A summary on Nature news at the times: https://archive.ph/Xnx5n

The most fun stuff to mess with is of course parts that controls how other stuff works. Figuring out what makes stem cells want to grow into shapes will lead us to more of these control switches.

... of course, the flip-side of the coin is that for a certain segment of the pro-life movement, using these cells as test subjects will be equivalent to intentionally fertilizing human egg cells and then using those as test subjects.

Even today there will be situations where the difference between effective slavery and freedom is the country on your passport (or lack of it)

My comment was mostly in jest.

It is certainly not a simulation, and although it apparently started with different components they manipulated those to behave the way the normal versions do.

What would happen if they implanted it in a womb?

For one thing human embryos would have already been implanted in a womb for a week at that point and a great deal of signaling occurs between embryo and the uterus.

I read somewhere that pregnancy (unlike what is normally described) is a tug of war between the embryo which is the leach if you will on the mother which is the host. The embryo basically try consumes the host and so long as everybody is doing what they're supposed to, all the mechanisms end up keeping that war at bay with both participants making it alive at the end. If some mechanisms (and signals) were to misbehave one of the two would cease to exist.

At what point? Implantation typically occurs 6-12 days after fertilization. This experiment starts at the equivalent of day 7. IVF is a thing.

It sounds like you're just guessing.

Edited to add, this article says "It would be illegal to implant them into a patient’s womb" which is a far cry from what you are implying, that it would be impossible.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/14/synthetic-hu...

“This stage corresponds to day 7 of the natural human embryo, around the time it implants itself in the womb.”

“The researchers discovered that if the embryo is not enveloped by placenta-forming cells in the right manner at day 3 of the protocol (corresponding to day 10 in natural embryonic development), its internal structures, such as the yolk sac, fail to properly develop.”

“The stem cell–based embryo-like structures (termed SEMs) developed normally outside the womb for 8 days, reaching a developmental stage equivalent to day 14 in human embryonic development.” (So ~1 week post implantation for a human embryo.)

This research in animals has led to successful implantation, but not live births. Nobody knows why yet.

People could be up in arms if hypothetically 50% of these where viable, but the nonviable 50% would still cause errors when compared to human embryos. Alternatively, 100% could be viable and they could still be different in critical ways from natural human embryos resulting in universally late or premature births etc. Or perhaps 0% are viable and people just don’t understand the nuances.

It’s therefore an orthogonal question.

The discrepancy exists because people can track the day of ovulation and hormonal changes from implantation but actual fertilization has no obvious signs, unless your doing IVF or something and looking at the actual egg.

That said, extreme outliers may exist but that’s not what we’re talking about.

Here's an example of how IVF embryos are graded at day 6, prior to implantation:

https://flo.health/getting-pregnant/trouble-conceiving/ferti...

I think you missed the fact that these models start at the equivalent of day 7, so we're right in the same time window of implantation. Unless you are claiming that exactly at 6 days after fertilization is when every single embryo implants, and at 7 days it is simply too late. But your whole point seems to be that the window is hard to observe, so I doubt that's what you mean.

At any rate, I still see nothing to indicate that these "models" are not simply embryos. I think they are intentionally calling them models so that they can skirt the legal requirements about embryo research.

Unless of course you can point me to something that is actually different about one of these models vs an embryo. The whole article is about how they are the same.

And of course, even if you don't agree with the necessity for ethics statements, because it is just one more thing that takes up time you could otherwise spend on your actual job (doing research), you certainly don't want to risk having your paper rejected just because you don't meet whatever ethics standards the conference or journal seeks to uphold.

But remember, I'm talking natural language processing here.

In that light, it is a complete mystery to me how research like the one described in the article could have possibly, ever made it past an ethics review. Unless, of course, completely different standards are applied - which in itself would be rather questionable.

(your comments are a bit obscure, in a way that suggests you aren't familiar with how modern biological research is evaluated)

I suppose what I was trying to get at was a suspicion that ethics reviews in today's research landscape (not only in the medical field, but others as well) seem to me more like a lip service. And don't get me wrong, that's just an opinion, I'm sure a lot of you think otherwise.

None of this really matters until somebody announces we can make viable embryos from stem cells or that we can bring a viable embryo to term in an artificial womb. Both of these seem to be not implausible in the next 20 years.

These guys have established processes and justifications to do these experiments. It was always just wrong that Web has none, and it also makes no sense to assume that just because the process look substantial judged by norms of other industries they must have ignored it.

If any "world" must be accused of promoting the most human suffering through history, that should be the "western" one.

China is a bigger risk factor, but it's not like they would care about the direction of western ethics anyway.

The research isn't about reducing human suffering. No research is. All research is about attaining new knowledge.

> I would rather have western world make giant leaps in this field and also set the direction of ethics here rather than just banning it and leaving it up to Russia and China to conduct this sort of research in their secret facilities.

Why? Given the history of the western world in biological, chemical and nuclear genocides, why is it better that the west make sets the directin of ethics than russia or china. The west has proven it hasn't a ethical bone in our body.

Research should happen because humans want to learn and advance. The west ain't saints. The russians and chinese certainly aren't monsters, especially compared ot the west.

warring super-solider arms race: {added to jira board}

As opposed to governments, which are famously cautious about deploying destructive technology, and scrupulously avoid civilian casualties.

While an artificial womb could be very useful as a medical device to save the life of the child, in vitro/ex vivo methods of reproduction only entrench human alienation. Support for them bespeaks an absence of a sound philosophical anthropology. And I mean not just the alienation of the children, but the alienation of men and women from their own humanity as well. And this is because it attacks the very core of what it means to be human.

But as they say, experience is an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other. Often, nothing short of catastrophe is needed to lead men to pause and reflection, and even then, there are no guarantees.

I absolutely disagree with your view. Infertility is a medical condition much like cataract or myocardial infarction.

In my view, it is profoundly unethical to deny unhealthy people efficient treatment of their disease for philosophical reasons. You are straying dangerously close to the "life unworthy of life" eugenics that is, fortunately, overcome. Trying to ban other people from procreating because your personal opinion on the necessary means is "phew, icky" (and for all the grand words in your comment, you basically say "phew, icky"), sounds like it is you who hasn't taken any lessons from the experience of the collective West.

In absence of a ban, you can be almost sure that someone will go to the extraordinarily lengths to develop such techniques for human use.

We have ChatGPT for that.

That statement is incorrect for many couples.

The sheer number of interactions in our environment per femtosecond is astounding. They're dynamical inputs into our brain that compound over time. It's certainly enough to approximate "free will" at our level of detection.

It is nevertheless worth looking at - in order to know what to avoid.

Doesn't Israel have any bio-ethics rules in place? If not, they should have and this abomination shouldn't have received the green light.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018392

This was a busy summer for developmental biology, full disclosure that I am an author on one of these papers and my thesis work is in embryo models/early development. The Hanna group was unfortunately scooped by some unethical behavior but their model is superior to the other one in Nature by Zernicka-Goetz.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...