There are various technologies that might let you make many more egg cells than are possible to retrieve from an IVF cycle. For example, you might be able to mature oocytes from an ovarian biopsy, or you might be able to turn skin cells into eggs.
Wait, what? I know Aldous Huxley is famous for writing a scifi novel in 1931 titled “Don’t Build A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs And Grow Clone Workers On Demand In Jars” but I thought that his warning had been taken very very seriously.
Are you telling me that science has stopped refusing to do this, and there is now a protocol published somewhere outlining “A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs”???
A brief summary of the current state of the “making eggs from stem cells” field:
We’ve done it in mice
We have done parts of it in humans, but not all of it
The main demand for eggs is from women who want to have kids but can’t produce them naturally (usually because they’re too old but sometimes because they have a medical issue). Nobody is taking the warning to not “Build A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs And Grow Clone Workers On Demand In Jars” because no one is planning on doing that.
Even if you could make eggs from stem cells and you wanted to make “clone workers”, it wouldn’t work because every egg (even those from the same woman) has different DNA. They wouldn’t even be clones.
Oh huh. I was treating the “and make them twins” part as relatively easier, and not worthy of mention… Did no one ever follow up on the Hall-Stillman work from the 1990s? Or did it turn out to be hype, or what? (I just checked, and they don’t even seem to be mentioned on the wiki for the zona pellucida.)
There are various technologies that might let you make many more egg cells than are possible to retrieve from an IVF cycle. For example, you might be able to mature oocytes from an ovarian biopsy, or you might be able to turn skin cells into eggs.
Wait, what? I know Aldous Huxley is famous for writing a scifi novel in 1931 titled “Don’t Build A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs And Grow Clone Workers On Demand In Jars” but I thought that his warning had been taken very very seriously.
Are you telling me that science has stopped refusing to do this, and there is now a protocol published somewhere outlining “A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs”???
A brief summary of the current state of the “making eggs from stem cells” field:
We’ve done it in mice
We have done parts of it in humans, but not all of it
The main demand for eggs is from women who want to have kids but can’t produce them naturally (usually because they’re too old but sometimes because they have a medical issue). Nobody is taking the warning to not “Build A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs And Grow Clone Workers On Demand In Jars” because no one is planning on doing that.
Even if you could make eggs from stem cells and you wanted to make “clone workers”, it wouldn’t work because every egg (even those from the same woman) has different DNA. They wouldn’t even be clones.
Oh huh. I was treating the “and make them twins” part as relatively easier, and not worthy of mention… Did no one ever follow up on the Hall-Stillman work from the 1990s? Or did it turn out to be hype, or what? (I just checked, and they don’t even seem to be mentioned on the wiki for the zona pellucida.)
Look up “in vitro maturation”. E.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028212017876 . I haven’t evaluated this literature much, so I don’t know exactly what can and can’t be done. See maybe this review (not super clearly written). https://tjoddergisi.org/articles/doi/tjod.23911
I’m not aware of a currently published protocol; sorry for confusing phrasing!