Quest to create viable human sex cells in lab progressing rapidly, with huge implications for reproduction
Scientists are just a few years from creating viable human sex cells in the lab, according to an internationally renowned pioneer of the field, who says the advance could open up biology-defying possibilities for reproduction.
Speaking to the Guardian, Prof Katsuhiko Hayashi, a developmental geneticist at the University of Osaka, said rapid progress is being made towards being able to transform adult skin or blood cells into eggs and sperm, a feat of genetic conjury known as in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG).
His own lab is about seven years away from the milestone, he predicts. Other frontrunners include a team at the University of Kyoto and a California-based startup, Conception Biosciences, whose Silicon Valley backers include the OpenAI founder, Sam Altman and whose CEO told the Guardian that growing eggs in the lab “might be the best tool we have to reverse population decline” and could pave the way for human gene editing.
What does technological progression without the oppressive aspects of capitalism look like? (I don't know, and don't know if there is an answer.)
It seems to me that the current trend of population decline in the west is fine for humanity because it is not a sharp cut, but a taper, while it is a problem for capitalism because fewer people equal smaller markets over time. A stable population would also, based on this, cause problems for capitalism because the markets would not be growing and the infinitely increasing return expected by investors would fail to materialize.
The markets would be growing as productivity is always growing, and there's real wage growth as well, so there's more goods and services people consume over time.
Productivity has been increasing for decades, but real wages have not kept pace and income inequality continues to grow.
This looks like the graph is presenting the compensation line below the productivity in both graphs. In the second graph, the mean and median are represented in such a manner as to indicate that high end outliers are inflating the data set. This is speculative, I know, but certain patterns appear in certain ways for very few reasons.
Can you share the graph's definition of 'Real Producer' and 'Real Consumer'? I am specifically wondering if the capitalist-class wage and the working-class wage are represented as a single wage.
It's not real consumer/producer, real compensation is inflation-adjusted
Well, the mean compensation is always going to be higher than the median, right? The graph was originally posted to show that wages grow slower than the productivity. Both graphs are for the workers, but a lot of the difference is mean vs median. There are also other factors.
For example, total compensation grew faster than wages because company health plans just cost companies more these days. Health care prices grew faster than inflation, so clearly companies had to pay more for them.
In recent years the real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth has been solid
The price of groceries in hours worked had been mostly dropping