I think you maybe mean "conception" and not "contraception".

I have to say I saw this story before and it worries me somewhat. Isn't is possible that try to make sperm out of a woman's bone marrow could possibly lead to severe side-effects for the child? Is there anyone who would really want to inflict that kind of risk on their own child?

There is enough kids already who could really do with adopting into loving families, without coming up with this kind of crazyness...

This is cool, very cool. Science can do amazing things.

That said...I'd be very leery of trying this myself. It seems like there could be unintended consequences, medically speaking. But what do I know?

My bad; it's a Monday.

Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons.

I guess this makes sense, scientifically speaking, but it still seems kind of, well, weird in a science-fiction sort of way. Very Herland, as they point out at the end of the article . . .

I think I would be sorry not to have the possibility open that my child could be of either sex. But, from what I understand, the desire to have children with a genetic connection to their parents is very important to many couples and maybe that would be the deciding factor.

I wonder what the implications might be for male couples to somehow birth a child that was their "own"?

Women need men like fish need bicycles.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish watching the highlights of this year's Tour de Sargasso.

annajcook,

Men would probably still need a surrogate to carry their child, where as this isn't the case for women (i.e. women don't need male sperm, unless they want a boy).

Plus, they have yet to find anything in men that would duplicate the egg, like they have found in women to duplicate the sperm so the men wouldn't be able to share their DNA like this does for women.

This is interesting but like someone said above, we have enough kids already, adopt. Though I do understand the pull to have a genetic heir, so to speak.

So until the invention of the artificial womb, men are kinda out of luck.

Yeah, you know, something about it just seems so scary. Producing a child from only your own genetic material? So much for genetic variation..

By the way, GREAT post title.

Lilaeden,

Good point. That's why we have men and women in the first place, for more genetic diversity. Though I'm sure they'd argue that two women have different genetic diversity...

Well, two women do have genetic diversity. In order to achieve diversity all you need is two unique organisms. Gender isn't really the issue at all, gender is only what allows us to actually have sexual reproduction. If it's possible to fertilize one woman's egg with another woman's genetic material, then the issue of genetic diversity is unchanged from that of man/woman reproduction.

Agreed, Kimmy, the issue of decreased genetic diversity wouldn't be a lesbian couple combining their genetic material, but single women impregnating themselves with their own marrow-sperm.

UltraMagnus,

Yes two women (or two men if it were ever possible) would be genetically diverse, I was only talking about a women using her bone marrow to create sperm and fertilizing her own egg (probably unlikely). It isn't the "unnaturalness" that bothers me, just possible health complications.

While Im not a scientist, I do agree that I am somwhat split on this. I dont think taking something and turning it into something it was never meant to be can be done without... complications.

Its great that a lesbian couple could have their own female child, and that men may be able to have their own sperm who couldnt originally, but its still all kind of artificial right?

I hope none of those "killer lesbians" get onto this though. Id hate to be dashed on the rocks by their army of females bred by only females. Saves me eagles, saves me!!!

I know there are a few possible complications, but for the the possibility of having a child with my partner that no one in my family could contest (regarding its parentage) is amazing. With my family I worry that if something happened to me they might try to take our child away from my partner, whereas this provides a solution.

As the Independent's article notes, all the children produced by this new technique would be girls. Oh no! let's make a big fuss over this "anti-male" technology that doesn't even exist yet. And disregard the fact the for children in China, thanks to selective abortion and contraception, the male-to-female ratio among children is something like 112 to 100.

Incidentally, I Googled around a bit to get some information on the pro-male bias in China, and while I saw a good deal of talk about selective abortions, I didn't see a word about what I am calling "selective contraception." The whole idea seems to be absent from the literature. I wonder why?

What I mean by "selective contraception" is this. The law in China says that if an urban couple has more than one child or a rural couple has more than two, they face a rather stiff financial penalty. However, it is a Chinese tradition that families especially value male children, as they consider male children as capable of continuing the family line, whereas if a female child has a child she is considered to have continued her husband's family line.

So if an urban Chinese couple's first baby is male, or at least one of a rural couple's two children is male, then in order to escape the costs incurred by the "One-Child" policy, they might decline to have any further children. But if the first child or the first two children are female, then they may be more willing to take on the burden of the government's financial penalties and have another child, in the hope that this one will be male. So without any kind of sex-selective abortion, without even any kind of pre-natal testing at all, the combination of the rather appalling tradition of valuing male children more than female together with China's "One-Child" policy is likely to lead to an increase in the male-to-female ratio.

Though it seems plausible, this is an unproven hypothesis. I would very much like to see some statistics on the number and gender of children in Chinese families who submit to the financial penalties enforced by China's "One-Child" policy, to see if my hypothesis is supported by real statistical data. If anyone has any information about where I can get this data I would be grateful if you'd let me know.

Anyway, "selective contraception" isn't cutting-edge high technology, but it is technology, and the end result of the use of this technology is a tremendous deficit in the number of girl children in China. So before people start freaking out about how horrible and unfair-to-males it would be if women were to employ this untested new reproductive tech, maybe they should already be freaking out over the mass misuse of sex-selective reproductive technology that has already exists.

"Agreed, Kimmy, the issue of decreased genetic diversity wouldn't be a lesbian couple combining their genetic material, but single women impregnating themselves with their own marrow-sperm."

I thought the issue of decreased genetic diversity would be cloning.

If a woman used her own egg and her own bone-carrow-made sperm, wouldn't there still be a chance of the child not having the same genotype as she does? I mean, there's no guarantee that this particular egg would haqve only the genes she got from her mom and this particular sperm would have only the genes she got from her father. Maybe both would have the X chromosome she got from her mom, maybe both would have the half of chromosome pair #5 that she got from her father, etc. It would be especially obvious if, for example, a dark-haired woman who got recessive genes for light blonde hair from only one of her parents had a blonde daughter this way.

"So if an urban Chinese couple's first baby is male, or at least one of a rural couple's two children is male, then in order to escape the costs incurred by the 'One-Child' policy, they might decline to have any further children. But if the first child or the first two children are female, then they may be more willing to take on the burden of the government's financial penalties and have another child, in the hope that this one will be male. So without any kind of sex-selective abortion, without even any kind of pre-natal testing at all, the combination of the rather appalling tradition of valuing male children more than female together with China's 'One-Child' policy is likely to lead to an increase in the male-to-female ratio."

Hold it, that doesn't add up. Wouldn't there still be a 50% chance of XX conception every time a couple tries again for a boy?

Suppose 8 couples try "selective contraception" and start to have kids at roughly the same time. Out of the first 8 babies, 4 are boys and 4 are girls. The parents of the boys use birth control, and the parents of the girls try again.

Out of these 4 babies, 2 are boys and 2 are girls. The parents of these 2 boys go on birth control, and the parents of these 2 girls try again.

Out of these 2 babies, 1 is a boy and 1 is a girl.

The total number of kids so far is 8 + 4 + 2 = 14. The total number of boys is 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 and the total number of girls is 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 even though no couple has more than 1 boy.

Now if the couple who has 3 girls in this scenario tries again, then the total # of kids will be 15 with either 7 boys and 8 girls or 8 girls and 7 boys...

"If a woman used her own egg and her own bone-carrow-made sperm, wouldn't there still be a chance of the child not having the same genotype as she does?"

Yes, but it would still be limiting to genetic diversity, in basically the same way in-breeding is. I don't know how much genetics you know (not that I'm an expert), but when you have two parents who aren't closely related not only are you possibly combining alleles in new ways, but you can also have recombination to create totally new chromosomes. I don't know if I said all that right; I dropped my Biology major. Basically, you wind up with more diversity with two unrelated parents than with two closely related parents (or only one parent).

You know, as to the China thing, I have some friends who are Chinese and all and I have heard that the sexism and selection against girl babies is not such a big deal these days, and that a lot of couples desperately want girl babies. I don't know how true that is though; maybe it applies more to younger, urban, liberal-types

yeah I guess seeing as the 2007 CIA factbook also has the 112 to 100 ratio, /something/ is going on

"Yes, but it would still be limiting to genetic diversity, in basically the same way in-breeding is...Basically, you wind up with more diversity with two unrelated parents than with two closely related parents (or only one parent)."

Good point, and thanks for clearing that up!

Good Lord, you're right. If not you could manipulate the odds of the sum of a series of coin flips, which obviously you can't. The disparity I was seeing is that there would be more families with at least one boy than with at least one girl, but to make up for it, more of the more numerous families would be all-female, so the overall sum balances perfectly.

Also, a larger percentage of the children of families being punished by the government for exceeding their birth-quota would would be girls than boys. It's hard to believe, however, that the increased taxes could account for the enormous disparity in numbers of surviving girls vs. boys. Which means that selective abortion or infanticide must account for the disparity.

Which is horrible. I just can't wrap my mind around the idea that millions of people continue a pregnancy if the baby would be male but abort if the baby would be female. I don't know what to say.

Well considering that we can't even always get birth control when it's prescribed by a doctor, I seriously doubt that something like this would ever be legal. It will face the same sorts of hangups that women's reproductive health already faces. The problem isn't the science. The problem is the wingnuts.

You know the wingnuts would come up with some reason why this wouldn't be "ethical." Anything that liberates women from men's control scares the holy crap out of them.

Even as a lesbian, this makes me a little nervous. I'd want it to be well-tested before I'd create a child that way. And since I'm almost 33, I'm thinking that a realistic prospect of creating a child this way will come long after my fertility has passed. Plus any technology-assisted conception is expensive, and I just can't see going into debt in order to have a biological child. Don't get me started on the high costs of adoption. If I adopt, it will likely be through the foster care system. I love babies, but I think I could be perfectly happy adopting an older child.

I'm also bothered about the health complications for the babies – don't cloned animals have shorter life expectancies? I know these wouldn't be cloned, but it's still an artificial means of doing something that's um, fairly straightforward and works well!
It just seems a strange thing to want to spend money developing, unless of course every male on the planet had had his testes nuked and was infertile.
That seems pretty unlikely.

A little genetics review for y'all (from a bio major):

Each person (without genetic abnormalities) has two copies of every chromosome, one from each parent. When egg cells and sperm cells are made, a process called "crossing-over" happens in which the chromosomes from each parent are twisted together and recombined. This happens before conception. So each egg a woman makes has chromosomes with some of her father's and some of her mother's genes, and these are combined with the other chromosomes in the other cell at fertilization. The reason that inbreeding causes problems is that each individual chromosome often has defective genes, compensated for by each cell's other matching chromosome with a normal gene. When (very) close relatives mate, often two copies of a defective gene are united and a genetic condition is seen in the offspring.

No ethical physician/scientist would ever allow a woman to produce a child only from her own cloned cells. What the research is describing is the use of (men's or women's) bone-marrow stem cells to make these unique reproductive cells, which would NOT be clones. This is the kind of reason why stem cells are so prized for research into treatments - they have a unique ability to develop into other kinds of cells.

That said - the possible physiological/developmental issues that might arise for any fetus conceived in this way are totally unclear. More research ahead, I hope!

PBS had a documentry series on China recently, and it was stated that a family that gives birth to a girl first is basically given a free pass to try again for a male child, with no fines or fees to be paid, but because schooling costs are so high, especially for rural families, many parents don't take advantage of this.

Even if they manage to get functional sperm cells from female bone marrow, I'd concerned about the effects of genomic imprinting: some genes have different effects depending on which parent they came from.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_Imprinting for more information.

Another bio major here. From my understanding, Doug S., imprinting is not based on the sex of the parent, but on the method of genome delivery. When gametes are formed, all the DNA is demethylated. Some of these genes get remethylated in sperm, others in eggs. So, assuming the creation of sperm from bone marrow cells mimics gametogenesis in this regard, there shouldn't be a problem with imprinting.

For those of y'all who haven't studied genetics, methylation of DNA is involved in regulating gene expression. So for some genes, only one of the parental copies of a gene is expressed in any of the offspring's cells, since the re-methylation of the parents' genomes is retained in all of cells created by the offspring. Hence the term "imprinting." (This isn't a change in the actual genes inherited, but a change in the chromosome structure that gets wiped clean with every new generation of gametes.)