The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
prob also raising a child way expensier if you factor uni and such into it vs UK
But they tend not to cover fertility stuff.
Uterus transplants are still experimental. The only ones I could find in the U.S. are in clinical trials and are being paid for by the institution to people accepted into the program, such as the one at John Hopkins.
There are not gynecologists (yet) charging $200,000 for uterus transplants in America.
“That’s ok, other people bear the enormous cost.”
Not really a win, that.
For a comparison, check out what a 1-month supply of a biologic drug costs: https://www.goodrx.com/stelara
In some jurisdictions the former could be illegal while the latter would be legal.
A rare, congenital, condition.
I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that “someone born without a womb is a woman” and “hey we can transplant wombs now”
Thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have taken thousands of baby steps to get to this point. We should fund every single one of them - we never know where research will take us.
You're not allowed to be in the middle anymore.
People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".
Are you an extremist or a moderate? Because I can get along with a moderate person on the left, right, or anywhere in between. By the same token extremists regardless of stripe are unbearable.
What often happens is that a "supreme" court like this will file an opinion attempting to clarify the meaning as best they can, but it really requires a statutory amendment by the legislators to fix it. Often that is what happens next.
The court is really saying that the lawmakers did not specify properly what they meant in certain cases and that they should probably modify those sections (they are carefully not to tell Parliament what to do), which can be done and does sometimes get done when such things crop up.
Yes, the act (as it should) protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment, e.g. you can't fire someone for their gender identity or deny them from a service.
The act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their "sex", but a portion of the act allowed for "single sex" spaces where there is reasonable grounds to have them, but the act (reasonably at the time) did not define what sex was.
A piece of Scottish legislation referred to "woman as defined by the Equality Act", but the Equality Act never said if it was referring to biological sex or gender identity, the Scottish government said it would include people with gender reassignment certificates, a "woman's rights" charity disagreed. Hence the court got involved and found the original intention was to refer to biological sex, which was confirmed by the politician that introduced the Equality Act (Harriet Harman).
- Lord Filkin, the Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 (18th December)
The woman in question is a woman because her sexual differentiation followed the female pathway. Just because in her case that pathway led to a DSD variant doesn’t undo the rest of her female development or make her a little bit less of a woman, or male, or a third sex.
The other three I've commonly seen are:
(1) as you suggest, developmental pathway — which tends to trip people up over androgen insensitivity, and is also why puberty blockers are part of the public debate
(2) chromosomes — which has the problem of 0.6-1.0% of the population doing something else besides the normal XX/XY
and (3) current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public, and also in private by anyone who has had top surgery but not bottom surgery.
(also, you should just not talk about trans people as you display immense ignorance in a very short time, you clearly have a concept of trans bodies that is rooted in fascist propaganda: trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
> trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
Transgender people go both directions, not only AMAB but also AFAB.
Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."
e: The far more interesting discussion is whether the revival of eugenics-era language is justifiable. This is hardly the first example on this site of arrogant commentators casually reviving language that came to be understood as hateful in the 20th century.
It's the primary term I grew up with in the UK specifically about what is also called cross-dressing.
It's also used by one of my favourite comedians, Suzy Eddie Izzard, as self-description ("executive transvestite") before she identified as transgender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)
> Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."
1) Quite a lot of transphobes focus entirely on women, thus ignoring how their own rules end up forcing trans men to end up in women's-only spaces.
2) I am informed that many trans women have implants before hormones. In fact, one woman I know openly discussed face surgery as part of her transition.
Also: cis women have breast surgery. I'm told most often as a reduction. Facebook, in its complete uselessness, has advertised the surgery to me along with dick pills.
If the answer to why you use the word "transvestite" is "I am steeped in 90s celebrity and watched RHPS" fine, but your disingenuous accusations of transphobia and extreme interest in a topic you seem exceptionally ignorant about fit a corrosive pattern that attempts to shutdown meaningful discussion. The rise of eugenics-era language is deeply concerning and I would actually like to better understand why this site in particular has seen an increase of commentary using regressive 20th century language.
I am also not labelling *you* transphobic at all. It was quite obvious that you are not, even before you stated you are a trans woman. Fun fact: myself, gender fluid. (Huh, first time I've said that in a pubic forum with my name on it…)
When I wrote:
> Quite a lot of transphobes focus entirely on women, thus ignoring how their own rules end up forcing trans men to end up in women's-only spaces.
This sentence is not about you. It's a much more general observation, noting what is wrong with *the public discourse*, specifically that transphobes insist on certain definitions which end up with outcomes that they themselves are dissatisfied with.
> RHPS
While I also watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show in my teens (late 90s), that film (1975) predates me by so much, I wasn't sure if they used "transvestite" to mean "cross dressing" or "transgender". Where I first used the word "transvestite" to your objection, I meant specifically what is also called "cross dressing", because I was talking about *outward appearance in public*, and clothes are the outward appearance in public.
That and hair, I guess. My hair is long enough I've had at least one straight guy get half way through a wolf-whistle before noticing a beard. At least, I assume they were straight, given the appearance of a beard was simultaneous with them stopping.
From what I remember, that word was common and acceptable when I was growing up in the 90s, and I don't remember any Nazis using it. Nor did anyone tell me that the word "transvestite" was derogatory or offensive, although if social mores have shifted then fine, I won't say it.
What did I miss?
I have heard of folks who claim the label “transveatite” for themselves. Others see it as derogatory.
Where I wrote above:
> current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public
That wasn't a statement about being transgender. I was saying that people judge clothing, and are confused by that clothing. "Public" being about clothing, because there aren't many public places where you're going to see enough skin for anything else to cause confusion.
("vest" as in vestments, clothing).
In truth, I misspoke when I said "Nazi demographic" and had intended to write "Nazi era demographic," as the word's origination was in its use to describe the nascent trans community in Weimar Germany. In fact, the Nazis disregarded the validity of trans status entirely and the folks we'd regard as trans women today were classified as homosexual men before being subjected to the violence of the Nazi state. Trans men received a different, no less humiliating punishment.
The motivation in asking the question, beyond my disgust, is that I have observed a trend on this site of anachronistic language that fell out of favor after being associated with hate speech. It is generally being used in contexts supportive of the prominent far right agenda, and I seek to illuminate the motivations of the commentators who facilitate such odious reversions in discourse.
I apologize for my lack of clarity.
The bill referenced makes no direct mention of womb, nor functioning. You're using "literally" a bit unfaithfully there.
from the law
> a "female" is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,
“is developed to produce ova” is a statement about current capability. If they meant to include women with hysterectomies, they would have worded it differently, like “is or once was developed to produce ova;” if they meant to include women with non-functioning wombs, they would have written more broadly, like “is of the type that usually produces ova” or something.
Are you including ovary removal in your definition of hysterectomy?
Or are you defining "ova production" as including fertilization/implantation?
It is somewhat similar to how men with vasectomy still produce sperm.
For the last few fractions of a percent accuracy, a SRY cheek swab test is a simple non-invasive screening test that can flag individuals for further investigation. World Athletics have just implemented this test, stating it is “a highly accurate proxy for biological sex”.[1] A positive result in this screening test could be combined with a finger prick test for testosterone level to provide further information, and at this point we’re into methods of medical diagnosis of DSDs. About 1 in 5000 individuals will have a DSD, some of which are still unambiguously male or female (e.g. XXY Klinefelter syndrome), and some of which are almost unique individuals that defy categorization.
At this point, it is popular to seize on those rare individuals and declare “aha! So sex isn’t binary then! So it must be a spectrum!”, and while this is surely well-intentioned, it is scientifically illiterate.[2] I suspect part of the confusion is interpreting “binary” as a mathematical Boolean value (where exceptions cannot, by definition, exist) rather than as a scientific classification, where exceptions can and do exist and “prove the rule”.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/articles/cj91dr17d1no.am...
[2] https://richarddawkins.com/articles/article/race-is-a-spectr...
>What tests with what results would conclusively show which individuals went down which pathway?
You've managed to provide 0 tests that conclusively answer the question.
Did you know there is no conclusive test for Alzheimer’s, IBS, migraines, and dozens more physical conditions, nor for any psychiatric condition? Do you think these aren’t real, or that they cannot be discerned to a useful degree of accuracy?
Besides that, there are things you can determine with certainty: The presence of a substance in blood for example
Do you think natural phenomena don’t exist or can’t be useful unless there is a simple test to grant you the details?
MRKH syndrome is a disorder of female sex development, and if you look at this from the perspective of developmental biology it's clear that anyone affected by this must be a woman. I feel it shouldn't be too hard an idea to struggle with.
That they have a working womb transplant technique is impressive from a medical technology point of view but I think not enough has been said about the ethics of this experimentation.
Personally I wouldn't risk exposing my baby to transplant anti-rejection drugs. We don't know how this may impact the short-term or long-term health of the baby.
If you're still human if you're born without legs then clearly neither genetic or developmental traits determine someone's humanity.
So at what point do we call someone a woman born without a uterus? When a 'normal' pregnancy would have resulted in them having a uterus? When different genetics would have resulted in them having a uterus? Or when she herself complains that she lacks a uterus?
Here's another one for you, given how many people care about XX/XY as a distinction of gender: Humans have 46 chromosomes, but by this definition, about 0.6–1.0% of live births from human mothers are of individuals who aren't human.
Language is a tool we use to create categories, don't let language use you. Insisting that everything in reality must conform to the categories that language already has, is mistaking the map for the territory.
English: Times, German: Mal or Zeiten.
"Every time" is "jedes Mal", but "good times" is "gute Zeiten". "Three times four" uses "mal".
And every time a new thing gets invented, found, or imported, neologisms pop up, or words get borrowed from other cultures. In English, robins are said to have "red breasts", because the colour orange had not yet been coined when the bird needed a name, because the fruit after which the colour is named had not yet arrived.
People also argue about if "vegetarian hamburgers" is a sensible term, as if the "ham" implies meat, even though (1) the meat varieties usually use beef, and (2) it's named after the place Hamburg.
Before the development of hormonal and surgical solutions, the only thing trans people could do was change their clothes. At some point, the medical options are so capable that any given previous definition of gender becomes malleable. A womb implant is one such option.
I really don't.
As I say in such discussions, "you're only allowed to call them 'hamburgers' if they're from the Hamburg region, otherwise it's just a sparkling fried patty".
See also: https://xkcd.com/3075/
All of the following are nearly possible today:
+ A man implanted with a womb giving birth.
+ A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here.
+ A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father.
And one that I was working on:
+ Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.
I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?
One does not.
One builds the tools to run the experiments to discover the rules.
The closest are FinalSpark and CorticalLabs, but they both are only using in vitro neurons as the computational substrate.
Neuralink et al. are working in vivo, but they are only doing output and don't have any plans to do input, let alone to actively disrupt normal neural activity and take control of bodily processes.
If you're very interested feel free to drop me a line.
Short term in vitro learning's been shown in the original CorticalLabs paper (20 min), but the sheer difficulty of keeping neurons alive, working, unstressed, fed and oxygenated in vitro while highly active for more than an hour at a time means that no one's been able to show how that short term learning transfers to long term memory.
Using an organism that already provides all the life support for the neurons means that you can have test runs that last hours to weeks with continuous stimulation.
Your tech is easily modifiable so it can do that since it's based on the Intan RHS chips. Happy to have a chat about it since you're one of the two companies that could potentially pull this off right now.
When a woman is born without a womb, the doctors should investigate and figure out why that is. Is something else missing? Could there be other issues? A diagnosis should be made.
No such investigation is necessary when a man is born without a womb.
Where we want to end up is with artificial wombs because that will ultimately give individuals much more control over their reproduction and will do away with the onerous physiological and psychological stresses that pregnancy puts on women.
An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194422
We can now support extremely premature babies outside the womb, but as of now, the risks of growing a baby in an artificial womb is not overcome with the benefits.
Why?
Because you are trivialising the emotions of pregnancy and motherhood. It is not stress all the time, it is also joy and satisfaction and like everything in life, a roller coaster.
Would only have the sister's DNA if it was an ovary transplant.
Fun fact: fetal cells transmit back to the mother and can be spotted in virtually every organ afterwards - it's called "Fetomaternal cell microchimerism" [1].
It's not a far stretch to assume the transfer works also the other way around and you can detect maternal DNA in the fetus/child, but I'm not aware if there has been research around that.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357422...
Could someone born as a man have a transplanted womb and get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, in theory? anyone here with more medical knowledge who can comment on how likely that is to work at some point in the future?
As you may imagine, she was not happy with such responses.
However, I fear the largest hurdle will be a political one, with so many nutjobs [2] so hell-bent on imposing their dogmatic definition of gender on everyone.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/08/23/uterus-transplant...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/18/jk-rowling-har...
why just trans? it would work on any male regardless of what they identify as if it were possible. No need for penis removal either, C-section would work.
No, since plenty of trans men have babies. All these considerations would be completely irrelevant.
It's strong evidence that the desire to birth child has nothing to do with gender identity, which latter will be pretty much pointless by the time science allows human fœtus gestation outside the human female body.
First, male-identified people can be born biological female. It's an identity.
Second, the procedure doesn't exist for biological males to begin with right now, neovagina or not. A neovagina is physiologically not a biological female vagina to begin with anyway so I wouldn't help at all with the gestation. Birth can be done via C-Section.
Trans women will receive the modern* uterine transplant operation, this I can state with certainty. Birth is done via C-section as a requirement of the UTx operation, the vagina is required for discharge. I haven't been able to pay attention to the operation for a few years, but it is clear that you are operating from uninformed conjecture.
*The first uterine transplant was performed on a trans woman in Germany in 1930, Lili Elbe. This pioneering surgery lead to her death, as transplantation medicine was not adequately developed at that point in time.
> Trans women will receive the modern* uterine transplant operation, this I can state with certainty. Birth is done via C-section as a requirement of the UTx operation, the vagina is required for discharge. I haven't been able to pay attention to the operation for a few years, but it is clear that you are operating from uninformed conjecture.
> *The first uterine transplant was performed on a trans woman in Germany in 1930, Lili Elbe. This pioneering surgery lead to her death, as transplantation medicine was not adequately developed at that point in time.
Not all transmen require a vaginoplasty, not all transwomen have had a vaginoplasty or even have the desire to do so.
No biological male has ever birthed a child so far, so all that's speculation about what is or isn't needed from you is just that, speculation, based on nothing since it's technically not possible for now.
The desire to birth a child doesn't depends on anybody's gender identity nor anatomy.
Now stop trying to put people in boxes and keep an open mind.
Aside from this, the male pelvis isn't shaped to accommodate a womb, and males don't have the hormonal milieu to enable pregnancy.
The closest that researchers have come to having a male gestate a foetus was in rats. But they had to connect the bloodstream of the male rat to a pregnant female rat, where both were implanted with embryos at the same time. Even then, it worked less than 5% of the time.
Harmless divergence from nature: helping women have children.
People's perspectives give wildly different views on things.
I can't truly comprehend the mass data collection and surveillance system, how it interplays with intelligence and law enforcement, and what the impact of connecting a global constellation of privatized armed satellites and a constellation of advanced phased array antennas & sdrs to either end of the system will be, however. I believe there are bigger threats to humanity than bodily autonomy.
I am unaware of trans women having received this operation yet, but Lili Elbe died after the first uterine transplant nearly 100 years ago, before the Nazi regime destroyed trans medicine and eradicated contemporary trans existence. Given the global climate, I don't expect any trans recipients to be eager for publicity. It will happen, and soon.
This is interesting to me at the margins, because one of the things I learned when my wife got pregnant the first time was that the womb is not exactly the warm cradle of nurturing that I had always (without thinking much about it) imagined, but in many ways a blast door or containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
Keywords: fetal microchimerism, placental barrier, trophoblast invasion
https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet...
Red in tooth and claw at every layer, from the smallest cell to the entire biosphere.
Amazing article. Another reason that hardshelled laid eggs are such a great invention. The offspring can do its thing from a safe distance.
Most birds’ nests are built much more intricately than just a pile of sticks thrown together! Usually built from layers of different materials, sometimes weaved or plastered with mud/clay/bird-spit.
E.g. sparrows pick up lavender in my garden, because the oils repel some pests etc.
Crows fly, mate for life and are considered positive for the ecosystem. Humans do taxes.
There are many articles about bird intelligence available from multiple sources.
A more open minded perspective would instead try to look to what is "remotely close" to a human brain.
Although primates can't quite communicate like humans, they are known for being our closest relatives in scientific biological terms.
I know I am deviating from the birds subject a little, but stick with me. I need to address the "remotely close" expression you used.
Primates can display what humans would recognize as human behavior. Work in groups, social dynamics, use of simple tools.
The "looks like human" effect could be explained by anthropomorphization performed by those very humans (to put it simply: an effect where humans see human features in non human things). In fact, some behaviors considered as human are not commonly displayed by primates, like the ability to keep a pet. There is no clear definitive answer to it, and any dismissal of such behaviors could be also used to dismiss humans themselves, therefore I must refrain from entertaining them too much.
Birds also show a lot of human like behavior. Like the ability to gather objects (to construct a nest and to attract a partner are common examples).
Remember, the closest thing to humans in anatomy and biology (primates) is not very much different from birds in terms of "how it presents human-like" behavior.
So, as a counter argument, I would ask: what makes the difference of thinking between a primate and a bird so different to you? Is it their anatomy that prevents you from anthropomorphizing it so readily? Or do you also think primate brains are "nothing remotely close to a human brain"?
It cannot be denied that "closeness" is a loose definition and could generate endless discussion. I tried to concede a little bit to find a reasonable common ground that is both based on rational thinking and a little bit of open mindedness.
Under such criteria, I can assert that birds might be much more intelligent than previously assumed.
Thank you, stranger!
For my part, I'll add that "Humans are visual creatures", which biases every aspect of our culture -- and might help explain why many would consider other primates "closer" to us than birds.
1) the ability to plan ahead of time 2) in a non innate way
The consequence is that humans actually build stuff by investing time and energy by visualizing a future benefit without immediate gratification. I believe this is unique in the realm of animals, at least for now.
It has been reported that some eagles and hawks spread fire to drive out prey from dense vegetation. Whether that is learned behavior and planning for the future, a previously undiscovered innate behavior, or just a myth, depends on results of further research.
Whales wearing salmon hats is a story that, if happens to be true, would also be a non-innate behavior, whose purpose we don't know, that could point to something close to what you described.
Humans are different, I cannot disagree.
My play was to challenge our assumptions of what that perceived distance from humans to animals is consisted of.
We can come up with increasingly more convoluted ways of defining what we are. Animals can't. Maybe that is our innate ability.
I can't find the original video, but Suzana Herculano-Houzel developed a technique to measure total neuron counts by liquefying the brain and then counting the cell nucleus density / volume.
WSU Master Class: Big Brains, Small Brains with Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3TcfGoBY
(nice short popsci intro) The woman who turns brains into soup: Suzana Herculano-Houzel https://youtu.be/d2Uhv0_Ji1k?t=362 (talks about racoon and bird brains)
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/09/07/brainiac-with-her-inn...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This paper is really fun, "Brains matter, bodies maybe not: the case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Brains-matter%2C-bodie...
I don't
You would not have survived more than a few weeks past birth in the absence of modern medical interventions — well, that part at least was true for most of us — but specifically an inability to process milk as an infant is very rare, precisely because "mammary" is what puts the "mam" in "mammal".
It puts the "mamm" in; that second m is also part of the root.
To segue from your post, I was adopted as an only child at birth, so formula was the only option. No IgA exposure, which probably over-taxed my early immune system.
But in being adopted, I have very nontraditional feelings about cloning, artificial birth, etc. I knew about my adoption from an early age, so it deeply worked itself into my thinking. At about elementary school age, some of my asshole neighbors bullied and called me a bastard, but that didn't really impact me as much as the feeling of being a genetic island completely alien to everyone else. All of my peers were related to their birthing parents and sometimes clonal siblings, yet I was alone in the universe. My weird hobbies and behaviors and preferences were out of the norm for my family. Despite my closeness with them, I didn't feel the same as everyone else around me. I wasn't. I was a nerd, absorbed into science books and Bill Nye. The southern culture and football and Christian God I grew up around wasn't my home, and I couldn't understand it just as others couldn't understand me. Everyone talks about blood as being a big deal - it's even in the foundation of the religion I was raised in - but to me, it meant nothing. It really shaped how I feel about humanity and biology and families and reproduction and the universe. Ideas, not nucleotides, are the information that matters.
I've understated and undersold how fundamentally differently this makes me feel about people.
Because of my perspective, I have controversial viewpoints about human biology. I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:
If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor, perhaps we could one day clone MHC-negative, O-negative, etc. monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs. Use genetic engineering to de-encephalize the brain, and artificially innervate the spine and musculature. We'd have a perfect platform for every kind of organ and tissue transplant, large scale controlled in situ studies, human knockouts, and potentially crazy things like whole head transplants to effectively cure all cancers and aging diseases except brain cancers and neurodegeneration.
Because they're clones engineered to not expose antigens, their tissues could be transplanted into us just like plants being grafted. No immunosuppressants. This might become the default way to cure diseases in the future. We could even engineer bodies that increase our physiological capacity. Increased endurance, VO2 max, younger age, different sex, skin color, transgenic features. Alien hair colors. You name it.
I bring things like this up and get ostracized and criticized. But it feels completely normal to me. Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
In light of how others think, I don't think I'd have these thoughts so comfortably if I didn't feel like something of a clone already. A genetic reject, an extraterrestrial growing up, tends to think differently.
Flipping this around, your aversion to this is because you have a mother and father that birthed you that you share blood with. That you grew up in a god fearing society bathed in his sacrificial blood. If you were like me, perhaps you'd think like me.
I'm totally perplexed that other people find this disgusting or horrifying. It feels wholly natural.
And we should absolutely do it.
> If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor
I believe those kinds of "ick" factors are there for a reason - protecting us from a descent into deep dystopia or something.
Implementing new human things at scale often has unanticipated indirect negative consequences.
It's a typical Hollywood sci-fi film with the usual Hollywood lessons and platitudes.
We wouldn't be producing clones with brains or consciousness. We might even have to modify the spine and stomach.
So there's no thinking at all. They'd be like plants.
My guess is for many of us, our gut says "looks like a human therefore is human"; if you try to tell gut instinct it's fine because there's no brain, you're gut's response is "Brain and brain! What is brain?"
My gut seems to care more about dynamic behaviour than static appearance, but for what it's worth — and despite being able to understand the premise of @echelon's suggestion without being upset by it — even I find images of a real, natural, human birth defect where the brain is missing, to be horrifying (content warning: do not google "anencephaly" unless you're strong stomached).
unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences.
Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.
If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas...
I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football).
Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)
I agree with this, and I'm glad we do. But I've posted the "let's harvest clones for organs" idea numerous times on HN -- a community where many of us are on somewhat of a similar wavelength. It's usually met with a lot of vitriol and disgust.
> Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.
That's one of the nice things about this. It would give us an organismal research platform where we could replicate experiments. No more animal studies, imperfect chimera systems, or molecular experiments we can't scale up. We'd have a perfect test bed for investigating almost everything that ails us.
It does not offend me. I cannot say if I would be upset if this were to be turned from idea to reality because the closest thing in reality is quite upsetting; but because I think that the only part of a body capable of suffering is the CNS, I also regard any potential upset on my part about a realisation of your idea as a "me problem", not a "you problem".
That said, I don't know how far we are from being able to perfom what you suggest, even in principle.
It may well be the case that growing a full human without a CNS is harder than solving 3D bioprinting.
One downside of such a degree of biological mastery, is that it does to trust in real life what AI is currently doing to trust online.
> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.
Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.
Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.
Some key ethics concerns to consider:
* creating brainless clones is almost like creating a sub-species of humans that we're going to farm like cattle.
* given that many people consider embryos & fetuses have certain rights, can we find a way to create brain-less clones without killing viable embryos?
In reality, most of the work done in this area is going to be focused on growing organs, rather than entire bodies. This lets us sidestep most of the ethical concerns.
But about a month before birth things switch around. The womb partially disconnects from control systems of the mother's body and ... there's an extremely scary way of pointing this out I once heard from a medical professor: "you know just about the only thing a human body can still do when it's decapitated? It can give birth"
In less extreme circumstances, you actually have a switch in your circulatory system ... when pregnancy gets to this point and the mother's body loses power, it will initiate a rapid birthing process, and start shutting down organ after organ to give birth with the remaining power. That includes, eventually, the brain. Only the heart, lungs, liver and womb will remain operational. The body will shut down blood flow to the brain to continue giving birth. Once shut down it cannot be turned back on. So this kills the mother, despite the body remaining functional, in some reported cases, for over an hour, and is something gynaecologists get trained to prevent from happening.
Given how common it was even a century ago for women to die giving birth, one wonders how often this mechanism was involved.
> In extremely rare forensic cases, a phenomenon called "coffin birth" (post-mortem fetal extrusion) can occur, where gases from decomposition expel a fetus from the deceased mother's body. This is not true childbirth and is extremely rare, occurring only under specific post-mortem conditions.
The blood supply and nerves are weird special cases in a great many ways. For instance, they're not left-right symmetric (whereas the ones of "nearby" systems, like the bladder, are. So this was not done because there's only one womb)
the body has a lot of messaging systems; 'completely paralyzed' people still enjoy the use of many chemical messaging signals; they just generally have a hindered spinal cord or neurological interface element.
A paralyzed person will still go into shock after a dismemberment, blood-flow will be affected by vaso-constriction, and so on. It doesn't surprise me to hear that childbirth can trigger a similar set of conditions to occur.
And that belittles the existence of the underlying support nervous system and the secondary elements. Many completely paralyzed men can achieve erection and ejaculation even with a near total disconnect from the rest of the nervous system. Why? The parasympathetic nervous system and secondary nervous materials in the region in question are taking up the slack from the brain and still allowing 'normal' function.
The article says it goes back a lot further than Rome!
> So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals.
What's "homini" supposed to mean?
The phrase is a latin proverb meaning, roughly, "A man is a wolf to another man".
Homini is the declination of Homo, is dative case. I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".
I know this from Philosophy and Latin (separate) in Highschool around the nineties in Spain. They both were compulsory global subjects. I think Latin is not compulsory this days.
The quote from Plautus appears to be lupus est homo homini, which is much easier to parse. There's a verb and everything. (I didn't know that; I just looked it up.)
> I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give".
Yes, the word literally means "giving [case]", but the grammatical concept in English is generally called "indirect object". English mostly doesn't have cases, so supplemental arguments to verbs tend to be marked by associated prepositions, making them "indirect".
When talking about Latin specifically or languages with noun case in general, it is normal in English to refer to the "dative case"; you don't really need to translate it.
I assume the case was named after the action of giving because giving is a very common action that necessarily involves three things. (Giver, gift, and recipient.) The name tells you what it means by example: "if a gift is given, the dative case is the one you'd use for the recipient".
And kiwi kiwi kiwi.
Couldn't help myself, being a speaker of a language with grammatical cases, which allows the translation of "homo homini lupus" without changing the grammatical structure. At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above.
I hope I'm safe in assuming that "kiwi kiwi kiwi" comes off as pure nonsense.
But if it's possible for loanwords to come in without being forced into the system, there must be something you could add to the sentence to bring back the effect? What would that look like?
Going back to the question though, I can't think of words I could add without changing the overall structure. As in, our translation of "homo homini lupus" is "człowiek człowiekowi wilkiem", and it's not like you could "just add something to make it full form". Well, you could say "człowiek człowiekowi jest wilkiem", with "jest" meaning "is", but when you say "kiwi kiwi jest kiwi", it still sounds like garbage. I guess the only way out of this would be to use something different, like "kiwi dla kiwi jest jak kiwi", which is "a kiwi to a kiwi is like a kiwi", but that's not what we want, because when we talk about people and wolves again, it becomes "człowiek dla człowieka jest jak wilk", and now it's clear that the cases have changed.
Giving an example of a loanword, the government's official position used to be (or even still is?) that "radio" has only one form, but if you ask me, "radio radiu radiem" sounds clear and natural.
Human behavior, however, is still a deep, deep mystery in terms of evolutionary biology. I'm always wary of people applying evolutionary principles to human behaviors. Writ large you can see contours of what we would expect to see, but even then it's unclear why the boundaries are where they are, or to what degree we're projecting expectations into the data, etc. The speculation quotient is extreme. I wouldn't put any stock into evolutionary biology-based explanations for human behavior. And just as a practical matter, it's not like most people would leave their most hated cousin to die in a ditch; and though most people wouldn't leave anyone to die in a ditch--at least, if they knew that's what they were doing--I'm betting they're more likely to save a cousin than a stranger.
Our capacity for stories and language helps us create large cooperation networks, which is a unique evolutionary advantage.
Chimps have cooperation limited to "we are genetically close and you give me banana so I give you banana".
Humans can create something like the Roman Republic, or modern nation states and corporations, based on a shared set of stories and language (culture, also includes stuff like rituals, socio-sexual taboos, etc), which enables millions of us to collaborate together towards a common goal. Which is why we're so successful as a species.
All of those people might be selfish, yet they still work together without even knowing they are doing so.
"And so while the cooperative outcome would be the most efficient, you lead to a situation in which there are conflict costs, and I think this explains why things go wrong so often during pregnancy. Of course, at first sight it's strange, my heart and my liver have been functioning very well for for 62 years, and yet during pregnancy, you have a natural process that only lasts for nine months, and yet many things go wrong during it. And I would argue that the reason why pregnancy doesn't work as smoothly as the normal functioning of the body is that in normal bodily functioning all the parts of the body are genetically identical to each other and working towards survival of that body, but in pregnancy, you have two different genetic individuals interacting with each other and natural selection can act at cross-purposes, there's a sort of politics going on, and we know that politics does not always lead to efficient outcomes."
I think this is a useful insight even on a higher level. For evolution (if you want to anthropomorphize it), war and conflict are just another set of tools in the toolbox. Where humans see those as evidence of something going wrong and evil to eradicated, for evolution it's "working as intended".
(Or, if you don't want to anthropomorphize it, an indication how much of evolution and biology is just barely tamed chaos)
(Careful to draw conclusions for human society from this though. People in the past had already seen the Darwinian "struggle between the species" as a model for society, which brought "Social Darwinism" and ultimately the Nazi ideology.
A different conclusion would be that biology is in fact not a perfect ideal to aspire to, and even in the situations where it "works", its factual objectives are not always the same as ours. Which does give legitimacy for the endeavor to improve upon it - for everyone)
You can also flip the perspective the fetus is trying to survive in a hostile environment designed to strangle it. If it isn't clawing for every ounce of food and air it will become a miscarriage. It must interface with a system built for millenia designed to kill anything that doesn't have its code.
In truth, it is the equilibrium that evolution has achieved. Placenta must account for the most vicious fetus, and fetus must account for most vicious placenta.
The immune system can't see DNA at all. It works by other methods.
With this sort of surgery, they wouldn't be cutting into the uterus (womb) itself when extracting it from the donor, but instead will cut around it to remove it, along with some very essential plumbing. The receiving mum will also be on industrial-strength immune suppressants anyway.
Where you DO have to worry about leaks and weak stitches is with said plumbing (uterine arteries and veins) -- they have to support virtual firehoses of blood through the duration of pregnancy, and their damage is one reason why a delivery can go south very, very quickly. Obstetric medicine is definitely a high-risk sport, which is why their malpractice insurance rates are head and shoulders above any other medical specialty. But I digress...
This is just a fact of reality for any women that have children though.
Eg male chromosomes from fetuses being found in women’s brains: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3458919/
(I don’t think this is believed to be unusual or an example of ‘containment failure’ of the womb)
It appears it may even be protective.
Why us and not other mammals? No idea.
Turns out, being the most intelligent apex comes with some gestational specialities.
That would be the gestational sac, no?
Is it a miracle I can go to JFK and fly through the air and be in Europe for dinner?
It’s a surgical procedure. It’s cool that it worked. We don’t need to invoke the supernatural here, especially given the oodles of hard work that went into this by very real and natural human beings.
At some point we should just assign credit where credit is due: thousands upon thousands of people working very hard for many decades to make the impossible possible.
Our modern world is amazing, but it’s not miraculous. It’s achievement, not supernatural.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaginal_transplantation#Labora...
(I don't know why this lab stopped performing this procedure though.)
No one does a womb-check before granting women validity. It's always been a vibe thing and people who do not conform to the prescribed model of existence as a man or woman are constantly denied full privileges under the framework. It's not just trans women getting the short end of the stick here, it's everyone: men who do not embrace dominance culture or otherwise display "effeminacy" are denied true Man status, women who don't meet beauty standards or possess a submissive demeanor are slurred as bull-dykes or the dreaded transexual.
This isn't an issue with any real reasonable basis for it's opposition, it's a golem of pure hatred and disgust in a suit vs. people who want to live full, free lives.
editing to add: the first known uterine transplant was performed on Lili Elbe who received treatments through the Institute of Sexology in Germany. The Institute was famously destroyed by the Nazi regime. It's barely coincidental that fascism has risen again as medical science brings this technology to maturity. Trans women gave their lives for this medical miracle.
Have you considered that people just think that performing any kind of sex-change operation is dumb, made a deduction from that that the subject is dumb, and everything else you mentioned stems from that?
Much simpler explanation than "power structures", which makes very little sense considering most people don't have any power.
I saw all of that already. Some of it in this very thread, some of it on the defunct /r/GenderCritical: I remember someone proposing committing suicide by volcano to keep her uterus out of "male [sic] hands".
Giving birth is already not a precondition of being a woman, as the category "infertile women" exist.
This "gotcha game" has become so tiresome.
Is this because they're not connecting the transplanted uterus to the fallopian tubes or something? Or is there some other reason that it wouldn't be possible to conceive the "old-fashioned way" post-transplant?
Creating and freezing embryos otherwise seems like a very strange thing for a woman to have done who has no uterus, unless she was already considering surrogacy. Where was she expecting them to grow?
Requiring the embryos to be created before knowing whether the womb transplant would be possible or successful seems really odd to me.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap between women who ate so desperate to carry their own child that they'd undergo a womb transplant, and women who are already so committed to having a biological child that they've prepared embryos to do so by surrogacy.
But none of that answers my actual question anyway, about why it isn't possible to conceive naturally in a transplanted womb.
sebazzz•9mo ago