this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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IDK. Looking at that wikipedia article, the progress looks pretty good.
Also, just on a conceptual level, growing a whole embryo may be a lot easier than growing a single organ. Organs really aren't designed to grow by themselves. A fetus is designed to grow and develop. It needs a nutrient supply.
But I think of it as the difference between trying to figure out how to grow plants in aquaponics vs trying to somehow coax plant cells to grow a flower without the rest of the flower plant present.
*A flower with seeds, unless you want a bunch of sterile future humans too.
Growing an embryo is easy. Growing an embryo into a fetus is hard. Growing a fetus into a baby is still very very unknown. There's a LOT of signal pathways to figure out with many hormone mixtures as well. It wasn't until recently that only one aspect of sex development was even somewhat figured out:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181215141333.htm
And that's not even getting into more complicated things. It's still not understood why some people are born heterosexual, others homosexual, bisexual, etc. But it is thought to have something to do with development in the womb (look up how the odds of being a gay man go up the more kids a woman has). If something like orientation is affected by womb development, what else is? Intelligence? Empathy? Facial Features?
And if you get it wrong, the result can be unethical. You could end up with many humans who have no empathy, or as I mentioned, sterile, or whoops everyone is hetero now, or all of them have severe learning disabilities.
And if you get it right, guess what the rich will do? Gattica btw.
A lot of progress has been done, yes, but there's still way, way more. People forget the human genome wasn't even mapped out until the early 2000s, and less than 50 years ago people could still smoke in a lot of hospitals.
Sure it would be difficult. It wouldn't be easy. Like anything, you don't just start with humans. You start with mice and work your way up from there. But you're right, it would I suppose not be a near term thing. But still, for people like Musk, who always insist how they are so concerned with the future 'survival of humanity?' If you're that worried about underpopulation, to the point you're willingly throwing away civil rights, wouldn't such a thing be worth funding, even if it takes a century to figure it out?
Musk is full of hot air and bs tho