Conception, a Berkeley based biotech startup, is trying to
accelerate-- and subsequently commercialize-- a field of biomedical research
known as in vitro gametogenesis (IVG).
Matt Krisiloff, one of the company’s founders, recently stated: "Basically, we're trying to turn a
type of stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem into a human egg.”
One of Conception’s goals is to
utilize IVG to create eggs from the cell of a man. That egg could then be
fertilized with sperm from his partner, at which point a surrogate mother could
then carry the resulting embryo through to birth. This would result in a baby
genetically related to both men. IVG could also be used to create sperm for
lesbian couples, allowing them to have babies with genes from both women. And,
of course, transgender couples could also use IVG to have biologically related
babies.
This would render heterosexual
couplings utterly unnecessary, moot. Yay!
We don’t know the health or other
implications for the babies created this way, but who really cares about
that anyway?
Let’s go
ahead and completely decouple male-female intercourse from anatomy, sex, and
procreation! How freeing! Let’s decouple all of this from coupling!
Brilliant! What could go wrong? While we’re at it, we should remove the archaic
and arbitrary “moral” barriers that heretofore discouraged humans from having
sex with dead humans—or animals, for that matter. How exclusionary! How regressive!
How repressive! How 1950s Republican!
We already
have lab-grown diamonds. Better than the real thing! Surely we will also
be better off with artificial intelligence, sex-bots, lab-grown meat…and
lab-grown people.
Call it Genesis
2.0. Better than the original, no?
God help us.
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