and the advent of in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG), the transforming of non-reproductive cells into gametes (reproductive cells like eggs and sperm) followed by fertilization outside the body. Two Japanese scientists removed skin cells from the tip of a mouse's tail, turned them into stem cells ("youthful" cells able to develop into any kind of cell), then turned the stem cells into mouse eggs and fertilized them, in-vitro, with traditional mouse sperm, finally transferring the fertilized eggs into a mouse womb where they developed into baby mice which the scientists described as "grossly normal."
One of the human limitations that this science is seeking to correct is that, unlike most other female mammals (for instance female elephants who can conceive into their sixth decade), human females are far less likely to conceive past the age of 45 because of declining viablity of their eggs. In addition, as reported by the Oxford Academic Journal (March/April '23), numerous studies have found that in the last 50 years male sperm counts have dropped 51.6%. Scientists are puzzling over the causes of these declines, but IVG could solve both problems by producing viable human eggs and sperm throughout any phase of our lives.
Last March the lab that developed IVG repeated the process, but this time it produced fertilized mouse embryos whose eggs had been developed using stem cells from males only. In other words, they were "mice with two dads," as the headline in Nature Magazine put it. Witt continues, "Futurists have speculated about broader possibilites, such as an embryo formed with the DNA of four people instead of two, or even a so-called 'unibaby,' the result of a person reproducing with herself [sic]."
Witt continues that "a related prospect, artificial wombs, was a prominent theme at the Amerian Society for Reproductive Medicine's annual conference in 2021, hinting at a time when gestation could happen outside the human body." Witt observes, "It wasn't 'Oh, maybe this will happen; it was very factual: when this happens, this is how we're going to use it."
Progress is driven now by numerous start-ups working on IVG, hoping to create the next billionaires who change what we are.
The start-ups must face the politics of the abortion debate. As Alta Dharo, retired professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, put it, "The U.S. has a political debate about abortion that has spilled over into everything that has to do with embryos."
Much of the debate derives from speculation about God's will. Does God consider every embryo a sacred being divinely ordained for life? If so, how will that play out when embryos can develop from non-reproductive cells? There are about 100 trillion cells in the human body, all theoretically capable of being transformed into eggs fertilized by either natural or induced sperm, giving us a possible world population of 100 trillion times the 8 billion people now on Earth, clearly an unsustainable number. We are not accustomed to God appearing and telling us which of our interpretations of His will is right, but short of that we are left with a welter of subjective views and no helpful dictate.
Witt ends with a quote from science writer Katsuhiko Hayashi: "It is valuable to show the possibility of new, let's say alternative types of reproduction for the future," ending dryly, "but of course such a technology should be evaluated by the society." Really?
On this blog I advocate for a new American political party because our current major parties, the Democrats and Republicans, specialize in helping us rage against each other over ill-defined "crises" so we don't notice the radical changes coming to human culture- most prominently from AI and the biological sciences- and because of the lack of ideas from our government on how to deal with these changes. We need a truly "democratic" party to give us a voice regarding the replacement of the current human being with something else.
Here's a question that a truly democratic party might ask: What will happen to the sex drive characteristic of our species? It is much more pronounced than in other mammals, who have "mating seasons" characterized by male combat leading to coitus for the victor. This mating season typically ends (since, after all, it's a season) and is followed by different types of seasons, such as a season in which the species sleeps all winter. Humans, however, have only one season: male combat and coitus. The sexual urges that drive this constant season are of an intensity that invades all emotional states and all undertakings of our kind, from a boy's longing to insert Tab B into Slot A, to a girl's fervid dreams of connection, to art, to science, to everything we do. How will we react (or will we react) if this never-ending desire, typical of humanity for all its recorded and probably unrecorded history, and necessary to keep us going while we weren't produced in a dish, suddenly vanishes or is manipulated into being a limited season? Some of us would notice. They would be the upset ones. The new model humans will have little or no memory of what we were and will settle into whatever status quo they inherit.
Aldous Huxley's prescient view of our future, the novel Brave New World (1931), depicts a not very far off society where all humans are conceived in-vitro, but there are primitive, left-over humans from the end of the previous era (ours) who are kept in concentration camps in the desert and referred to as "savages." The most obscene word in the language is "mother." Memory, you might say, is the theme of the book.
Don't look to our dominant political parties for a response to the biological revolution. The Democrats and Republicans would rather pontificate about the national debt than pretend to understand the likely imminent end to the current human model.
How about a new political party that at least promotes consciousness of what is happening?
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