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...
> Results also suggested lower prevalence (p = 0.03) and concentration (p = 0.06) of male microchimerism in the brains of women with Alzheimer’s disease than the brains of women without neurologic disease.
> It’s no accident that many of the same genes active in embryonic development have been implicated in cancer. Pregnancy is a lot more like war than we might care to admit.
Amazing article. Another reason that hardshelled laid eggs are such a great invention. The offspring can do its thing from a safe distance.
Birds, the inheritors of the venerable Dinosaur brand, managed to both produce very large eggs (e.g. ostriches), and impressively capable brains, rivaling those of larger mammalians (e.g. parrots, corvids), interestingly, without the use of very large eggs.
That depends. Look it up. You will find there is a point where it switches. Normally the body (of both baby and mother) will protect the mother. Something goes wrong or just gets too far "out of spec"? Miscarriage. After a few months, the body goes so far as to sedate the mother and child before terminating the pregnancy. There is research claiming it actually shuts down the baby's nervous system before decoupling.
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.
But some form of evolution might make it a local optimum. It would at least require 3 or more offspring per pregnancy, and could not happen in mammals, though.
If that was true when you were an infant, you're part of an extreme minority.
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".
I get downvoted every time I feel like posting this (the thread is markedly appropriate), so I'll give some background this time. I'll get to the point after a little bit of setup.
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.
My uncle said yesterday that man's harsh nature goes back to Rome: Homo homini lupus.
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.
In all non-human species selfless cooperation falls off a cliff beyond siblings, and AFAIU this comports well with Game Theory-type models for understanding genetics. Popular examples of non-human cooperation, naked mole rates and bonobos, actually live in communities dominated by sisters. (It's not often noted, though, in the breathless narratives extolling the virtues of cooperation and anthropomorphizing the rest of the animal kingdom.)
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.
Homo homini lupus is the latin for "Man is wolf for man", famous quote from Plautus.
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.
> So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...
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...
Pretty sure that’s not some fringe theory. Didn’t the director and visual designers consciously use rape as the model for how to depict the Alien attacks?
Absolutely. From what I understand, there's been an evolutionary war for resources between the womb and the placenta, which is a big part of why human pregnancies are so complicated and invasive compared to other mammals (because no other mammal has this anywhere near as extreme as we do).
> containment vessel to protect the mother (host) from the fetus (roughly, xenomorph) that would otherwise explode like an aggressive parasite (killing them both).
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.
Did you read the article? It's not. It's somewhat fighting against it. Plus immune system would see baby's DNA as corrupted, since half of it is just wrong.
They also check the blood type of the baby and the mother and I believe this is to make sure the mother won’t throw clots, and to take precautions if there’s a mismatch.
> The first baby born as a result of a womb transplant was in Sweden in 2014. Since then around 135 such transplants have been carried out in more than a dozen countries, including the US, China, France, Germany, India and Turkey. Around 65 babies have been born.
It would be quite interesting to see how public discourse about gender is affected by this, and in particular if this procedure is done successfully on a transgender woman. Regardless of your political outlook, it will no longer be possible to say that the ability to give birth is a condition for being a woman. (And what will happen should chromosome replacement become possible? It seems unlikely that anyone would really invest in such a procedure, but is it medically feasible?)
If the procedures got so good that a trans woman/man was indistinguishable from one born that way who would still object to them claiming the gender they choose, most of the arguments fall apart at that point.
It’s incredible and Inwish long life and happiness to the newborn and her family
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.
It’s not that confusing. “Has a womb” is not a common definition of “woman”. Women don’t stop being women after having a hysterectomy.
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.
There's at least four common definitions of "woman", and I have in fact seen people use "has a womb" as one of them despite, as you may guess, all the people piling on immediately with a reply along the lines of what you yourself say — that this would exclude women who have had a hysterectomy.
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.
> 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"
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.
As I understand it, the court ruled that specifically within the text of the 2010 Equality Act, where it says 'woman' with no qualifier, that refers only to biological females. I do not know how many such places there are, but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way.
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.
> but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way
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).
On the important issue of discrimination, Clause 9 makes it clear that a transsexual person would have protection under the Sex Discrimination Act as a person of the acquired sex or gender. Once recognition has been granted, they will be able to claim the rights appropriate to that gender.
- Lord Filkin, the Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 (18th December)
This is not actually a struggle whatsoever, it only is if you pretend it is thus. Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms. It I was born without legs, am I still a human?
If you’re writing laws, your choice of language matters quite a lot. “Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms” alongside “humans are entitled to unalienable rights” could lead to foreseeable problems, so specifying in your writing that “humans typically have two legs and two arms” would be a smarter bet. It’s not important in a hacker news comment, but is important in law.
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.
That's a gross oversimplification. Virilisation is a complex process with many factors.
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?
The Supreme Court wasn’t deciding anything other than the intention of an existing law and the meaning of the words in that law (which were unclear enough to require clarification). BOTH sides of the debate claiming that the Supreme Court has now defined what constitutes a “woman” are wrong and doing nothing but polarising people for their own selfish gain.
Unfortunately when you try to explain this to people, the most common response (regardless of which side they're on) is to express that "Yes, but OUR side is right, so misrepresenting the ruling in our favor is right too."
People are rightly judged for saying they're "in the middle" because too often their "middle" is just whatever they perceptually decided the position of the left and right was and then they picked their position in reaction to that, rather then out of any consideration of the issue.
People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".
Nothing in nature can ever be described with 100% accuracy by any model. But that doesn't mean models are useless. So imagine why we would use the binary sex model instead of three or a spectrum or what have you.
Simple models are useful, but they shouldn't determine who is allowed to live a normal, productive, life without some very compelling justification. Like the "binary sex model" is handy, but nothing about it makes it obvious that we should definitely and always lock gender (another non-binary model often simplified usefully into a binary) directly to biological sex.
Is a bimodal distribution, or a somewhat reductive “typical male, typical female, intersex” model, so difficult to understand that we can’t use it? I don’t think people are stupid.
You may be thinking of species like the white-throated sparrow. These have two morphs with distinct behaviours which lead to there being four mating combinations. Still two sexes though.
You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.
> You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.
Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
You’ll note that the people who oppose abortion generally also oppose aborting fetuses with disabilities. And among people who support abortion, a decent proportion also oppose aborting fetuses because of disabilities.
That's plain wrong. For example, the overwhelming majority of people in Iceland supports abortion rights AND abortion of pregnancies where there is the potential for down syndrom and other larger disabilities. Same goes for me, in general.
I mean, congenital limb differences are quite literally a spectrum. An entire limb can be absent, or just part(s) of it, or most of the limb can be present but irregularly formed...
You can even mix and match with which parts are present vs absent. I know someone with an arm that stops just above the elbow but still has several (usable!) fingers extending from it. So no joint, but sorta-yes hand.
It's really offensive to tell people with DSDs they aren't their sex. Sex is binary. People with DSDs are female or male, except for extremely rare cases.
>it’s really offensive to tell people with DSDs they aren’t their sex.
Not really true. Some people maybe.
>Sex is binary
Sex is complicated. Traits cluster bimodally, but it would be reductive, scientifically inaccurate, to say it’s a simple binary.
>People with DSDs are female or male
That depends on how female and male are categorized. The line between in the trait cluster and outside of the trait cluster is arbitrary. So it depends where you draw that line.
But that's my whole point, "sex" a spectrum and it's one of the big lies perpetuated by people who insist everything was known and set in stone, when their bible was invented, despite never having microscopes or telescopes or even eyeglasses
You do not need microscopes, telescopes, or even eyeglasses to determine sex differences. The existence of chromosomal abnormalities does not mean we need to change the meaning of words.
and you can tell with the naked eye that an intersex baby is intersex, and neither "properly" male or female. except when the baby looks very female but is genetically male due to androgen insensitivity syndrome. then you need that microscope again...
kindergarten level logic fails at physiological sex ambiguity.
and it fails even more so at gender identity issues.
I can tell you that in Czechia and former East Germany, two most atheist places in the Western world, the concept of sex as a spectrum isn't especially popular either. People can be somewhat socially conservative without believing in the bible.
did you read the link? there are humans with ambiguous genitals (fka "intersex"), there are women with androgen insensitivity, genitally xy, born as perfect little girls, vulva and all, but alas, testicles. bummer
The word you're looking for is "bimodal distribution".
The spectrum of sex characteristics is a bimodal distribution with two peaks. and the vast majority of all humans fall close to one of the two peaks peaks. however, they indeed exist medically classified circumstances for bodily sexual expression that is not on one of the peaks but somewhere in between.
and the percentage of those not close to the peaks is heavily contested and varies between 1 in 15000 ( putting extremely high bars on "uh wen can't tell") to 17 in 1000 (counting for example a larger clit as a penis-y ambiguous thing)
bimodal distribution with distinct peaks and a low but non-zero density between the peaks.
As far as I'm aware, no one is born with both sets of working reproductive organs and in most cases there is still a "dominant" gene expression, and only some extremely rare cases where current tests fall short.
So I don't see 1 in 1500 people being oppressed by the court ruling.
Sex is binary to a similar degree that humans are born with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Nothing in nature is fixed 100% of the times, but rather exist on a line of probabilities.
thanks for the link. and the section in controversy is really worth reading for nuance and thoughtful conversation.
the humans with intersex conditions themselves object the term, as it tags them as sick, a "disease". their personal experience based political interventions have lead to the prohibition of cosmetic surgeries on genitals of minors, or forced hormonal sex assignment on minors, in several European countries that is. so they can decide on their own when they are old enough. that's all the personally affected humans ask for, for the next generation: let them be as they are and allow them to decide on their own.
The woman in the article has a DSD that only affects female sex development. Plus she has working ovaries. From either of these facts one can conclude that she is female.
I don't know why you think this is a conservative lie. It is not.
Lab-grown vaginas made from the patient's own stem-cells have also been transplanted into women [1]. Hopefully soon it will be possible to get the whole #!/usr/bash.
I stopped and looked at the natal photo for a while. It is a feeling I have not had before. This new life, chanced not only by lineage but multiple family members and a host of research and medical staff.
The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
There’s actually a very good case that, while we shouldn’t deny care to people, those with some conditions should not reproduce, morally speaking. Those who are sickly or low iq or carry certain congenital conditions (if they are aware of them) definitely shouldn’t. I have a few congenital problems and, while they’re manageable, they’ve affected my life enough I feel it would be wrong to pass them on absent gene editing to prevent doing so.
The alternative is the quality of the human genome declines to zero and our whole population gets one shotted by being in the same room as a damn peanut.
People love to straw man this obvious issue, saying, “oh so you support forced sterilization?” No, I didn’t say that. They love to point out that this choice also isn’t perfect and talk about “disability rights” or whatever. But they are letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. We owe future children more than to saddle them with lifetimes of ailments because we were too selfish to do otherwise.
It sucks that GP’s comment is flagged dead… it’s an opinion a lot of people seem to disagree with but IMO it’s not against the site’s guidelines or anything. It could be an interesting conversation if folks are willing to debate in a curious way.
My personal take is that it’s a moral imperative for humans to eventually edit obviously-bad disorders out of the gene pool going forward, through CRISPR-style editing or just selecting sperm/eggs to exclude the known bad genes. We have to come up with a good definition of “disorder” that people can be happy with, but I don’t think it’s an impossible task to do so.
I think it’s a moral imperative precisely because we’re so good at medical intervention that we’re able to keep people with a variety of conditions and disorders alive and even procreating, when “naturally” they wouldn’t have been able to do so without advanced medicine. Because of this, such disorders become more and more common in the gene pool because they’re no longer being effectively selected against.
We ought to prevent the human race from being utterly dependent on advanced medicine for survival, is my point. And IMO the way to do that, is to make sure that if we’re using advanced medicine to allow people with a genetic disorder to live a healthy life and procreate, we ought to do the gene editing necessary to make sure the disorder itself is not passed on to the next generation. (Basically address the “root cause” as well as the symptoms.)
I am saying precisely what I said: it is wrong to do. Not all that which is legal is moral, nor is all that which is illegal immoral. The state is an enforcer of the social contract and a monopolist of violence, not an arbiter of morality.
I believe people do plenty of immoral things but do not necessarily believe we ought to use that state violence to prevent or punish them. Adultery, for instance, is one of the more contemptible choices one can make, and yet goes unpunished by the state. Some jurisdictions don’t even consider it strongly in divorce proceedings.
Because people take what I consider a reasonable statement (“It is immoral to pass on certain genes.”) and conflate it with an evil implementation (“We should enforce this via violence.”) It’s what I call “Germany syndrome”, where past abuses (e.g. nazism) lead to an overreaction (“let’s not elect a remotely right-wing party for decades.”)
Interesting, are you stating there is no scenario under which you would consider those types of body modifications not quite acceptable? I am curious about your individual line. You state there isn't one, but I am relatively certain one exists.
It’s Sorites. I don’t have a line because the cost to identify it is much greater than the cost to move forward. When we cross it or approach a positive feedback loop, we will take a step back and re-evaluate.
> Interesting, are you stating there is no scenario under which you would consider those types of body modifications not quite acceptable?
Yes! If some body modifications make someone more efficient at killing, raping, stealing, committing crimes we should all be against it. If it is just because it annoys some people's sense of nature, no.
Once we can control fully developed adult brains, at the level you're suggesting for this thought experiment, that power will force us to reconsider criminality as a mental health issue — even if the personality disorders leading to criminality happen to be harder to fix in adults than boosting of IQ.
But note how I phrased that: Being able to rewrite the DNA of killers etc. to make them smarter, in the absence of influencing developed adult brains, only makes their descendants (in the strictly genetic sense of the word) smarter.
At some point in this century, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to cost-effectively write arbitrary human-length genomes. Simply printing a custom genome will likely happen well before it becomes possible to safely rewrite live adult genomes, which is itself a different task from understanding, controlling, or safely re-activating in adults, the developmental pathways that lead to healthy growth within a brain for things as vague as "lust", "empathy", or "intelligence".
But to your previous question, "At what point does it get silly?": at some point, we're all made of atoms, and if we had a level of control over matter as in fictional narratives like The Culture or Star Trek, then (modulo weight changes) all your atoms can be rearranged to turn you into a copy of me, or anyone else on the planet, or any other species including fully customised not-found-in-nature varieties.
I'm reminded of a cover of a Monty Python song:
> Oh, I'm a lycanthrope and I'm okay, I romp all night and I sleep all day.
Heh. I do not believe so for one reason and one reason only. It is not exactly secret what it chooses on a rather daily basis. That as a race we have managed to remove ourselves somewhat from the grip of that choice is a testament to our arrogance. In other words, I do not think you are accurate. I know, because I see things in front of me. I am uncertain on how you know what you know.
How is it awful? There is already too many humans on this planet and here we are spending resources on bodies that would obviously not even begin to exist save for technology. If anything, I am likely more reasonable here than the emotional gasps of 'ooh science'. Is it an interesting solved challenge? Sure. Is it something that is going to further remove us from reality.. also yes.
We should have twice as many people on this planet. Add we're going to do it, and we're going to feed them, and they're going to come up with ideas and do things. It's going to be even more awesome than it already is
Naturally. But it won’t matter. The human extinctionists are a self solving problem. I don’t worry that much about them except in making sure we don’t construct individual vetos.
Just for clarity, "in UK" is qualifying the whole thing, not that she just happened to be in the UK. A woman in Alabama had a child via a uterus transplant, among other places.
"Grace was born with a rare condition, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, where the womb is missing or underdeveloped, but with functioning ovaries"
I can't help but wonder if there is any hope of this working for trans persons in the future?
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?
Considering how many trans people who are assigned female at birth get hysterectomies (tissue that would otherwise be discarded), maybe there could be a "give a uterus, take a uterus" matching program...
Maybe I'm missing the point you're trying to make but people who get hysterectomies aren't doing it for fun, they're doing it because the organ is diseased so giving it to someone else wouldn't work.
Among those "trans people who are assigned female at birth" who "get hysterectomies" how many would you say are doing it because the organ is diseased. (Not that the proposal is practical, of course.)
What would be the point of that? I'd be surprised if it got past an ethics committee.
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.
It might work with a C-section. Reassignment surgery isn’t stretchy enough for a live birth. For trans girls who start before male puberty they might get enough pelvic rotation for there to be enough room for it, though.
Not transfem myself, but considering the risk of tears and other unpleasantness from a vaginal birth I know I'd probably opt for a C-section if I were in that position regardless... recovering from bottom surgery once is tough enough without the miracle of life wreaking havoc on the place after :P
That's a very negative attitude. Think about how happy these women must be to have this procedure done. Just because something isn't natural doesn't mean it's horrible.
> I can't help but wonder if there is any hope of this working for trans persons in the future?
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.
Trans men having babies is not strong evidence for cis men having less of a desire to give birth than trans women. If you have the equipment for it, it's going to happen some percent of the time.
Apparently [1], it's not completely out of the question, but more research is needed before it can be safely attempted on a trans woman.
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.
Ah yes, the nut jobs are the ones opposing what for almost all of human history, is something so far beyond the imagination as to be bordering on the grotesque.
Wondering the same. Surrogacy would seem like a much safer option. Just use the working womb without transplanting it. Why put two people through major surgery, plus additional risks for the baby?
This is really cool but it's ultimately a stop-gap measure.
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.
If everything scientific inquiry accomplishes is a “miracle”, then nothing is.
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.
For my money I would say, yes, and I think Louis C.K. was right when he said, "Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, 'Oh my God! Wow!' You're sitting in a chair in the sky!"
Yes, but by that logic we should be dumbfounded with awe every time we speak to turn on the lights, make a long distance call, eat a fresh fruit grown on another continent, or walk around after open heart surgery.
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.
It's part of a clinical trial, and the staff donated their time, so I don't think that number tells you anything meaningful about what it would normally cost.
I don't think anyone in America is actually paying a bill for $300,000 for a transplant. It's either paid for by insurance, or if someone doesn't have insurance, via hospital charity or a state medical aid plan. The only exception would be an absurdly rich person who doesn't have insurance.
The negotiated rate is still super high. There are procedures where it costs less to fly overseas and get it done self-pay than the out-of-pocket cost with insurance in the US.
Whose baby is it? If I get a transplanted womb and have hundreds of kids are they mine of the original owners? I would assume the current owner, but Anglo laws tend to be completely backwards when it relates to sex.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's "homini" supposed to mean?
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 phrase is a latin proverb meaning, roughly, "A man is a wolf to another man".
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...
Why us and not other mammals? No idea.
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29485996
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.
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.
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,
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.
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)
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.
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?
You're not allowed to be in the middle anymore.
People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".
about 1 in 2000 births have less than 4 limbs but i don't see anybody claiming its a spectrum.
Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
You made a claim, but without evidence. Iceland is a population, that demonstrates the contrary.
Not saying you're wrong, but the second sentence is suspect and it's not interesting to argue about why.
> trans people
Those populations have very little to do with each other - if anything.
You can even mix and match with which parts are present vs absent. I know someone with an arm that stops just above the elbow but still has several (usable!) fingers extending from it. So no joint, but sorta-yes hand.
Not really true. Some people maybe.
>Sex is binary
Sex is complicated. Traits cluster bimodally, but it would be reductive, scientifically inaccurate, to say it’s a simple binary.
>People with DSDs are female or male
That depends on how female and male are categorized. The line between in the trait cluster and outside of the trait cluster is arbitrary. So it depends where you draw that line.
Some people who are DSD take great pride in being non-binary.
People who are DSD have been documented for CENTURIES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_people_in_history
But that's my whole point, "sex" a spectrum and it's one of the big lies perpetuated by people who insist everything was known and set in stone, when their bible was invented, despite never having microscopes or telescopes or even eyeglasses
Yes I know it's a spectrum, and all 'intelligent' people I know this (the spectrum is unevenly distributed with 2 peaks).
Of all the things in the world that people understand or misunderstand, why, to you, is this particular subject even an issue?
kindergarten level logic fails at physiological sex ambiguity.
and it fails even more so at gender identity issues.
I can tell you that in Czechia and former East Germany, two most atheist places in the Western world, the concept of sex as a spectrum isn't especially popular either. People can be somewhat socially conservative without believing in the bible.
no. sex, biological sex, is not binary.
There's not like 20% of humans with mammary glands and a scrotum, right? Or 10% with no reproductive organs. Or 15% with both sets.
The obvious flip side of 1 in 1500 is that 1499 out of 1500 are binary.
So there's not really a spectrum as most people would understand that word.
The spectrum of sex characteristics is a bimodal distribution with two peaks. and the vast majority of all humans fall close to one of the two peaks peaks. however, they indeed exist medically classified circumstances for bodily sexual expression that is not on one of the peaks but somewhere in between.
and the percentage of those not close to the peaks is heavily contested and varies between 1 in 15000 ( putting extremely high bars on "uh wen can't tell") to 17 in 1000 (counting for example a larger clit as a penis-y ambiguous thing)
bimodal distribution with distinct peaks and a low but non-zero density between the peaks.
So I don't see 1 in 1500 people being oppressed by the court ruling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development
the humans with intersex conditions themselves object the term, as it tags them as sick, a "disease". their personal experience based political interventions have lead to the prohibition of cosmetic surgeries on genitals of minors, or forced hormonal sex assignment on minors, in several European countries that is. so they can decide on their own when they are old enough. that's all the personally affected humans ask for, for the next generation: let them be as they are and allow them to decide on their own.
I don't know why you think this is a conservative lie. It is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaginal_transplantation#Labora...
(I don't know why this lab stopped performing this procedure though.)
The image shows very little technology, but to me, is the epitome of how life and progress can unite.
The alternative is the quality of the human genome declines to zero and our whole population gets one shotted by being in the same room as a damn peanut.
People love to straw man this obvious issue, saying, “oh so you support forced sterilization?” No, I didn’t say that. They love to point out that this choice also isn’t perfect and talk about “disability rights” or whatever. But they are letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. We owe future children more than to saddle them with lifetimes of ailments because we were too selfish to do otherwise.
My personal take is that it’s a moral imperative for humans to eventually edit obviously-bad disorders out of the gene pool going forward, through CRISPR-style editing or just selecting sperm/eggs to exclude the known bad genes. We have to come up with a good definition of “disorder” that people can be happy with, but I don’t think it’s an impossible task to do so.
I think it’s a moral imperative precisely because we’re so good at medical intervention that we’re able to keep people with a variety of conditions and disorders alive and even procreating, when “naturally” they wouldn’t have been able to do so without advanced medicine. Because of this, such disorders become more and more common in the gene pool because they’re no longer being effectively selected against.
We ought to prevent the human race from being utterly dependent on advanced medicine for survival, is my point. And IMO the way to do that, is to make sure that if we’re using advanced medicine to allow people with a genetic disorder to live a healthy life and procreate, we ought to do the gene editing necessary to make sure the disorder itself is not passed on to the next generation. (Basically address the “root cause” as well as the symptoms.)
Why is "flagged" considered a super downvote? I flag spam, and that's pretty much it.
> People love to straw man this obvious issue, saying, “oh so you support forced sterilization?” No, I didn’t say that.
So what are you saying?
I believe people do plenty of immoral things but do not necessarily believe we ought to use that state violence to prevent or punish them. Adultery, for instance, is one of the more contemptible choices one can make, and yet goes unpunished by the state. Some jurisdictions don’t even consider it strongly in divorce proceedings.
That it doesn't seem noteworthy to you that your best comparison is invoke Godwin's law on yourself.
Or the idea that the reason that the right wing suffered must have been because people were mistaking them for Nazis.
"At what point does it get silly?"
Yes! If some body modifications make someone more efficient at killing, raping, stealing, committing crimes we should all be against it. If it is just because it annoys some people's sense of nature, no.
But note how I phrased that: Being able to rewrite the DNA of killers etc. to make them smarter, in the absence of influencing developed adult brains, only makes their descendants (in the strictly genetic sense of the word) smarter.
At some point in this century, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to cost-effectively write arbitrary human-length genomes. Simply printing a custom genome will likely happen well before it becomes possible to safely rewrite live adult genomes, which is itself a different task from understanding, controlling, or safely re-activating in adults, the developmental pathways that lead to healthy growth within a brain for things as vague as "lust", "empathy", or "intelligence".
But to your previous question, "At what point does it get silly?": at some point, we're all made of atoms, and if we had a level of control over matter as in fictional narratives like The Culture or Star Trek, then (modulo weight changes) all your atoms can be rearranged to turn you into a copy of me, or anyone else on the planet, or any other species including fully customised not-found-in-nature varieties.
I'm reminded of a cover of a Monty Python song:
> Oh, I'm a lycanthrope and I'm okay, I romp all night and I sleep all day.
- http://web.archive.org/web/20080509070613/http://www.swampfo...
Silly is fine :)
I think it’s arrogant to claim you know what “nature” chose, if indeed it “chose” anything at all.
A rare, congenital, condition.
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?
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.
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.
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...
In some jurisdictions the former could be illegal while the latter would be legal.
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
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.
For a comparison, check out what a 1-month supply of a biologic drug costs: https://www.goodrx.com/stelara
https://www.drugs.com/price-guide/pluvicto
prob also raising a child way expensier if you factor uni and such into it vs UK
“That’s ok, other people bear the enormous cost.”
Not really a win, that.
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...