In the future, people will not have to have sex to conceive. After all, sex is not one hundred percent guarantee. It is unlikely that reality will take on such a gloomy look, as it was in the movie "Gattaca"; rather, everything will be just more convenient and scrupulous. Let's talk about exactly what such a future might look like.
Imagine a future in which the process of giving birth will be completely dependent on geneticists. After all, are we not trying to provide the child with the best education, clothing, nutrition, upbringing … Why not start with the best possible genetic code?
Is it heresy or sound morality?
Reproduction without sex
It is not difficult to make a person - it happens every day and without special training. Traditionally and evolutionarily, sex has served humans as a means of reproduction for millions of years. However, this will change.
Today, more and more couples in the world are turning to in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive a child. IVF is an assisted reproductive technology, when fertilization occurs by manually combining an egg and a sperm in a laboratory dish and then transferring the embryo into the uterine cavity.
Today, about 2% of children are conceived with IVF. This is more than four times more than in 2003. This trend has been particularly influenced by the reduction in the cost of this procedure. Today, the cost of in vitro fertilization does not exceed 10 thousand dollars. Surrogacy costs about the same amount. Together they help women who suffer from infertility problems or are too old to have a child.
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IVF also allows you to fertilize many eggs at the same time (from 8 to 10 on average), grow them to the blastocyst stage, and then select the healthiest one for implantation into the mother's uterus.
In the future, IVF may become the standard. As well as the Olympiad of improvements.
Egg freezing
Today, women are increasingly choosing careers and further education in order to subsequently gain deep concern about children - the opportunity to have children is reduced by two-thirds from the age of 40. But there is a technological solution that could help them solve this problem: the ability to freeze healthy eggs earlier.
Egg freezing can provide women with the opportunity to give birth when they want - not when they have to.
Carl Jerassi, the inventor of the contraceptive pill, commented on this trend: “In the next 20 years, more young people will freeze their eggs and sperm in their 20s and donate them to conservation. Then they will give up contraception in favor of sterilization and retrieve their eggs and sperm from the bank when they want to have a baby through IVF."
Designer babies
If you had the opportunity to change your child's genetics, would you go for it? Would you go to the trouble of preventing a birth defect? Wouldn't it be a crime not to fix what could be fixed?
Since we created CRISPR / Cas9, a tool that allows us to "edit" the human genome with incredible precision, these questions have ceased to be theoretical and philosophical - and have become very, very real.
Just three years after its initial development, CRISPR technology is already widely used by biologists as a tool for finding and modifying DNA, down to one letter.
But editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself (embryonic engineering) allows you to correct diseased genes and pass these genetic corrections to future generations. For example, families could be rid of cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. This approach may be as important as the creation of a vaccine against one of the "eternal" diseases.
Most curiously, public opinion is not that strongly negative about the idea of modifying babies. A Pew Research study in August found that 46% of American adults encourage the use of a child's genetic enhancement to reduce their risk of serious illness. While the same 83% consider genetic modification, which will make the child smarter, "excessive medicine."
In the United States, three more centers are actively working on embryonic engineering. China and Great Britain are especially zealous in this area. The goal of all groups is to demonstrate that it is possible to give birth to a child who does not have the specific genes responsible for inherited diseases.
If it is possible to correct the DNA in a woman's egg or in a man's sperm, these cells could be used in an in vitro fertilization clinic to produce an embryo and then a baby. It would also be possible to directly edit the DNA in an embryo in early IVF using CRISPR.
Life becomes programmable. These changes are waiting for us in the next ten years. But the future will be even more exciting.
Reproduction and exponential technology
The development of technology in the next 20 years should play a huge role in defining our lives. For example, here's how this might affect reproduction:
- The birth of a child with the participation of more than two people. The first child was born this April using a procedure that matched the DNA of three people. Nuclear DNA was taken from the father and mother, and mitochondrial DNA was transferred to a fertilized egg from a third donor.
- The birth of a child without eggs. Scientists from the University of Bath say that one day it will be possible to conceive a child without an egg at all. They succeeded in creating healthy mice by tricking sperm into fertilizing a normal egg. So, one person could make themselves a child using their own cells and sperm. In this case, the child would be more of a non-identical twin than a clone.
- Artificial uterus. In the mid-1990s, Japanese scientists were able to preserve goat embryos for several weeks in a machine containing artificial amniotic fluid. Today, it can be used to preserve a prematurely born fetus that left the mother at a gestational age of less than 22 weeks. This is almost half of the gestation period (40 weeks). Imagine if the mother did not have to carry the baby for all 9 months of pregnancy.
Humanity is rapidly moving away from evolution due to natural selection and comes to evolution due to a reasonable direction of accelerated development. Ever since the birth of birth control in 1960, we have tried to take control of reproduction.
ILYA KHEL
