<story><title>Baby girl born from record-setting 27-year-old embryo</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55164607</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anonytrary</author><text>I thought it was relatively easy to keep zygotes dormant for arbitrary lengths of time, but embryos are more developed and this definitely raises philosophical questions regarding cryogenics. &amp;quot;How big can we go beyond the embryo, and for how long?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>If we manage to reproduce from digitally stored DNA, endlessly.&lt;p&gt;Where it gets interesting  is what happens when we start manipulating and improving DNA digitally before we implant it. Basically things like Crispr are stepping stones towards getting there.  But we could be digitally creating and evaluating combinations of genes and genomes from very large  databases of historical archives of individuals.&lt;p&gt;The philosophical and ethical questions around this are largely centered on boys of brazil type scenarios. Most of that stuff is driven by popular fiction rather than reality. Another factor is religion and religious objections against stuff like this happening or even acknowledging that this is possible.&lt;p&gt;But the reality is we already have celebrities ordering clones of their deceased pets. From there to designer babies is not such a huge technical leap. Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc. Now imagine dog breeders going digital and creating new dog breeds digitally before planting an embryo. Not possible today but also not that far off probably. If that  bothers you ethically, think designer grains or rice from digitally crafted DNA. GMO foods have been a thing for decades. That stuff going digital would be  about as controversial.  When that happens it won&amp;#x27;t stop there.&lt;p&gt;Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges such as the low success rate of implanting embryos,  the high error rates of dna modifications, the correspondingly high number of abortions needed because of failures, availability of stem cell material (until recently this required embryos), etc. This is not a problem for chihuahuas but kind of a show stopper when it concerns our own genetic offspring. Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely. We&amp;#x27;re kind of ethically flexible.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a good chance that this already is happening and that we simply don&amp;#x27;t get to learn about it for a while because it is kind of illegal and the people involved are not likely to want to be exposed. But the combination of billionaires, fertility issues, and technical capability makes this more a question of when than if, I would say. Supply and demand are not going to be the issue.</text></comment>
<story><title>Baby girl born from record-setting 27-year-old embryo</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55164607</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anonytrary</author><text>I thought it was relatively easy to keep zygotes dormant for arbitrary lengths of time, but embryos are more developed and this definitely raises philosophical questions regarding cryogenics. &amp;quot;How big can we go beyond the embryo, and for how long?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>est31</author><text>In the very first stage of embryonic development, during cleavage, all cells of the clump are totipotent, meaning that if you took out a single cell, you could create a human from it. The article doesn&amp;#x27;t say at which stage the embryo implanted was, but likely it was in that early stage.</text></comment>