this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
13 points (100.0% liked)
Science
12955 readers
126 users here now
Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wonder what exactly about this innovation is, ethically speaking, problematic. The article says the embryo possesses no brain or heart. Sure, I could see this eventually being used to create artificial humans, but right now, this is huge for just growing organs. I personally don’t even see a problem with real humans being grown. It means people no longer need sex to make children. Of course, this could potentially lead to eugenics issues and designer babies, but that’s problem which you shouldn’t fix with a blanket ban on this incredible science. That’s a problem which you fix using dedicated restrictions on eugenics- not artificially grown embryos.
Human being grown raises so many question: who are the legal parents, can they inherit, can they have siblings and a typical sibling relationship, who's responsible for the chid education and welfare, what's the effect on culture, what's the effect of human generic diversity and evolution.
At the moment these artificial "embroys" aren't really human beings though, any more than a kidney is a whole ass person. These clumps of cells don't grow lungs, a brain, or any of the other structures required to form a full person and they are extremely unlikely to form viable pregnancies if implanted into a womb.
The ethical questions are likely to be more related to how long scientists should be allowed to grow these artificial embryos for in a lab and more generally whether the laws for scientific growth of real human embryos should apply to artificial ones or if the potential benefits outweigh the ickyness.
Any debate about actually growing full humans using this tech is probably decades away from being really relevant and could potentially harm research into pregnancy using this tech - research that could easily save a lot of lives.
China has an aging population that will not wait to continue this technology
What use do you see China having for this that they couldn't already do with conventional cloning that's been around for like 30 years now?