I’ve just started reading and this seems very interesting and important. However, I find the discussion about embryos and scaling odd. I mean sentences like “If we had 500 embryos”. Here is some quick info for women under 35, generated by ChatGPT:
A single egg collection usually retrieves 8-14 eggs. Out of those, only 4-6 embryos typically develop far enough to be tested, and about 50-60% of those will be genetically normal. This means that in most cases, only 2-4 embryos per cycle are actually viable for implantation.
Even in the best-case scenario, only about 50-55% of embryo transfers lead to a live birth.
Egg collection and embryo transfer aren’t easy. Women have to inject hormones daily for weeks, go through a minor surgery to retrieve eggs, and deal with bloating, pain, and possible complications. It’s also expensive—one cycle can cost $10,000-$20,000. I doubt many women would go through dozens of rounds just to produce 100+ embryos.
I think this makes embryo selection even less promising than you portrayed. I’m confused about how this affects your analysis of gene editing. Or maybe I just don’t understand why you talk about hundreds of embryos because I haven’t read the full text.
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.)
Yes you’re right. With current technology there’s no way you could get anywhere close to 500 embryos. I know a couple trying to get 100 and even that seems crazy to me.
5-20 is more realistic for most people (and 5 is actually quite good if you have fertility issues).
But we wanted to show 500 edits to compare scaling of gene editing and embryo selection and there wasn’t any easy way to do that without extending the graph for embryo selection.
Thanks for clarifying. If you ever pitch your ideas to potential investors or something, I recommend avoiding talking about hundreds of embryos, or at least acknowledging that this is unrealistic with current technologies before doing so. When reading, I was a bit worried that you might be divorced from reality, thinking in sci-fi terms, not knowing the basic realities about IVF. This made it difficult for me to trust other things you were saying about domains I know nothing about. Just letting you know in case it’s helpful :)
I’ve just started reading and this seems very interesting and important. However, I find the discussion about embryos and scaling odd. I mean sentences like “If we had 500 embryos”. Here is some quick info for women under 35, generated by ChatGPT:
A single egg collection usually retrieves 8-14 eggs. Out of those, only 4-6 embryos typically develop far enough to be tested, and about 50-60% of those will be genetically normal. This means that in most cases, only 2-4 embryos per cycle are actually viable for implantation.
Even in the best-case scenario, only about 50-55% of embryo transfers lead to a live birth.
Egg collection and embryo transfer aren’t easy. Women have to inject hormones daily for weeks, go through a minor surgery to retrieve eggs, and deal with bloating, pain, and possible complications. It’s also expensive—one cycle can cost $10,000-$20,000. I doubt many women would go through dozens of rounds just to produce 100+ embryos.
I think this makes embryo selection even less promising than you portrayed. I’m confused about how this affects your analysis of gene editing. Or maybe I just don’t understand why you talk about hundreds of embryos because I haven’t read the full text.
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!
Yes you’re right. With current technology there’s no way you could get anywhere close to 500 embryos. I know a couple trying to get 100 and even that seems crazy to me.
5-20 is more realistic for most people (and 5 is actually quite good if you have fertility issues).
But we wanted to show 500 edits to compare scaling of gene editing and embryo selection and there wasn’t any easy way to do that without extending the graph for embryo selection.
Thanks for clarifying. If you ever pitch your ideas to potential investors or something, I recommend avoiding talking about hundreds of embryos, or at least acknowledging that this is unrealistic with current technologies before doing so. When reading, I was a bit worried that you might be divorced from reality, thinking in sci-fi terms, not knowing the basic realities about IVF. This made it difficult for me to trust other things you were saying about domains I know nothing about. Just letting you know in case it’s helpful :)