http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/01/18/33735.aspx "Then came the legal battle, which was fought around the ruling permitting only the wife of a deceased man to extract his sperm and to become impregnated by it. The new ruling now recognizes the parent’s right over their dead child’s sperm."
I don't know what to say about this, I can see why a family might want to do this sort of thing and I don't know that a child conceived this way would necessarily feel like an orphan. The mother had to want to be a mother and being able to tell the child all about his/her father, and being able to include his parents in the child's life, when under more usual circumstances she would have had to tell her child she was so desperate to be a mother she resorted to buying anonymous sperm from a sperm bank has got to be the better deal. There used to be rules about young men being able to establish their families before they were sent off to war, this young soldier wasn't able to provide that service to his family. His mother may have been better off to have sought grief counseling but I can't blame her for trying to see her family continue. I have heard about stranger things having to do with dead men's sperm, them little things are extremely persistant.
if you're refering to the various urban legends about a soldier being shot through the nads and the bullet hitting a woman in the abdomen and penetrating her ovary, knocking her up, that's pretty much medically impossible.
Garner, that's "the Slow Bullet" one of the weirdest films ever made . I was referring to a report I saw about research into the ability of sperm to fertilize an egg. Using a tiny pipette to insert an individual sperm cell into the egg can result in an embryo even if the spermcell is totally immobile. I think that as long as the genetic material is intact any sort of sperm can be used in this technique. It was really strange to think about the ability to '"play God" this way. I'm not sure if they have actually had any live births yet , I think there have been some though.
ah yes, totally different kettle of fish that. i was talking to my mother in law and one of my sisters in law about this when i read the article. it's entirely feasible that if you could remove the nucleus from an egg cell, it wouldn't even need to be a human ovum, and replace it with the nucleus from a human sperm, then another human sperm could fertilize it. the only two problems are making sure the egg has an X chromosome, and being able to actually extract the nucleus from a human sperm cell, which is a tiny little bugger by anybody's standards. but, should such cellular surgery be feasible (and, i'm pretty sure it already is) then it would be entirely possible for two men to father a child together, and only require a woman for the host mother to carry it. if an artificial womb could be developed that was capable of actually nurturing the fetus, then gay (male) couples could breed! now, sadly, the same isn't as readily true for lesbian couples. i'm pretty darn sure that you'd need the sperm cell to be from a human, so there'll have to be a bloke involved at that stage of the process (though, fortunately, women won't have the issue with needing to invent an artificial womb), and as i said before, while i'm pretty sure I've heard of cellular surgery being conducted on egg cells, sperm cells are tiny. they're not gonna be as easy to manipulate. also, because an ovum ONLY contains X chromosomes, any offspring is guaranteed to be female - this might be just fine by some folks looking to create lesbian reproduction, but as the formula requires a human sperm, blokes would still need to be involved on some level. I think.
As seen and disproved on Mythbusters on Discovery........... To be honest, I don't think even the desperate pregnant women of the war believed this could be got away with!
Garner, it is more likely that two women would succeed in male free reproduction then that two men would be able to father/mother a child. for one thing you are guarenteed all the X chromosomes you need and as you said you must have at least one to have a viable human embryo. It is probably even more likely that a woman could clone herself before the scenario you suggested would occur. I'm not saying that it would be impossible In fact if someone can imagine it it probably will happen for real someday. I tried to find something about that film I mentioned, I think I saw it in college, arround 1980. I'm not even sure about the title anymore after the Google search I did, but I clearly remember the bullet hitting the guy and then the girl and some other things and it was very strange. Atleast as strange as Eraserhead, maybe even as strange as the Andalasian Dog.
there's no way to achieve reproduction without a woman unless someone creates an artificial womb. however, as i said, if you do the nucleus swapping, you don't need a human ovum to act as the egg. its just the human nucleus that matters. incidentally, sperm cells with X chromosomes are *slightly* heavier than sperm cells with Y chromosomes, so it could be possible to pick the right cell to harvest a nucleus from for that procedure. now, as for woman/woman reproduction - i'm pretty sure the issue here is that the sperm cell MUST be human, though now that i'm thinking about it even more, i could be completely wrong on that! given that women don't need to worry about picking a cell with the right 23rd chromosome, and they've already got a perfectly functional womb, they've got some major advantages over male/male reproduction. however, as you said, i think it'd be easier to achieve cloning (quite simply done, you take the nucleus from an ovum and replace it with a suitable/viable nucleus from a non gamete cell, and then the bugger should start dividing on its own.) than reproduction, if only because the cellular surgery is trickier when you're workin on a sperm.
Yep. It's already possible to sort sperm by gender. In theory, one could have an egg cell with a Y chromosome fertilized by a sperm cell with an X. Just to further have fun with this concept.
Except that egg cells normally only carry x, thus the sperm "deciding" which gender the child is going to be by either carrying an x or an y. Either that, or the mother would have to be a very rare genetical exception. Or did I just get wrong what you were trying to suggest?
ba's proposal stemmed from the notion of replacing the original nucleus in the egg with a nucleus from a sperm cell. it's actually quite an interesting idea. i'd be curious to see what resulted from it. i mean, could the Y chromosome egg be fertilized at all, or would the nuclei just sort out the ordering of the 23rd pair in the process of fertilization, and it ultimately wouldn't matter? and, of course, if we're deviating into wholesale willy nilly speculation, i'd be curious to see what we'd get if there was a Y Y pairing of the 23rd pair. would the cells fertilize? or would the zygote terminate itself? there's probably already research into this. i recall some transgender fashion model who was born with a YXX combo in the 23rd pair. she was born with male sexual reproductive organs, but i think had slightly abnormal hormone levels? there's bound to be other similar situations out there.
The YY combination is incompatible with life. The missing 'leg' of the X contains genes that are necessary for survival. The XXY combination is a syndrome called Klinefelter's Syndrome. It occurs in about 1 in 1000 males. Most men don't realise that they have it, unless someone specifically looks for it. It causes infertility and some degree of 'feminisation'. The XYY combination also occurs in about 1 in 1000 males. Men who have the XYY combination are supposed to have learning disabilities. They also don't know they have it unless someone checks for it.
I know I read a headline recently that said (or suggested) there had been some breakthrough in adapting female egg cells that would allow two women to reproduce. But I didn't read the article, and I can't remember where I saw it. Headlines on science stories tend to be even more misleading than usual anyway.
Regarding artificial wombs, I remember reading an article about a year ago regarding a research group in Japan which was very close to achieving just that, being in a state of "almost, but not quite" state for several years. Last I read they reached the point where the fetus actually starts to develop properly, but it then begins to mutate in ways which don't quite result in a human anymore. They never went further than a few weeks with each experiment, according to that article.
Its a Brave New World, isn't it. To be getting that close to stealing the secrets of the tree of life. I wonder what the penalty for that will be, maybe we will be denied the right to die?
Close to 1/2 of embryos conceived the 'usual' way do not survive beyond the first few weeks. The technical term is 'menstrual wastage'. I fail to see the problem with using science to bring some happiness into the lives of people who desperately want children and, presumably, would be good, loving parents. (Whether or not certain people are fit to be parents is another story.) If you believe in God, then you must believe that it was God who gave scientists the knowledge and the skills to do these things, and hopefullyyou believe that God wants people to use the talents they have to bring happiness to others. If creating an artificial womb is 'playing God', then it must be playing God to give someone an artificial heart, a kidney transplant, a blood transfusion - to give chemotherapy to a cancer patient or insulin to a diabetic.
I have no problems with scientific experiments at this level provided the results are not released on to the streets to ultimately get elected in to government. But... I can't help thinking of what the effects long term freezing of human sperm might be. There are millions of combinations of genes in each chromosome and any one deviation could lead to mutation, to a greater or lesser extent despite extreme precautions, in the fertilized embryo. Sure, practice makes perfect in research but four years is a long time for living tissue to be frozen without expecting some damage and in the event of a world wide catastrophe such reserves would be mankind's only hope of continuing the species. One simple analogy that came up in a discussion was along the lines of... 'some people prefer full fat milk in coffee, others prefer skimmed milk. They both do the same job, but they are slightly different to each other'. I think I can see where that thought came from, and it just leaves that small amount of doubt of how others would handle the problem of 'a slight difference'. edit:spelling.
