How to reproduce with two fathers – and no biological mother
In effect, Hayashi had developed a complex procedure for turning male pluripotent (meaning embryonic or inducible) stem cells into female stem cells, allowing him to obtain eggs from a male. His surprising findings were published in the journal Nature a few weeks later.
Almost two years later, a team of Chinese researchers – led by Zhi-kun Li, Wei Li and Qi Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences – has once again shocked the field of genetics with a similar procedure.
However, these scientists found a completely different way of achieving the same result. They produced a baby mouse from two males without maternal biological intervention, beyond needing a female mouse to gestate the embryos generated. Their results were published last month in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
This new procedure developed by Li and colleagues combats a mammalian control system called genetic imprinting, which prevents viable mammal embryos from being obtained by combining two gametes of the same sex (two sperm or two eggs). These embryos do not survive naturally, since in mammals every embryo has to derive from a male gamete (sperm) and a female gamete (egg).
The reason for this is that some genes are only expressed if they are inherited from the mother, while others have to be inherited from the father. And all of them are essential for survival.
The Chinese researchers' highly complex process manages to convert, after numerous steps, a spermatozoa into a cell that behaves like an egg cell. They did this by deactivating the imprinting barrier, which is found at twenty points in the genome, through gene editing with CRISPR tools. This cell (now with the genetic characteristics of an egg) can be combined with another spermatozoa to create a viable mouse embryo. That embryo is gestated by a mouse, and the mice that are born are derived from two sperm, from two fathers, without the genetic involvement of eggs, or a mother.
This process is still not without problems. As the study's authors acknowledge, the mice created by this process are not fertile, and can only be reproduced through cloning.
Additionally, more than half of the mice born to two fathers either do not survive, die young, fail to mature properly, or fail to reach adulthood.
In a previous study from 2018, the same research team had shown that mice born to two mothers were fertile and survived longer than those born to two fathers, all of whom died shortly after birth. In their new study, published last month, the results have improved, though only partially.
Though these experimental studies were conducted on mice, they raise the question of whether such procedures could ever safely produce human embryos, and what impact this would have.
This is not yet possible, though if it were, it would revolutionise fertility treatments. Male same-sex couples, for instance, could both be the biological parents of their children – one would provide sperm and the other would provide pluripotent stem cells which, following either of the two procedures (that of the Japanese or the Chinese researchers), would produce eggs that could be fertilised in vitro and gestated by a woman through surrogacy. Surrogacy is illegal across much of the EU, but permitted in other countries.
Similarly, a female same-sex couple could also have biological children, where one contributes eggs and the other pluripotent stem cells that end up producing sperm. Either of the two women could gestate the resulting embryo, and the children born would be the biological children of both mothers.
For the moment, these human applications remain in the realm of science fiction – they are not yet technically possible, and it would be unwise to try to implement them. However, assuming that all these processes will be optimised to the point where we can consider offering them in fertility clinics, I believe it is important to reflect on this. We must ask ourselves, as a society, whether we would be willing to ethically and legally accept these techniques.
A version of this article was originally published in Science Media Centre España.
Este artículo fue publicado originalmente en The Conversation, un sitio de noticias sin fines de lucro dedicado a compartir ideas de expertos académicos.
Lee mas:
Geneticists have finally solved the mystery of Garfield's orange coat
Why more twins are being born than ever before – even though birthrates are falling
How (apparently) identical animals can have different genomes – new research
The contents of this publication and the opinions expressed are exclusively those of the author and this document should not be considered to represent an official position of the CSIC nor does it commit the CSIC to any responsibility of any kind.
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Chinese researchers suggest lasers and sabotage to counter Musk's Starlink satellites
ROME -- Stealth submarines fitted with space-shooting lasers, supply-chain sabotage and custom-built attack satellites armed with ion thrusters. Those are just some of the strategies Chinese scientists have been developing to counter what Beijing sees as a potent threat: Elon Musk' s armada of Starlink communications satellites. Chinese government and military scientists, concerned about Starlink's potential use by adversaries in a military confrontation and for spying, have published dozens of papers in public journals that explore ways to hunt and destroy Musk's satellites, an Associated Press review found. Chinese researchers believe that Starlink — a vast constellation of low-orbit satellites that deliver cheap, fast and ubiquitous connectivity even in remote areas — poses a high risk to the Chinese government and its strategic interests. That fear has mostly been driven by the company's close ties to the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment, as well as its growing global footprint. 'As the United States integrates Starlink technology into military space assets to gain a strategic advantage over its adversaries, other countries increasingly perceive Starlink as a security threat in nuclear, space, and cyber domains,' wrote professors from China's National University of Defense Technology in a 2023 paper. Chinese researchers are not the only ones concerned about Starlink, which has a stranglehold on certain space-based communications. Some traditional U.S. allies are also questioning the wisdom of handing over core communications infrastructure — and a potential trove of data — to a company run by an unpredictable foreign businessman whose allegiances are not always clear. Apprehensions deepened after Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine made clear the battlefield advantages Starlink satellites could convey and have been exacerbated by Musk's proliferating political interests. Musk pumped tens of millions of dollars into President Donald Trump's reelection effort and emerged, temporarily, as a key adviser and government official. As Musk toys with the idea of starting his own political party, he has also taken an increasing interest in European politics, using his influence to promote an array of hard-right and insurgent figures often at odds with establishment politicians. Musk left the Trump administration in May and within days his relationship with Trump publicly imploded in a feud on social media. SpaceX, the rocket launch and space-based communications company that Musk founded and that operates Starlink, remains inextricably linked with core U.S. government functions. It has won billions in contracts to provide launch services for NASA missions and military satellites, recuperate astronauts stranded at the International Space Station and build a network of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Starlink's space dominance has sparked a global scramble to come up with viable alternatives. But its crushing first-mover advantage has given SpaceX near monopoly power, further complicating the currents of business, politics and national security that converge on Musk and his companies. Since its first launches in 2019, Starlink has come to account for about two-thirds of all active satellites, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who writes a newsletter tracking satellite launches. SpaceX operates more than 8,000 active satellites and eventually aims to deploy tens of thousands more. Beijing's tendency to view Starlink as tool of U.S. military power has sharpened its efforts to develop countermeasures — which, if deployed, could increase the risk of collateral damage to other customers as SpaceX expands its global footprint. The same satellites that pass over China also potentially serve Europe, Ukraine, the United States and other geographies as they continue their path around the earth. Starlink says it operates in more than 140 countries, and recently made inroads in Vietnam, Niger, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan. In June, Starlink also obtained a license to operate in India, overcoming national security concerns and powerful domestic telecom interests to crack open a tech-savvy market of nearly 1.5 billion people. On the company's own map of coverage, it has very few dead zones beyond those in North Korea, Iran and China. No other country or company is close to catching up with Starlink. Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has taken aim at rival Musk with Project Kuiper, which launched its first batch of internet satellites into orbit in April. So far Amazon has just 78 satellites in orbit, with 3,232 planned, according to McDowell, and London-based Eutelstat OneWeb has around 650 satellites in orbit, a fraction of the fleet it had initially planned. The European Union is spending billions to develop its own satellite array — called the IRIS2 initiative — but remains woefully behind. EU officials have had to lobby their own member states not to sign contracts with Starlink while it gets up and running. 'We are allies with the United States of America, but we need to have our strategic autonomy,' said Christophe Grudler, a French member of the European Parliament who led legislative work on IRIS2. 'The risk is not having our destiny in our own hands.' China has been public about its ambition to build its own version of Starlink to meet both domestic national security needs and compete with Starlink in foreign markets. In 2021, Beijing established the state-owned China SatNet company and tasked it with launching a megaconstellation with military capabilities, known as Guowang. In December, the company launched its first operational satellites, and now has 60 of a planned 13,000 in orbit, according to McDowell. Qianfan, a company backed by the Shanghai government, has launched 90 satellites out of some 15,000 planned. The Brazilian government in November announced a deal with Qianfan, after Musk had a scorching public fight with a Brazilian judge investigating X, who also froze Space X's bank accounts in the country. Qianfan is also targeting customers in Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan and Uzbekistan and has ambitions to expand across the African continent, according to a slide presented at a space industry conference last year and published by the China Space Monitor. Concerns about Starlink's supremacy were supercharged by Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war was a turning point in strategic thinking about Starlink and similar systems. Ukraine used the Starlink network to facilitate battlefield communications and power fighter and reconnaissance drones, providing a decisive ground-game advantage. At the same time, access to the satellites was initially controlled by a single man, Musk, who can — and did — interrupt critical services, refusing, for example, to extend coverage to support a Ukrainian counterattack in Russia-occupied Crimea. U.S.-led sanctions against Moscow after the full-scale invasion also curtailed the availability of Western technology in Russia, underscoring the geopolitical risks inherent in relying on foreign actors for access to critical infrastructure. 'Ukraine was a warning shot for the rest of us,' said Nitin Pai, co-founder and director of the Takshashila Institution, a public policy research center based in Bangalore, India. 'For the last 20 years, we were quite aware of the fact that giving important government contracts to Chinese companies is risky because Chinese companies operate as appendages of the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, it's a risk because the Chinese Communist Party can use technology as a lever against you. Now it's no different with the Americans.' Nearly all of the 64 papers about Starlink reviewed by AP in Chinese journals were published after the conflict started. Starlink's omnipresence and potential military applications have unnerved Beijing and spurred the nation's scientists to action. In paper after paper, researchers painstakingly assessed the capabilities and vulnerabilities of a network that they clearly perceive as menacing and strove to understand what China might learn — and emulate — from Musk's company as Beijing works to develop a similar satellite system. Though Starlink does not operate in China, Musk's satellites nonetheless can sweep over Chinese territory. Researchers from China's National Defense University in 2023 simulated Starlink's coverage of key geographies, including Beijing, Taiwan, and the polar regions, and determined that Starlink can achieve round-the-clock coverage of Beijing. 'The Starlink constellation coverage capacity of all regions in the world is improving steadily and in high speed,' they concluded. In another paper — this one published by the government-backed China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team — researchers mapped out vulnerabilities in Starlink's supply chain. 'The company has more than 140 first-tier suppliers and a large number of second-tier and third-tier suppliers downstream,' they wrote in a 2023 paper. 'The supervision for cybersecurity is limited.' Engineers from the People's Liberation Army, in another 2023 paper, suggested creating a fleet of satellites to tail Starlink satellites, collecting signals and potentially using corrosive materials to damage their batteries or ion thrusters to interfere with their solar panels. Other Chinese academics have encouraged Beijing to use global regulations and diplomacy to contain Musk, even as the nation's engineers have continued to elaborate active countermeasures: Deploy small optical telescopes already in commercial production to monitor Starlink arrays. Concoct deep fakes to create fictitious targets. Shoot powerful lasers to burn Musk's equipment.
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Chinese researchers suggest lasers and sabotage to counter Musk's Starlink satellites
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'As the United States integrates Starlink technology into military space assets to gain a strategic advantage over its adversaries, other countries increasingly perceive Starlink as a security threat in nuclear, space, and cyber domains,' wrote professors from China's National University of Defense Technology in a 2023 paper. Advertisement Chinese researchers are not the only ones concerned about Starlink, which has a stranglehold on certain space-based communications. Some traditional U.S. allies are also questioning the wisdom of handing over core communications infrastructure — and a potential trove of data — to a company run by an unpredictable foreign businessman whose allegiances are not always clear. Apprehensions deepened after Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine made clear the battlefield advantages Starlink satellites could convey and have been exacerbated by Musk's proliferating political interests. Advertisement Musk pumped tens of millions of dollars into President Donald Trump's reelection effort and emerged, temporarily, as a key adviser and government official. As Musk toys with the idea of starting his own political party, he has also taken an increasing interest in European politics, using his influence to promote an array of hard-right and insurgent figures often at odds with establishment politicians. Musk left the Trump administration in May and within days his relationship with Trump publicly imploded in a feud on social media. SpaceX, the rocket launch and space-based communications company that Musk founded and that operates Starlink, remains inextricably linked with core U.S. government functions. It has won billions in contracts to provide launch services for NASA missions and military satellites, recuperate astronauts stranded at the International Space Station and build a network of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Starlink's space dominance has sparked a global scramble to come up with viable alternatives. But its crushing first-mover advantage has given SpaceX near monopoly power, further complicating the currents of business, politics and national security that converge on Musk and his companies. Starlink dominates space Since its first launches in 2019, Starlink has come to account for about two-thirds of all active satellites, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who writes a newsletter tracking satellite launches. SpaceX operates more than 8,000 active satellites and eventually aims to deploy tens of thousands more. Beijing's tendency to view Starlink as tool of U.S. military power has sharpened its efforts to develop countermeasures — which, if deployed, could increase the risk of collateral damage to other customers as SpaceX expands its global footprint. The same satellites that pass over China also potentially serve Europe, Ukraine, the United States and other geographies as they continue their path around the earth. Advertisement Starlink says it operates in more than 140 countries, and recently made inroads in Vietnam, Niger, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan. In June, Starlink also obtained a license to operate in India, overcoming national security concerns and powerful domestic telecom interests to crack open a tech-savvy market of nearly 1.5 billion people. On the company's own map of coverage, it has very few dead zones beyond those in North Korea, Iran and China. No other country or company is close to catching up with Starlink. Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has taken aim at rival Musk with Project Kuiper, which launched its first batch of internet satellites into orbit in April. So far Amazon has just 78 satellites in orbit, with 3,232 planned, according to McDowell, and London-based Eutelstat OneWeb has around 650 satellites in orbit, a fraction of the fleet it had initially planned. The European Union is spending billions to develop its own satellite array — called the IRIS2 initiative — but remains woefully behind. EU officials have had to lobby their own member states not to sign contracts with Starlink while it gets up and running. 'We are allies with the United States of America, but we need to have our strategic autonomy,' said Christophe Grudler, a French member of the European Parliament who led legislative work on IRIS2. 'The risk is not having our destiny in our own hands.' China has been public about its ambition to build its own version of Starlink to meet both domestic national security needs and compete with Starlink in foreign markets. In 2021, Beijing established the state-owned China SatNet company and tasked it with launching a megaconstellation with military capabilities, known as Guowang. In December, the company launched its first operational satellites, and now has 60 of a planned 13,000 in orbit, according to McDowell. Advertisement Qianfan, a company backed by the Shanghai government, has launched 90 satellites out of some 15,000 planned. The Brazilian government in November announced a deal with Qianfan, after Musk had a scorching public fight with a Brazilian judge investigating X, who also froze Space X's bank accounts in the country. Qianfan is also targeting customers in Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan and Uzbekistan and has ambitions to expand across the African continent, according to a slide presented at a space industry conference last year and published by the China Space Monitor. Russia's invasion of Ukraine supercharges concerns Concerns about Starlink's supremacy were supercharged by Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war was a turning point in strategic thinking about Starlink and similar systems. Ukraine used the Starlink network to facilitate battlefield communications and power fighter and reconnaissance drones, providing a decisive ground-game advantage. At the same time, access to the satellites was initially controlled by a single man, Musk, who can — and did — interrupt critical services, refusing, for example, to extend coverage to support a Ukrainian counterattack in Russia-occupied Crimea. U.S.-led sanctions against Moscow after the full-scale invasion also curtailed the availability of Western technology in Russia, underscoring the geopolitical risks inherent in relying on foreign actors for access to critical infrastructure. 'Ukraine was a warning shot for the rest of us,' said Nitin Pai, co-founder and director of the Takshashila Institution, a public policy research center based in Bangalore, India. 'For the last 20 years, we were quite aware of the fact that giving important government contracts to Chinese companies is risky because Chinese companies operate as appendages of the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, it's a risk because the Chinese Communist Party can use technology as a lever against you. Now it's no different with the Americans.' Advertisement Nearly all of the 64 papers about Starlink reviewed by AP in Chinese journals were published after the conflict started. Assessing Starlink's capabilities and vulnerabilities Starlink's omnipresence and potential military applications have unnerved Beijing and spurred the nation's scientists to action. In paper after paper, researchers painstakingly assessed the capabilities and vulnerabilities of a network that they clearly perceive as menacing and strove to understand what China might learn — and emulate — from Musk's company as Beijing works to develop a similar satellite system. Though Starlink does not operate in China, Musk's satellites nonetheless can sweep over Chinese territory. Researchers from China's National Defense University in 2023 simulated Starlink's coverage of key geographies, including Beijing, Taiwan, and the polar regions, and determined that Starlink can achieve round-the-clock coverage of Beijing. 'The Starlink constellation coverage capacity of all regions in the world is improving steadily and in high speed,' they concluded. In another paper — this one published by the government-backed China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team — researchers mapped out vulnerabilities in Starlink's supply chain. 'The company has more than 140 first-tier suppliers and a large number of second-tier and third-tier suppliers downstream,' they wrote in a 2023 paper. 'The supervision for cybersecurity is limited.' Advertisement Engineers from the People's Liberation Army, in another 2023 paper, suggested creating a fleet of satellites to tail Starlink satellites, collecting signals and potentially using corrosive materials to damage their batteries or ion thrusters to interfere with their solar panels. Other Chinese academics have encouraged Beijing to use global regulations and diplomacy to contain Musk, even as the nation's engineers have continued to elaborate active countermeasures: Deploy small optical telescopes already in commercial production to monitor Starlink arrays. Concoct deep fakes to create fictitious targets. Shoot powerful lasers to burn Musk's equipment. Some U.S. analysts say Beijing's fears may be overblown, but such assessments appear to have done little to cool domestic debate. One Chinese paper was titled, simply: 'Watch out for that Starlink.' Chen reported from Washington.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
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A 'vibrant oasis' of chemical-eating creatures found in the deep Pacific
A 'vibrant oasis' of chemical-eating creatures found in the deep Pacific By Will Dunham (Reuters) -Scientists diving to astounding depths in two oceanic trenches in the northwest Pacific have discovered thriving communities of marine creatures that get their sustenance not by eating organic matter like most animals but by turning chemicals into energy. They found these chemosynthesis-based animal communities - dominated by tube worms and clams - during a series of dives aboard a crewed submersible to the bottom of the Kuril-Kamchatka and Aleutian trenches. These creatures are nourished by fluids rich in hydrogen sulfide and methane seeping from the seafloor in this dark and frigid realm beyond the reach of sunlight. These ecosystems were discovered at depths greater than the height of Mount Everest, Earth's tallest peak. The deepest one was 9,533 meters (31,276 feet) below the ocean surface in the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench. This was almost 25% deeper than such animals had previously been documented anywhere. "What makes our discovery groundbreaking is not just its greater depth - it's the astonishing abundance and diversity of chemosynthetic life we observed," said marine geochemist Mengran Du of the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, or IDSSE, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. "Unlike isolated pockets of organisms, this community thrives like a vibrant oasis in the vast desert of the deep sea," Du added. While some marine animals have been documented at even greater depths, nearly 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) below the surface in the Pacific's Mariana Trench, Du said, those were not chemical eaters. In the new research, the scientists used their submersible, called the Fendouzhe, to journey down to what is called the hadal zone. The hadal zone is where one of the continent-sized plates that make up Earth's crust slides under a neighboring plate in a process called subduction. "The ocean environment down there is characterized by cold, total darkness and active tectonic activities," said IDSSE marine geologist and study co-author Xiaotong Peng, leader of the research program. This environment, Peng said, was found to harbor "the deepest and the most extensive chemosynthetic communities known to exist on our planet." The Kuril-Kamchatka Trench runs about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) and is located off the southeastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Aleutian Trench runs roughly 3,400 km (2,100 miles) off the southern coastline of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. The newly observed ecosystems were dominated by two types of chemical-eating animals - tube worms that were red, gray or white in color and around 20-30 cm (8-12 inches) long and clams that were white in color and up to 23 cm (nine inches) long. Some of these appear to be previously unknown species, Du said. "Even though living in the harshest environment, these life forms found their way in surviving and thriving," Du said. Some non-chemical-eating animals, sustained by eating organic matter and dead marine creatures that filter down from above, also were found living in these ecosystems, including sea anemones, spoon worms and sea cucumbers. Du, the expedition's chief scientist, described what it was like to visit this remote watery sphere. "Diving in the submersible was an extraordinary experience -like traveling through time. Each descent transported me to a new deep-sea realm, as if unveiling a hidden world and unraveling its mysteries," Du said, while expressing amazement at the remarkable resilience and beauty of the creatures the scientists witnessed. The study illustrates how life can flourish in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth - and potentially beyond. "These findings extend the depth limit of chemosynthetic communities on Earth. Future works should focus on how these creatures adapt to such an extreme depth," Peng said. "We suggest that similar chemosynthetic communities may also exist in extraterrestrial oceans, as chemical species like methane and hydrogen are common there," Peng added.
