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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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It's a very minor gain, and IVF vs in-vitro probably offsets its already. When they can do at-home sperm selection, then I can expect this to take off. But as far as I understand, the test is a destructive process: you gather several eggs, then conception happens, the embryos grow a bit till the can survive some of their cells being removed, these cells are grown into a culture and tested, then the best embryo is implanted and the rest destroyed. You can't just ejaculate through a magic device that filters out inferior gametes.

If you do this test on a regular embryo, it starts looking too much like an abortion (which it technically is already).

the best embryo is implanted and the rest destroyed

Not true. The rest are frozen and saved for later. And "later" is often pretty soon, because each embryo transfer has a pretty high chance of failure.

Possibly they are destroyed at some point if they are no longer wanted. But in general, the challenge with IVF is having too few embryos, not too many.

As @aardvark2 points out, artificial sperm creation could fix the destructiveness. If you create a pair of haploid cells through meiosis, you will have a pretty good idea what is in cell A from the PCR of cell B and diploid cells.

Of course, another point is costs. The company in the article seems to bill 50k$ for analyzing 100 embryos, which would come to 500$ per analysis. While doing the analysis on (artificially created) sperm cells would definitely get you more dakka, it would also greatly increase costs.

how far are we from creating sperm lines in vitro?