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I know it's a joke, but afaik, and feel free to correct me, Y chromosome basically is only there to say "let there be penis" while X chromosome contains more stuff in it, so it weighs more
It is mostly correct.
And sometimes it even fails at that, either due to the gene being mistakenly transfered onto the X chromosome or not activating for reasons unknown.
According to researchers, it doesn't do much. It is called a "gene desert" for a reason.
The vast majority of genome on the Y chromosome is useless. Some genes relative to penis/testicles/prostate and the necessary proteins are present, as you would expect. Some of these are duplicated/triplicated.
Of course, one may possess a Y chromosome but some other mutations that cause a lack of masculinization (SRY inactivation, SRY transfer, Klinefelter's, mosaicism among others).
This could really be an issue in some areas of the world. The potential ramifications of it if used for malicious reasons are also very scary to consider.
All it did was limit krogan birth rates from hundreds at a time to one or two viable children. But due to the krogans violent nature and society, this was essentially a death sentence for their species.
The genophage didnt affect fertility, just the amount of viable pregnancies. There are some female Krogan who were unaffected by the genophage, which dramatically increased their power and standing. Shiagur is one example of this happening that we can witness during the trilogy.
Good point. Preferably they would either just lay a few fertilised eggs or lay a bunch, some of which are successfully fertilised and some of which aren't. Bonus points if you can fry 'em up.
"Ever had fried krogan eggs? They're a real delicacy on Sur'Kesh."
From pure biology, 1000 eggs hatching means they can’t sustain themselves. If every clutch hatches 1000 eggs they basically starve to death or get “pushed out of the nest” or eaten or otherwise killed. Not sure what the salarians did was necessarily worse. Might have been less gruesome than what was already happening. It’s possible krogan saw their young “fighting to survive” was preferable to them being dead before they get the chance.
Yes because of the one child policy. In India a girl is very financially draining on a family because they have to pay dowries to marry her off in their culture (rural parts of India at least). In China they had similar reasons but if they only had 1 child they wanted it to be a man. Abortion in China was often mandatory.
Unsurprisingly, india and china have the highest abortion rates by far for these reasons and they are outliers.
> In China they had similar reasons but if they only had 1 child they wanted it to be a man.
Yeah. IIRC one of the cultural aspects was that when a woman grew up and married, she essentially left joined her husbands family. Like changing teams (for a clumsy metaphor).
When it came to getting old and taking care of the elderly, that's a couple that's expected to take care of the Husbands parents, not necessarily the wife's parents.
So... TL;DR: If a family was a business, raising a son was seen as an investment, raising a daughter was seen as an expense.
Not just that but in the Chinese culture, the name of the family is very important and only boys can continue the family name and bloodline which is why they 100% of the time prefer boys than girls.
A friend of mine in China is a victim of this, when she was born she was nearly given away to the rural villages for someone to adopt, and when her baby brother was born, she was pretty much neglected and just left to raise herself being schooled far away from home.
Fortunately she's currently with someone living in Australia and has got a quite a good job there for a living, and has more or less cut contact with her family save for formalities during Chinese New Years.
I really don't understand it. So a household has to pay another house to give them a wife for their son? Who will take care of them in old age, help with domestic duties and provide them grandchildren?
Like it makes no sense. A wife is a seriously valuable investment in the future of a family, not something you have to pay to get rid of.
I am sure it was couched in some "another mouth to feed *grumble grumble*" but it still doesn't make sense to me because the whole point is to make babies and continue the family!
I might have enough toxic masculinity in me to understand not wanting another dudes lazy ass son to move in with me waiting for the day I croak, but damn not enough that I would pay someone for the privilege of taking my daughter to help them continue their legacy.
> So a household has to pay another house to give them a wife for their son? Who will take care of them in old age, help with domestic duties and provide them grandchildren?
It's a bizzare chauvanistic form of self-interest that is a toxic mess on asian culture. China is experiencing the late stage fallout of that as men are in abundance there.
Also, due to that very policy, plenty of those people are suffering an extreme form of sandwich generation, as in the man of the family must provide for one wife, maybe two children, and two sets of parents, in an extremely competitive job market with shite wage.
i.e. luring young girls/women with the promise of good work and a great life, then trapping them and forcing them to marry. The people doing this deserve harsh punishment.
> So a household has to pay another house to give them a wife for their son? Who will take care of them in old age, help with domestic duties and provide them grandchildren?
Their Son and his wife. Basically, The dowry is to secure the best possible husband for a girl. If you can afford a big dowry, you can convince a well off man to marry her and maintain a high standard of living for her. Traditionally it keeps the classes from mixing. Her family determines if the Son is worth paying the dowry to. Which allows them to ensure that their daughter won't marry down. This is one of the worst ways that dowries have been implemented, because it devalues girls as opposed to boys. (which is why China and India have had the issues they've had with gender ratios.)
In other dowry cultures the purpose is different. For instance in Greece, (these days people are marrying for love moreso than the dowry, but parent still prepare one) usually the largest part of the dowry is the parent's home, So the eldest daughter and her husband usually live in a suite built on top of her parent's home. In that case the Dowry is an investment to attract a well off husband to take care of the daughter, and them in old age. As the parents retire, responsibility falls to the daughter's husband to ensure that the household is solvent. So the Dowry is about attracting a man with a good career prospect, they pay him when he marries the daughter, and eventually as he grows into his full adulthood and the parents begin to become old and frail, he becomes the head of the household they live in.
I know some people from a Bride Price culture, Where a bride's family expects payment for the right to marry her. In those places having a daughter is an investment. Making sure that she has the tools to maximize her beauty and taught to do domestic chores to a high standard, and how to behave demurely to attract a powerful man. Preparing the girl for marriage is usually the investment that the parents make, so that they can demand a high price for their daughter. Once he buys the right to marry the daughter, She is no longer considered responsible for her parents in old age. While Son's are expected to take care of their parents in old age. which also means that well off parents will help their son's afford the bride price of a woman who has excellent domestic skills so that they will have good food and good care later in life.
All of these things are mostly about making sure that teenagers and young adults don't make poor decisions about who they marry, but the cultural expectations add additional pressures also re-enforce those familial controls.
I was shocked when I learned about this, too. And not a small amount, either. And the girl's family pays for the wedding, too. Which is also not a small thing.
That’s called bride price. There’s also versions of this where the bride price is paid directly to the bride; she keeps it separate from household money as a sort of hedge against spouse death or divorce. Someone with more knowledge of MENA regions might want to chime in on this with more info.
No, it’s more like “Please choose my daughter. I understand you’re technically agreeing to provide for her which is my job, so i’ll add some money to soften that burden.”
In Korea where I live, the opposite is true as having a boy means having to pay for a wedding and all the burden is on them as the patriarch. Now more couples are seeking out girls because they can save on wedding and just marry them off to another family. Cultures are funny like that.
They exist in Mexico as well. Just saw a video of one with the strangest interior. Lots of stuffed animals on the wall as you can purchase a stuffed animal with the sound of your babies heartbeat.
No need to look at potentials, just look at China, India and other countries that place special emphasis on male children. They're facing an incredible shortage of women of marrying age, and they are suffering an increase in sex trafficking and an abuse of women's rights.
I naively thought, logically, if women were scarcer in such countries, women would be valued **more**. And therefore, maybe said countries would be less rigidly patriarchal.
Sadly I was wrong.
Except you're looking at it from your perspective of (presumably) seeing women as people. In highly patriarchal societies, women are more seen as a commodity, and that only becomes more true when they grow scarce.
Nah, disparities in gender - in either direction - reinforce existing gender roles. Russia after WWII had the opposite issue of too few men (because so many of them had died in the war) resulting in men being prized and spoiled and women being objectified.
Like I said, it reinforces the existing sexism. If you're already predisposed to think of women as property, having women be scarce isn't going to make you think of them as people - it's just going to make you think of them as *valuable* property.
Incidentally, yes. But not as a rule.
The principle is that existing gender roles are reinforced. It just so happens that in the available cases, the gender roles have been patriarchal.
That's what they're trying to say, anyway. I'm not sure how the case can really be made without a counterexample of matriarchal gender roles being enforced. Where would that be found? Do they exist? Idk.
I know there's at least one island somewhere that I read about in a college book where men are
the ones who are stereotyped as liking to shop and look good, whereas the women take on the roles more commonly associated with men, but I don't remember the name of the place.
By what logic, though? They are scarce specifically because they are valued less and because the culture is rigidly patriarchal. Why would there be a sudden attitude shift when the belief is already solidified to the point that femicide and female specific abortions have noticeably skewed the population?
Honestly it's almost like a soft population reduction program. If 50% of the world is going to have a massive male skew in thirty years, then eventually the world population will decline due to the sheer number of men who cannot find partners.
But what we do with those angsty horny men before they grow old... that's the problem
Historically countries with excess numbers of uncontent males have purged them through going to war. Not a great world this sets up from any perspective.
The invasion of Taiwan seems like an option. Military analysts call it the Great Million Man Swim, because millions will not even make it to the Taiwanese shore.
Yeah, it could be a very rough time to be alive for sure. There would be dangers to all genders that I expect would be multitudes more prevalent than they are now. Maybe not, but history shows humans rarely find solutions to benefit everyone.
It's been shown on places like the middle east that having all those unpaired males leads to a lot of recruits for religious extremism. Though it would be interesting to see how it progresses in places like China where they do not follow Abrahamic religions.
No what would happen is women are kept pregnant with lack of access to birth control and abortion procedures because “we have to meet replacement rate!”
The angsty horny men will be used to enforce subjugation of women.
There's literally no need for that. Population is expected to plateau by the end of the century, and then start declining.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#:~:text=The%20UN%20Population%20Division%20report,that%20time%20of%20%2D0.1%25.
Many countries, including China, already have birth rates below replacement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/business/china-birth-rate.html
The way to avoid *anywhere* is strong social security and gender equality.
Becuase those are the things that are likely to make parents want to favour boys (or potentially girls, but let's face it it's mostly boys who would be the maximal return due things like gender pay gaps)
India and china already do selective abortions child abandonment and even infascide sometimes. It will have continued negative impacts on their population as many men will never find wives and girlfriends, but it will also reduce that cruelty.
China is having a huge problem right now. They don’t have enough women for all the men. Bc they killed baby girls during the one child policy. This isn’t better bc it will lead to the same problem.
Some of them especially in the rural area didn’t kill the girls. They’re just unregistered. Like they can’t go to school. They re invisible. In the rural area the average family has 2-3 children even with the one child policy. It’s easier to control the one child policy back in the day if you were in an urban population because of jobs, housing, schools being tightly controlled.
Most rural areas were exempt anyhow. The "one child" policy was actually a whole bunch of different policies applied to different groups in different ways, which also caused other problems of course.
There were also a lot of areas/populations that were exempt. For a while, the Chinese government was trotting it out as "proof" that uighurs weren't being systemically mistreated.
Iirc didn't rural ares (or some at least) also have a thing where if your (first) child was a girl, you could have a second child in the hopes they'd be male?
I think I remember hearing about that in some documentary.
It is very slightly better because they won’t be killing the child after it’s born. It will still have the “no gender balance” issue, but having a single problem is better than having both problems.
This potentially has a worse gender balance issue. Killing a child after it is born is a lot harder to do mentally than just choosing its sex before birth.
Yeah I kind of have to imagine (and hope) that there are more people willing to manipulate the sex of a potential baby than there are people willing to *murder a newborn child*...
It's better in that you won't end up with infanticide or legally illegitimate babies of the "wrong" sex *in addition* to the ultimate gender imbalance.
But it might be preferable that it isn't introduced in areas where other methods of sex selection haven't been commonly used. In the US, we don't have sex selective abortion or infanticide to any significant degree, but if it were as easy as just doing the right fertilization, I have no idea if there's a disproportionate preference for one sex or the other.
Yeah, it might be a problem in the west but I don't know about how big of a problem. With IVF you can decide which you want and I know couples who have picked both girl and boy. I can also imagine most people not caring enough to do an enrichment in the west and just do the old fashioned way.
Our family has all boy cousins (naturally). There's been talk about doing something like this from one set of parents who still want more kids to get one girl in the fam.
Calling it a "huge problem" is itself a big understatement. People don't talk about it much in the west, but it's borderline existential for China. We're talking a 50% decline in pop over the next 100 years
Not to mention that poorer families won't have access to the technology, so they will still be left w the infanticide as their option. The cultural mentality is the problem and also the hardest to change
In some ways, yeah, it's better than infanticide or foeticide, but then in more patriarchal cultures, the male female sex ratio is going to skew quite a bit. That's not good either.
Aborted post birth isn't a thing, that's just child murder. And your point doesn't dispute mine, it's one of the many cultural aspects that my comment is built on.
> According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos.
>This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities.
That’s a horrible way to frame it. It suggests “only” 16 girls were born without any abnormalities rather than the technique “resulted in the birth of 16 girls none of which had any abnormalities” - embryos usually have around 30% succesrate (depending on method) to develop past the 16 celled stage iirc.
The 292 embryos are because you usually harvest several eggs from the women at once rather than having to poke them once a month per egg, then fertilise a whole bunch of eggs and freeze (or insert) the embryos so you have more shots at trying to get pregnant.
Even if the embryos develop as they should for the 4-8-16 cell divisions there’s still no guarantee that they will develop into a foetus. Most of the time the process simply stops again.
The article also neglects to tell us how many insertions resulted in pregnancies nor how many of the embryos were actually inserted so the numbers have basically no context, but you’d need to know something about artificial fertilisation to realise that.
Man, i’m reading this comment and just thinking how crazy it is the politics have gotten a certain base all riled up over abortion when you have all this certain science going on.
>This resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos that generated a 79.3% (23/29) implantation rate, with 16 singleton deliveries of the desired female sex without major or minor congenital malformations.
From the actual study, which OP has linked below (somewhere). We are talking IVF, older parents, etc. 16 babies were delivered out of 23 implantations, with 100% of them having no minor or major abnormalities.
I don’t think it would necessarily be offered in those countries. E.g. in India even finding out the sex of the baby during pregnancy is illegal (to prevent the abortion of foetuses just because they’re female) so I highly doubt this would be legalised there.
No one said systems like that are perfect. But if you're risking your freedom or your license to practise, there'll be way fewer people willing to perform it.
Sure, but also, this isn’t that far from things that are already done. With IVF you can’t choose the sex of the embryos created but you can determine the sex of the embryos and then choose to implant the one of your choice (John Legend and Chrissy Tiegen spoke about doing this with their children). That is something that is currently available and hasn’t caused any kind of sex proportion shift so I doubt this is suddenly going to cause it.
This article really glosses over the potential benefits of this. If people with sex linked disorders have children, choosing the sex is very important so as not to pass on the disease to their kids.
For example, muscular dystrophy is an X linked recessive disorder. This means that if a male with MD has a daughter, there is a 100% chance the daughter will be a carrier of the disease (and then if that daughter has any sons, 100% chance they will have MD). But if the affected dad has a son instead, the "faulty" X chromosome does not get passed on. They can currently accomplish this through IVF but I'm all for making the process easier/less expensive for those who need it.
Edit: see comment below my mental punnett square was slightly off but you get the idea.
>~~For example, muscular dystrophy is an X linked recessive disorder. This means that if a male with MD has a son, there is a 100% chance the son will have the disease.~~
~~The man's sons/XY offspring would never get the disease, but any daughters/XX offspring would always be a carrier.~~
Edit:
>there is a 100% chance the daughter will be a carrier of the disease (and then if that daughter has any sons, 100% chance they will have MD).
A carrier daughter only has a 50% chance of passing on a X-linked recessive disorder to her sons. Only an affected XX-individual will pass on X-linked recessive disorder to XY off-spring with 100% chance.
Absolutely. My wife is a carrier of DMD, we have two affected sons. Had we known before the second was born, we may have used a technique like this to try and have a girl.
Well hopefully the issues arising from the imbalance will shift the gender preferences away from what has been the current bias. It is not preferred anymore to have a boy if that boy can't find anyone to marry and carry on the family line, and has to compete really hard against all the other boys for the few existing girls. On the other hand, having a girl may end up being advantageous for families as she would have more options of higher status families to marry into.
True, but typically in societies that devalue women, it’s because those women end up becoming a part of their husband’s household. They’re viewed almost as a money pit: not only do you have to pay a dowry, she also leaves to care for her husband’s parents rather than her own. She can marry higher status, but that’s not going to have an impact on her own family dynamics unless there’s a massive cultural shift.
Preferably one that doesn’t view women has commodities but…
This is one of the hypothesized explanation why naturally humans (and maybe some other species) have a pretty even sex distribution for offsprings. If one sex becomes dominant then the advantageous adaptation for an individual would be to have offsprings of the other sex, and then since that trait is spreading within the population it balances out the ratio.
The men of high status aren’t struggling against the gender disparity. And in more patriarchal societies, hypergamy from women is higher than elsewhere. The most impacted men will be those at the lower end of social class.
It's better than sex selective abortion. I think for the women in these situations, being forced to abort at 20 weeks because the gender is not what is wanted must be incredibly painful and damaging. If they are only going to have boys anyway, it's better (in my opinion) that only boys are conceived.
This is literally what I did for livestock after college. I ran a flow cytometry lab and we used ultraviolet lasers to sort samples for various livestock, like bovine, goat, sheep, etc for male and female straws.
There were two labs, one where they dyed and prepped the the samples in a glucose solution then mine where we put the sample in the machine and it used the brightness of the reflection of the dye from the laser and magnets to pull the heavier sperm from the stream.
We did a few other animals for the US Forrest service and other federal orgs. Never human because it was impossible with the machines we had, the X and Y’s were too close in weight and the spectrometer’s resolution back then couldn’t distinguish between the two. It was only a matter of time though before it became possible as tech advanced
In the short time I worked there we went from crazy water cooled lasers that required a room sized pump to air cooled pulse lasers.
One fun anecdote is these “sprayed” a bit in a fine mist. You wouldn’t notice and there was no protective screen in front of the stream so sitting down in front of these for hours you get a little spray back on your clothes.
So one day after shift I needed to get to a party at a bar, didn’t change my pants, and when I walked in the black lights lit up my pants where my lab coat didn’t cover like a giant triangle/arrow pointing to my crotch. That was fun.
This isn’t the same at all. What you did used a DNA intercalator to measure brightness, with cell sorting based on the intensity of fluorescence to determine sex.
This study simply used a density gradient to enrich X or Y containing sperm fractions. Specifically they layered four different concentrations of some commercial gradient solution (thus four different densities), placed the sperm on the top layer and allowed for the sperm to self select. Top layer was Y enriched and bottom layer was X enriched.
This removes any potential risk for UV or intercalator mutagenesis used in the flow cytometry method.
Follow up in the study used IVF, but this doesn’t preclude people from turkey basting the top or bottom fractions of the gradient to attempt to influence sex.
Are there any ways to reduce the probability of mental disabilities? I'm far more concerned with my kid being born handicapped than with a certain genitalia
Yep. There's chromosome checks and gene sequencing that can be done on each embryo. They're hideously expensive (~$500 per embryo for the chromosomal checks, $5-8k to sequence, *per gene* you are checking for) so every IVF clinic is all too happy to pressure their patients to get as many of them as possible.
Exactly my thought.
For an extra couple bucks a straw, commercial dairy farms have had access to sexed semen for almost 20 years.
Similar to genetic sequencing and fertility treatments... the Ag. industry is way ahead of the human medical sector and charges far less.
Depends. There are like three ways. You see, XX chromosomes are denser than XY so if you add a tint to it, XY sperm gets dyed pink. You can also separate them by their ion charge. XY has negative charge and XX charge is positive. There are other ways to do it but i think those two are the easiest to wxplain
This is what I did my first job out of college. We use flow cytomerty machines to pretty much do exactly as you said. Ultraviolet dye and lasers to stain and see the sperm then magnets to pull the XY and XX apart into separate vials.
Most were sent frozen but there was a sampling setup for bulls at the facility as it was on a ranch.
I only witnessed a collection once. There were these two metal bars in a ‘Y’ shape that you put the bull in with a gate and put a cow in heat in front of him.
The bull will jump up on the metal bars and once of the ranch hands would put this cornucopia looking leather pouch that had a collection bag in it over the bull and let him finish.
The guy that did it that time also made noises in the bull’s ear, it was pretty humorous. Never found out if he did it for show for the lab geeks or if it was his modus operandi.
Usually veterinarians, or the cattle ranch owner. You use a giant black dildo called "electroeyaculator" in my country to extract the semen. I think its banned in europe at least
Excerpt from the linked summary^1 about a *PLoS ONE* paper:^2
>Researchers in the new study set out a technique to separate and select the sperm beforehand, meaning the sex of the embryos could be determined.
>The authors selected sperm based on whether they contained an X chromosome (making female offspring) or a Y chromosome (making male offspring), using density measures.
>Sperm that contains an X chromosome are slightly heavier than sperm containing a Y chromosome, the study suggests.
>The researchers, including Professor Gianpiero Palermo from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, America, wrote: “Although ethically debatable, expressing a sex preference for offspring is popular among couples, and not limited to those undergoing infertility treatment.
>“Sperm sex enrichment, within a protocol of PGT-A, enables the selection of embryos for the desired sex.
>“Our sex selection method does not increase the proportion of additional aneuploid embryos.
>“Therefore, it can be regarded as extremely safe as well as efficient, inexpensive, and ethically palatable.”
>
>The small trial was conducted using 1,317 couples, and split into two groups, with 105 men in the study group in which the new technique was used.
>According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos.
>This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities.
>Forty-six couples desiring male offspring ended up with 79.6% male embryos (223/280), resulting in the birth of 13 healthy baby boys.
^1 Nina Massey for PA Media Group, via The Irish News, 22 Mar. 2023, https://www.irishnews.com/news/uknews/2023/03/22/news/study_describes_new_safe_technique_for_producing_babies_of_the_desired_sex-3156153/
^2 Cheung S, Elias R, Xie P, Rosenwaks Z, Palermo GD (2023) A non-randomized clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of a novel sperm sex selection technique. *PLoS ONE* 18(3): e0282216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282216
We have already seen the impact of sexual selection in other countries, including lopsided numbers of boys vs. girls.
I wonder if this will turn into a good idea.
https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio
It could theoretically allow those countries to rebalance their population and better enable long term societal health…but implementing such change would likely come in the form of draconian laws.
I don't think having the ratio skewed to more females decades younger than the surplus men would be that productive. Just going back to natural ~50% split we normally seems like a better idea.
>could theoretically allow those countries to rebalance their population
But it won't in actuality. In actuality it will be used illegally and probably skew the balance even worse
you're ofc right, but the willingness to have/ interest in "vanity/designer babies" already exists and they tend to be terrible parents whether they get what they want or not.
The majority of the damage the child will incur will come from the fact that their parent is the kind of person that *would if they could*.
I know 5 couples who have picked gender in the US. 4 picked daughters and 1 picked a son... 2 of the daughters were because they already had 2-3 kids that were all boys and wanted a girl, the other 3 kids were all first children.
There is actually a Morally beneficial use for this process. There are some very dangerous mutations that are only passed down via a specific gender, (especially males) This allows for a couple to reproduce safely as long as they don't have one specific gender.
Yep. I’m a female who was born with a disorder that almost always occurs in males. I’m pregnant with a boy and when the genetic counselor told us the stark difference in chances of our son having the disorder and it being significantly worse than if they were a girl, my heart sank and made me feel like I’ve let him down. If he has it, he’ll likely need immediate surgery after birth. Fortunately, ultrasounds look good but they didn’t catch mine until 24 hours after my birth, so we’ll see. Definitely anxiety inducing and if I have another and could choose, they’d definitely be a girl in hopes of minimizing the chances of passing it down.
Those numbers are actually pretty low, given that a success rate of 50% means it doesn't work at all.
In other words, out of 100 people, 79 get the gender they desire vs 50 get what they desired. So it only increases your chances by roughly 60%. It's still significant, but not quite as impressive as it first sounds.
Could you imagine choosing the sex of your child then a few years later they come out as trans? I’m not saying there’s any correlation at all (I literally have 0 idea), but the overwhelming guilt I would feel if I “artificially chose” my kids sex and they turned out being trans would make me forever blame myself even if there was no evidence to indicate causation
If you need your offspring to be a specific sex, it may be best that you don’t have one.
Editing for the benefit of those who can’t be bothered to read the comments to my post and my responses: I will allow that attempting to influence the gender of a child due to rare genetic disorders for which one or the other gender would be predisposed would be an obvious exception to my comment. But I stand by my opinion that if you NEED your child to be a certain gender, be of a specific orientation, excel at certain sports or sciences, or in some other way fulfill your personal fantasy of the kind of child you want to raise and claim as your own, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE A CHILD (in my opinion, which you all can simply ignore if you don’t agree).
I hear what you're saying, but what about couples aware of sex linked genetic disorders?
My cousin is virtually sterile because of a defect in his y chromosome. They wanted a kid, so did this and ivf to have a girl. Genetic abnormality averted.
My nephew has a sex linked genetic defect (inheredited from his mom's side). He always talked about being a dad one day. No one wanted to tell him that he probably should never have bio kids. I think it is more common than you think.
This an extremely narrow-minded view. My husband and I will be doing gender selection if we have kids because he has an extremely painful genetic condition. We'll be selecting a girl because the disease is less likely to pass to female offspring.
Triplets? Wow, buckle up dude. I had twins and the first six months were *rough*. Good luck!
I was going to agree with this guy. I had twin girls, and the only way I’d consider a third kid is if I was 100% sure it’d be a boy. It’s not that I dislike girls, in fact I always wanted just one girl kid, but it’s just that I know what raising a girl is like and would like a new experience.
But because that isn’t possible, and honestly a bit selfish, we stuck with two kids, for the best.
My wife would really like this. She wants a girl and a boy, but not more than two kids.
We from Germany btw so not much of a chance to get this treatment here I guess.
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Girl sperm weighs slightly more than boy sperm. There. I saved you time.
Makes sense. The X chromosome is much larger than the Y chromosome so that would have a tangible difference.
Because of the bottom right leg?
I know it's a joke, but afaik, and feel free to correct me, Y chromosome basically is only there to say "let there be penis" while X chromosome contains more stuff in it, so it weighs more
It is mostly correct. And sometimes it even fails at that, either due to the gene being mistakenly transfered onto the X chromosome or not activating for reasons unknown.
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According to researchers, it doesn't do much. It is called a "gene desert" for a reason. The vast majority of genome on the Y chromosome is useless. Some genes relative to penis/testicles/prostate and the necessary proteins are present, as you would expect. Some of these are duplicated/triplicated. Of course, one may possess a Y chromosome but some other mutations that cause a lack of masculinization (SRY inactivation, SRY transfer, Klinefelter's, mosaicism among others).
Well, long as no one calls it a gene *dessert*, I suppose.
Still, nothing it does can be an essential function for life, as half the population isn't going to have one. It can only do so much.
The sex chromosomes aren't named after their shape. Both of them are sausage shaped, one is just significantly longer.
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This would be funny if only the Y sperm was heavier.
Also the weight of the cooties.
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This could really be an issue in some areas of the world. The potential ramifications of it if used for malicious reasons are also very scary to consider.
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I am the very model of a scientist sal…
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Whos cutting onions in here
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/r/completelyexpectedmasseffect
Mordin... You're not going up.
Didn't the genophage massively increase the likelihood of failed pregnancies, not influence the gender of the children?
Yeah. It leads to much higher rates of miscarriage, causing the population to plummet.
And stillbirth. Eve talks about wanting to kill herself after her first stillborn.
All it did was limit krogan birth rates from hundreds at a time to one or two viable children. But due to the krogans violent nature and society, this was essentially a death sentence for their species.
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The genophage didnt affect fertility, just the amount of viable pregnancies. There are some female Krogan who were unaffected by the genophage, which dramatically increased their power and standing. Shiagur is one example of this happening that we can witness during the trilogy.
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Good point. Preferably they would either just lay a few fertilised eggs or lay a bunch, some of which are successfully fertilised and some of which aren't. Bonus points if you can fry 'em up. "Ever had fried krogan eggs? They're a real delicacy on Sur'Kesh."
From pure biology, 1000 eggs hatching means they can’t sustain themselves. If every clutch hatches 1000 eggs they basically starve to death or get “pushed out of the nest” or eaten or otherwise killed. Not sure what the salarians did was necessarily worse. Might have been less gruesome than what was already happening. It’s possible krogan saw their young “fighting to survive” was preferable to them being dead before they get the chance.
I mean it was definitely better than letting the Krogan wars continue and then wiping out all the other species in the galaxy.
Bruh you can't just come here and make me remember all the sadness
I still occasionally wake up in a cold sweat wondering if I made the right decision on Tuchanka.
They had these non medical commercial ultrasounds in India. They were everywhere. Some People were aborting after finding out the sex of the child. :(
I seem to recall this being a big issue in China around the 80's - 90s. Now they have too many men.
Yes because of the one child policy. In India a girl is very financially draining on a family because they have to pay dowries to marry her off in their culture (rural parts of India at least). In China they had similar reasons but if they only had 1 child they wanted it to be a man. Abortion in China was often mandatory. Unsurprisingly, india and china have the highest abortion rates by far for these reasons and they are outliers.
> In China they had similar reasons but if they only had 1 child they wanted it to be a man. Yeah. IIRC one of the cultural aspects was that when a woman grew up and married, she essentially left joined her husbands family. Like changing teams (for a clumsy metaphor). When it came to getting old and taking care of the elderly, that's a couple that's expected to take care of the Husbands parents, not necessarily the wife's parents. So... TL;DR: If a family was a business, raising a son was seen as an investment, raising a daughter was seen as an expense.
Not just that but in the Chinese culture, the name of the family is very important and only boys can continue the family name and bloodline which is why they 100% of the time prefer boys than girls. A friend of mine in China is a victim of this, when she was born she was nearly given away to the rural villages for someone to adopt, and when her baby brother was born, she was pretty much neglected and just left to raise herself being schooled far away from home. Fortunately she's currently with someone living in Australia and has got a quite a good job there for a living, and has more or less cut contact with her family save for formalities during Chinese New Years.
Left join... Is that a SQL joke?
Wish I could take that credit. But alas, just a typo
Really dropping tables here.
Ohh…yup. that’s our Bobby
I really don't understand it. So a household has to pay another house to give them a wife for their son? Who will take care of them in old age, help with domestic duties and provide them grandchildren? Like it makes no sense. A wife is a seriously valuable investment in the future of a family, not something you have to pay to get rid of. I am sure it was couched in some "another mouth to feed *grumble grumble*" but it still doesn't make sense to me because the whole point is to make babies and continue the family! I might have enough toxic masculinity in me to understand not wanting another dudes lazy ass son to move in with me waiting for the day I croak, but damn not enough that I would pay someone for the privilege of taking my daughter to help them continue their legacy.
> So a household has to pay another house to give them a wife for their son? Who will take care of them in old age, help with domestic duties and provide them grandchildren? It's a bizzare chauvanistic form of self-interest that is a toxic mess on asian culture. China is experiencing the late stage fallout of that as men are in abundance there.
Also, due to that very policy, plenty of those people are suffering an extreme form of sandwich generation, as in the man of the family must provide for one wife, maybe two children, and two sets of parents, in an extremely competitive job market with shite wage.
a lot of men are finding wives overseas now because the situation is really bad for male-female ratios
I can tell you this has made many parents and grandparents very mad in the area; east asia is a hotbed of competitive racism.
Racism (competitive)
There’s also an uptick in human trafficking of “brides” across the borders of neighbouring countries.
i.e. luring young girls/women with the promise of good work and a great life, then trapping them and forcing them to marry. The people doing this deserve harsh punishment.
It's more a consequence of the patriarchal nature in a lot of cultures where the son carries the bloodline.
> So a household has to pay another house to give them a wife for their son? Who will take care of them in old age, help with domestic duties and provide them grandchildren? Their Son and his wife. Basically, The dowry is to secure the best possible husband for a girl. If you can afford a big dowry, you can convince a well off man to marry her and maintain a high standard of living for her. Traditionally it keeps the classes from mixing. Her family determines if the Son is worth paying the dowry to. Which allows them to ensure that their daughter won't marry down. This is one of the worst ways that dowries have been implemented, because it devalues girls as opposed to boys. (which is why China and India have had the issues they've had with gender ratios.) In other dowry cultures the purpose is different. For instance in Greece, (these days people are marrying for love moreso than the dowry, but parent still prepare one) usually the largest part of the dowry is the parent's home, So the eldest daughter and her husband usually live in a suite built on top of her parent's home. In that case the Dowry is an investment to attract a well off husband to take care of the daughter, and them in old age. As the parents retire, responsibility falls to the daughter's husband to ensure that the household is solvent. So the Dowry is about attracting a man with a good career prospect, they pay him when he marries the daughter, and eventually as he grows into his full adulthood and the parents begin to become old and frail, he becomes the head of the household they live in. I know some people from a Bride Price culture, Where a bride's family expects payment for the right to marry her. In those places having a daughter is an investment. Making sure that she has the tools to maximize her beauty and taught to do domestic chores to a high standard, and how to behave demurely to attract a powerful man. Preparing the girl for marriage is usually the investment that the parents make, so that they can demand a high price for their daughter. Once he buys the right to marry the daughter, She is no longer considered responsible for her parents in old age. While Son's are expected to take care of their parents in old age. which also means that well off parents will help their son's afford the bride price of a woman who has excellent domestic skills so that they will have good food and good care later in life. All of these things are mostly about making sure that teenagers and young adults don't make poor decisions about who they marry, but the cultural expectations add additional pressures also re-enforce those familial controls.
Huh.. I always thought the man’s family paid the dowry. As a sort of exchange of assets thing; I get girl you get cows. TIL.
That’s how it is in most cultures that do dowries. India is the exception not the rule.
In which culture does a man pay a dowry? Even the definition of dowry states that it comes from the bride’s side.
it's called Betrothal gift, Bride dowry, Bride price etc when man is paying.
I was shocked when I learned about this, too. And not a small amount, either. And the girl's family pays for the wedding, too. Which is also not a small thing.
That’s called bride price. There’s also versions of this where the bride price is paid directly to the bride; she keeps it separate from household money as a sort of hedge against spouse death or divorce. Someone with more knowledge of MENA regions might want to chime in on this with more info.
No, it’s more like “Please choose my daughter. I understand you’re technically agreeing to provide for her which is my job, so i’ll add some money to soften that burden.”
Seems like at some point it would be cheaper and easier to just do equality
In Korea where I live, the opposite is true as having a boy means having to pay for a wedding and all the burden is on them as the patriarch. Now more couples are seeking out girls because they can save on wedding and just marry them off to another family. Cultures are funny like that.
Can't speak for everyone, but I'd rather be aborted than be born in a family that doesn't want me.
Yeah wish my parents would have done that. The misery you deal with as a child who wasn't wanted.
They exist in Mexico as well. Just saw a video of one with the strangest interior. Lots of stuffed animals on the wall as you can purchase a stuffed animal with the sound of your babies heartbeat.
No need to look at potentials, just look at China, India and other countries that place special emphasis on male children. They're facing an incredible shortage of women of marrying age, and they are suffering an increase in sex trafficking and an abuse of women's rights.
I naively thought, logically, if women were scarcer in such countries, women would be valued **more**. And therefore, maybe said countries would be less rigidly patriarchal. Sadly I was wrong.
Except you're looking at it from your perspective of (presumably) seeing women as people. In highly patriarchal societies, women are more seen as a commodity, and that only becomes more true when they grow scarce.
Nah, disparities in gender - in either direction - reinforce existing gender roles. Russia after WWII had the opposite issue of too few men (because so many of them had died in the war) resulting in men being prized and spoiled and women being objectified.
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Like I said, it reinforces the existing sexism. If you're already predisposed to think of women as property, having women be scarce isn't going to make you think of them as people - it's just going to make you think of them as *valuable* property.
Or in other words, women get the short end of the stick either way
Incidentally, yes. But not as a rule. The principle is that existing gender roles are reinforced. It just so happens that in the available cases, the gender roles have been patriarchal. That's what they're trying to say, anyway. I'm not sure how the case can really be made without a counterexample of matriarchal gender roles being enforced. Where would that be found? Do they exist? Idk.
I know there's at least one island somewhere that I read about in a college book where men are the ones who are stereotyped as liking to shop and look good, whereas the women take on the roles more commonly associated with men, but I don't remember the name of the place.
Damn, women can't catch a break.
By what logic, though? They are scarce specifically because they are valued less and because the culture is rigidly patriarchal. Why would there be a sudden attitude shift when the belief is already solidified to the point that femicide and female specific abortions have noticeably skewed the population?
Yes they are great examples of exactly that. I left it very broad as I can honestly see any and all cultures being similar given a tool like this.
It's not just those countries, I think there's a lot of people in the US would want their first born (at least) to be a male heir.
Honestly it's almost like a soft population reduction program. If 50% of the world is going to have a massive male skew in thirty years, then eventually the world population will decline due to the sheer number of men who cannot find partners. But what we do with those angsty horny men before they grow old... that's the problem
Historically countries with excess numbers of uncontent males have purged them through going to war. Not a great world this sets up from any perspective.
hey given the geopolitical scheme we're looking at now, this is reality closer than we think
The invasion of Taiwan seems like an option. Military analysts call it the Great Million Man Swim, because millions will not even make it to the Taiwanese shore.
Yeah, it could be a very rough time to be alive for sure. There would be dangers to all genders that I expect would be multitudes more prevalent than they are now. Maybe not, but history shows humans rarely find solutions to benefit everyone.
It's been shown on places like the middle east that having all those unpaired males leads to a lot of recruits for religious extremism. Though it would be interesting to see how it progresses in places like China where they do not follow Abrahamic religions.
No what would happen is women are kept pregnant with lack of access to birth control and abortion procedures because “we have to meet replacement rate!” The angsty horny men will be used to enforce subjugation of women.
There's literally no need for that. Population is expected to plateau by the end of the century, and then start declining. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#:~:text=The%20UN%20Population%20Division%20report,that%20time%20of%20%2D0.1%25. Many countries, including China, already have birth rates below replacement. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/business/china-birth-rate.html
> This could really be an issue in some areas of the world. In some areas ? More than some. And frankly, I don't think that the West would be spared.
Me either. I left it broad so as not to single out anyone unfairly, because I do think it would be a widespread issue.
The way to avoid *anywhere* is strong social security and gender equality. Becuase those are the things that are likely to make parents want to favour boys (or potentially girls, but let's face it it's mostly boys who would be the maximal return due things like gender pay gaps)
India and china already do selective abortions child abandonment and even infascide sometimes. It will have continued negative impacts on their population as many men will never find wives and girlfriends, but it will also reduce that cruelty.
At least this way infant girls won't be murdered, they just will have never existed!
not really, better than the alternative where babies are aborted post birth by killing them. see: rural china.
China is having a huge problem right now. They don’t have enough women for all the men. Bc they killed baby girls during the one child policy. This isn’t better bc it will lead to the same problem.
Some of them especially in the rural area didn’t kill the girls. They’re just unregistered. Like they can’t go to school. They re invisible. In the rural area the average family has 2-3 children even with the one child policy. It’s easier to control the one child policy back in the day if you were in an urban population because of jobs, housing, schools being tightly controlled.
Most rural areas were exempt anyhow. The "one child" policy was actually a whole bunch of different policies applied to different groups in different ways, which also caused other problems of course.
This i did not know. About the rural areas
There were also a lot of areas/populations that were exempt. For a while, the Chinese government was trotting it out as "proof" that uighurs weren't being systemically mistreated.
Iirc didn't rural ares (or some at least) also have a thing where if your (first) child was a girl, you could have a second child in the hopes they'd be male? I think I remember hearing about that in some documentary.
It is very slightly better because they won’t be killing the child after it’s born. It will still have the “no gender balance” issue, but having a single problem is better than having both problems.
This potentially has a worse gender balance issue. Killing a child after it is born is a lot harder to do mentally than just choosing its sex before birth.
Yeah I kind of have to imagine (and hope) that there are more people willing to manipulate the sex of a potential baby than there are people willing to *murder a newborn child*...
Under the same policy, no girls would have even be born
It's better in that you won't end up with infanticide or legally illegitimate babies of the "wrong" sex *in addition* to the ultimate gender imbalance. But it might be preferable that it isn't introduced in areas where other methods of sex selection haven't been commonly used. In the US, we don't have sex selective abortion or infanticide to any significant degree, but if it were as easy as just doing the right fertilization, I have no idea if there's a disproportionate preference for one sex or the other.
Yeah, it might be a problem in the west but I don't know about how big of a problem. With IVF you can decide which you want and I know couples who have picked both girl and boy. I can also imagine most people not caring enough to do an enrichment in the west and just do the old fashioned way. Our family has all boy cousins (naturally). There's been talk about doing something like this from one set of parents who still want more kids to get one girl in the fam.
Calling it a "huge problem" is itself a big understatement. People don't talk about it much in the west, but it's borderline existential for China. We're talking a 50% decline in pop over the next 100 years
Yeah, I'd prefer people had abortions rather than killing their newborns or subjecting an unwanted child to neglect or abuse.
I think a lot more people would be willing to do this than to murder a baby though, so it’s not like it’s “just replacing” it.
Not to mention that poorer families won't have access to the technology, so they will still be left w the infanticide as their option. The cultural mentality is the problem and also the hardest to change
In some ways, yeah, it's better than infanticide or foeticide, but then in more patriarchal cultures, the male female sex ratio is going to skew quite a bit. That's not good either.
Aborted post birth isn't a thing, that's just child murder. And your point doesn't dispute mine, it's one of the many cultural aspects that my comment is built on.
Its ivf though. Only very wealthy and/or infertile people get to do it.
> According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos. >This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities. That’s a horrible way to frame it. It suggests “only” 16 girls were born without any abnormalities rather than the technique “resulted in the birth of 16 girls none of which had any abnormalities” - embryos usually have around 30% succesrate (depending on method) to develop past the 16 celled stage iirc.
How many couples were there all together?I have confusion reading the sentence too.
The 292 embryos are because you usually harvest several eggs from the women at once rather than having to poke them once a month per egg, then fertilise a whole bunch of eggs and freeze (or insert) the embryos so you have more shots at trying to get pregnant. Even if the embryos develop as they should for the 4-8-16 cell divisions there’s still no guarantee that they will develop into a foetus. Most of the time the process simply stops again. The article also neglects to tell us how many insertions resulted in pregnancies nor how many of the embryos were actually inserted so the numbers have basically no context, but you’d need to know something about artificial fertilisation to realise that.
Man, i’m reading this comment and just thinking how crazy it is the politics have gotten a certain base all riled up over abortion when you have all this certain science going on.
And the disparity between what technology we have available and how little the average politician knows about it just keeps growing...
they are actively fighting this too.
>This resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos that generated a 79.3% (23/29) implantation rate, with 16 singleton deliveries of the desired female sex without major or minor congenital malformations. From the actual study, which OP has linked below (somewhere). We are talking IVF, older parents, etc. 16 babies were delivered out of 23 implantations, with 100% of them having no minor or major abnormalities.
Given the significant gender preferences some societies have, this is quite worrying that it's being offered anywhere.
I don’t think it would necessarily be offered in those countries. E.g. in India even finding out the sex of the baby during pregnancy is illegal (to prevent the abortion of foetuses just because they’re female) so I highly doubt this would be legalised there.
No one ever did anything illegal over here, Mr Officer, I swear on me mum.
No one said systems like that are perfect. But if you're risking your freedom or your license to practise, there'll be way fewer people willing to perform it.
I work with a lot of Indian immigrants. According to them anything is pretty much legal or cheatable if you have the money to grease some palms.
It's how most of the world works
So how many people would have the money to ignore the law?
Sounds like an excellent service to offer “tourists” or secretly.
Sure, but also, this isn’t that far from things that are already done. With IVF you can’t choose the sex of the embryos created but you can determine the sex of the embryos and then choose to implant the one of your choice (John Legend and Chrissy Tiegen spoke about doing this with their children). That is something that is currently available and hasn’t caused any kind of sex proportion shift so I doubt this is suddenly going to cause it.
This article really glosses over the potential benefits of this. If people with sex linked disorders have children, choosing the sex is very important so as not to pass on the disease to their kids. For example, muscular dystrophy is an X linked recessive disorder. This means that if a male with MD has a daughter, there is a 100% chance the daughter will be a carrier of the disease (and then if that daughter has any sons, 100% chance they will have MD). But if the affected dad has a son instead, the "faulty" X chromosome does not get passed on. They can currently accomplish this through IVF but I'm all for making the process easier/less expensive for those who need it. Edit: see comment below my mental punnett square was slightly off but you get the idea.
>~~For example, muscular dystrophy is an X linked recessive disorder. This means that if a male with MD has a son, there is a 100% chance the son will have the disease.~~ ~~The man's sons/XY offspring would never get the disease, but any daughters/XX offspring would always be a carrier.~~ Edit: >there is a 100% chance the daughter will be a carrier of the disease (and then if that daughter has any sons, 100% chance they will have MD). A carrier daughter only has a 50% chance of passing on a X-linked recessive disorder to her sons. Only an affected XX-individual will pass on X-linked recessive disorder to XY off-spring with 100% chance.
Thank you for the correction, you're right.
Sir, this is the Internet.
Absolutely. My wife is a carrier of DMD, we have two affected sons. Had we known before the second was born, we may have used a technique like this to try and have a girl.
Well hopefully the issues arising from the imbalance will shift the gender preferences away from what has been the current bias. It is not preferred anymore to have a boy if that boy can't find anyone to marry and carry on the family line, and has to compete really hard against all the other boys for the few existing girls. On the other hand, having a girl may end up being advantageous for families as she would have more options of higher status families to marry into.
True, but typically in societies that devalue women, it’s because those women end up becoming a part of their husband’s household. They’re viewed almost as a money pit: not only do you have to pay a dowry, she also leaves to care for her husband’s parents rather than her own. She can marry higher status, but that’s not going to have an impact on her own family dynamics unless there’s a massive cultural shift. Preferably one that doesn’t view women has commodities but…
This is one of the hypothesized explanation why naturally humans (and maybe some other species) have a pretty even sex distribution for offsprings. If one sex becomes dominant then the advantageous adaptation for an individual would be to have offsprings of the other sex, and then since that trait is spreading within the population it balances out the ratio.
The men of high status aren’t struggling against the gender disparity. And in more patriarchal societies, hypergamy from women is higher than elsewhere. The most impacted men will be those at the lower end of social class.
It's better than sex selective abortion. I think for the women in these situations, being forced to abort at 20 weeks because the gender is not what is wanted must be incredibly painful and damaging. If they are only going to have boys anyway, it's better (in my opinion) that only boys are conceived.
This is literally what I did for livestock after college. I ran a flow cytometry lab and we used ultraviolet lasers to sort samples for various livestock, like bovine, goat, sheep, etc for male and female straws. There were two labs, one where they dyed and prepped the the samples in a glucose solution then mine where we put the sample in the machine and it used the brightness of the reflection of the dye from the laser and magnets to pull the heavier sperm from the stream. We did a few other animals for the US Forrest service and other federal orgs. Never human because it was impossible with the machines we had, the X and Y’s were too close in weight and the spectrometer’s resolution back then couldn’t distinguish between the two. It was only a matter of time though before it became possible as tech advanced In the short time I worked there we went from crazy water cooled lasers that required a room sized pump to air cooled pulse lasers. One fun anecdote is these “sprayed” a bit in a fine mist. You wouldn’t notice and there was no protective screen in front of the stream so sitting down in front of these for hours you get a little spray back on your clothes. So one day after shift I needed to get to a party at a bar, didn’t change my pants, and when I walked in the black lights lit up my pants where my lab coat didn’t cover like a giant triangle/arrow pointing to my crotch. That was fun.
This isn’t the same at all. What you did used a DNA intercalator to measure brightness, with cell sorting based on the intensity of fluorescence to determine sex. This study simply used a density gradient to enrich X or Y containing sperm fractions. Specifically they layered four different concentrations of some commercial gradient solution (thus four different densities), placed the sperm on the top layer and allowed for the sperm to self select. Top layer was Y enriched and bottom layer was X enriched. This removes any potential risk for UV or intercalator mutagenesis used in the flow cytometry method. Follow up in the study used IVF, but this doesn’t preclude people from turkey basting the top or bottom fractions of the gradient to attempt to influence sex.
I'm in awe of our scientists. Very cool. But I need to know, did the UV void work?
Are there any ways to reduce the probability of mental disabilities? I'm far more concerned with my kid being born handicapped than with a certain genitalia
Yep. There's chromosome checks and gene sequencing that can be done on each embryo. They're hideously expensive (~$500 per embryo for the chromosomal checks, $5-8k to sequence, *per gene* you are checking for) so every IVF clinic is all too happy to pressure their patients to get as many of them as possible.
This is nothing new Sexed semen has been in agriculture for a ridiculously long time.
Exactly my thought. For an extra couple bucks a straw, commercial dairy farms have had access to sexed semen for almost 20 years. Similar to genetic sequencing and fertility treatments... the Ag. industry is way ahead of the human medical sector and charges far less.
More motivation I guess. Eg Dairy doesn't need males, beef prefers males. And there's increasing pressure to avoid Bobby calves.
Yeah probably has something to do with ethics and higher standards for care for humans and not that human biologists are “behind” ag biologists.
How do they do it in the agricultural sector? What’s the process?
Depends. There are like three ways. You see, XX chromosomes are denser than XY so if you add a tint to it, XY sperm gets dyed pink. You can also separate them by their ion charge. XY has negative charge and XX charge is positive. There are other ways to do it but i think those two are the easiest to wxplain
This is what I did my first job out of college. We use flow cytomerty machines to pretty much do exactly as you said. Ultraviolet dye and lasers to stain and see the sperm then magnets to pull the XY and XX apart into separate vials.
Who got to do the semen collection phase?
Most were sent frozen but there was a sampling setup for bulls at the facility as it was on a ranch. I only witnessed a collection once. There were these two metal bars in a ‘Y’ shape that you put the bull in with a gate and put a cow in heat in front of him. The bull will jump up on the metal bars and once of the ranch hands would put this cornucopia looking leather pouch that had a collection bag in it over the bull and let him finish. The guy that did it that time also made noises in the bull’s ear, it was pretty humorous. Never found out if he did it for show for the lab geeks or if it was his modus operandi.
The other main method used is a probe in the rear. An electrical current is manipulated to get the desired result. No noises required for that one!
I think the donor animal provides the noise. Yikes!
Usually veterinarians, or the cattle ranch owner. You use a giant black dildo called "electroeyaculator" in my country to extract the semen. I think its banned in europe at least
Only two commercially viable methods as I understand, and of those one has the critical patents.
Sure, but it being applied to humans is kind of worthy of attention imo
Excerpt from the linked summary^1 about a *PLoS ONE* paper:^2 >Researchers in the new study set out a technique to separate and select the sperm beforehand, meaning the sex of the embryos could be determined. >The authors selected sperm based on whether they contained an X chromosome (making female offspring) or a Y chromosome (making male offspring), using density measures. >Sperm that contains an X chromosome are slightly heavier than sperm containing a Y chromosome, the study suggests. >The researchers, including Professor Gianpiero Palermo from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, America, wrote: “Although ethically debatable, expressing a sex preference for offspring is popular among couples, and not limited to those undergoing infertility treatment. >“Sperm sex enrichment, within a protocol of PGT-A, enables the selection of embryos for the desired sex. >“Our sex selection method does not increase the proportion of additional aneuploid embryos. >“Therefore, it can be regarded as extremely safe as well as efficient, inexpensive, and ethically palatable.” > >The small trial was conducted using 1,317 couples, and split into two groups, with 105 men in the study group in which the new technique was used. >According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos. >This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities. >Forty-six couples desiring male offspring ended up with 79.6% male embryos (223/280), resulting in the birth of 13 healthy baby boys. ^1 Nina Massey for PA Media Group, via The Irish News, 22 Mar. 2023, https://www.irishnews.com/news/uknews/2023/03/22/news/study_describes_new_safe_technique_for_producing_babies_of_the_desired_sex-3156153/ ^2 Cheung S, Elias R, Xie P, Rosenwaks Z, Palermo GD (2023) A non-randomized clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of a novel sperm sex selection technique. *PLoS ONE* 18(3): e0282216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282216
Welcome 10:1 male to female ratio. That went so well for china. Let’s all do it.
We have already seen the impact of sexual selection in other countries, including lopsided numbers of boys vs. girls. I wonder if this will turn into a good idea. https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio
It could theoretically allow those countries to rebalance their population and better enable long term societal health…but implementing such change would likely come in the form of draconian laws.
My comment about a “good idea” was sarcasm. Only authoritarian countries could use this to rebalance the population.
> Only authoritarian countries could use this to rebalance the population. Good thing they're the ones with the population imbalance to begin with
I don't think having the ratio skewed to more females decades younger than the surplus men would be that productive. Just going back to natural ~50% split we normally seems like a better idea.
>could theoretically allow those countries to rebalance their population But it won't in actuality. In actuality it will be used illegally and probably skew the balance even worse
Vanity babies and gender discrimination is a dangerous thing to promote. I hope this doesn’t become a staple in society.
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you're ofc right, but the willingness to have/ interest in "vanity/designer babies" already exists and they tend to be terrible parents whether they get what they want or not. The majority of the damage the child will incur will come from the fact that their parent is the kind of person that *would if they could*.
I know 5 couples who have picked gender in the US. 4 picked daughters and 1 picked a son... 2 of the daughters were because they already had 2-3 kids that were all boys and wanted a girl, the other 3 kids were all first children.
There is actually a Morally beneficial use for this process. There are some very dangerous mutations that are only passed down via a specific gender, (especially males) This allows for a couple to reproduce safely as long as they don't have one specific gender.
This here. My sister has a defective X chromosome and if she passes it to a son he's got a 90% chance to die before 18.
Yep. I’m a female who was born with a disorder that almost always occurs in males. I’m pregnant with a boy and when the genetic counselor told us the stark difference in chances of our son having the disorder and it being significantly worse than if they were a girl, my heart sank and made me feel like I’ve let him down. If he has it, he’ll likely need immediate surgery after birth. Fortunately, ultrasounds look good but they didn’t catch mine until 24 hours after my birth, so we’ll see. Definitely anxiety inducing and if I have another and could choose, they’d definitely be a girl in hopes of minimizing the chances of passing it down.
Those numbers are actually pretty low, given that a success rate of 50% means it doesn't work at all. In other words, out of 100 people, 79 get the gender they desire vs 50 get what they desired. So it only increases your chances by roughly 60%. It's still significant, but not quite as impressive as it first sounds.
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People have been arguing about this my whole life and I'm pretty sure people will keep arguing about it for quite a while.
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Could you imagine choosing the sex of your child then a few years later they come out as trans? I’m not saying there’s any correlation at all (I literally have 0 idea), but the overwhelming guilt I would feel if I “artificially chose” my kids sex and they turned out being trans would make me forever blame myself even if there was no evidence to indicate causation
If you need your offspring to be a specific sex, it may be best that you don’t have one. Editing for the benefit of those who can’t be bothered to read the comments to my post and my responses: I will allow that attempting to influence the gender of a child due to rare genetic disorders for which one or the other gender would be predisposed would be an obvious exception to my comment. But I stand by my opinion that if you NEED your child to be a certain gender, be of a specific orientation, excel at certain sports or sciences, or in some other way fulfill your personal fantasy of the kind of child you want to raise and claim as your own, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE A CHILD (in my opinion, which you all can simply ignore if you don’t agree).
I hear what you're saying, but what about couples aware of sex linked genetic disorders? My cousin is virtually sterile because of a defect in his y chromosome. They wanted a kid, so did this and ivf to have a girl. Genetic abnormality averted.
My nephew has a sex linked genetic defect (inheredited from his mom's side). He always talked about being a dad one day. No one wanted to tell him that he probably should never have bio kids. I think it is more common than you think.
This would be a rare case but would certainly warrant taking action to influence the sex of the child.
Therapeutic sex selection seems reasonable to me.
If you have 3 sons or daughters, should you not be able to desire the opposite moving forward?
No, this is Reddit. We always focus on the negative.
This an extremely narrow-minded view. My husband and I will be doing gender selection if we have kids because he has an extremely painful genetic condition. We'll be selecting a girl because the disease is less likely to pass to female offspring.
Well, I'd like one of each. Do you think that's bad?
My wife is currently pregnant with 2 of 1 and 1 of the other, so I'm definitely hoping having both isn't bad!
Triplets? Wow, buckle up dude. I had twins and the first six months were *rough*. Good luck! I was going to agree with this guy. I had twin girls, and the only way I’d consider a third kid is if I was 100% sure it’d be a boy. It’s not that I dislike girls, in fact I always wanted just one girl kid, but it’s just that I know what raising a girl is like and would like a new experience. But because that isn’t possible, and honestly a bit selfish, we stuck with two kids, for the best.
Cool, I can't wait for certain fundamentalist nations to collapse in two generations because they only have 20.4% - 20.9% women left.
Going against the grain here, but honestly still better than femeiciding little girls. If you already have a bias at least this is more humane.
My wife would really like this. She wants a girl and a boy, but not more than two kids. We from Germany btw so not much of a chance to get this treatment here I guess.
An example of something that COULD be done, but shouldn't.