Not sure if this should be in IMHO or here.
I was in a bit of a gender battle with an ex. She said that if all men died the human species would carry on because of frozen sperm and such, but if all women died that’d be it.
I think that if all women died tonight that an artificial womb or a surrogate animal mother would be viable before everybody died off. Is anything like that remotely possible today or in the immediate future?
in the realm of theory…
Men carry both the x and Y chromosome so both XX and XY could be put together
there are frozen eggs as well as frozen embryos
I think the species would be over, unless we could take fertilized human eggs and implant them in chimpanzee wombs. That technique has not been attempted, however, as far as I know.
This isn’t really about science, is it?
There’s frozen eggs and frozen sperm, but you still need a living human womb to grown in. In the situation you described, it would become urgent to develope an artifical womb, but I doubt it could work. The best solution might be to transplant a womb into a male doner, who would then have to have whatever chemicals would be needed injected into his body. I don’t image there would be a lot of volunteers for this to happen. Maybe guys on death row could expect a full pardon after sucessfully giving birth via C-section.
But what if you needed to parallel park in front of the sperm bank?
Would it have to be human?
We don’t know, because we haven’t tried. (Various ethical problems come up, which might be overlooked if all women disappeared, and the future of the species depended on it).
Indeed. Even if women killed every single male on the planet they could still use frozen sperm to continue the species (didn’t that happen on the Outer Limits). Of couse the sperm supply would be finate, unless that allowed more males to be born.
Why wouldn’t they allow males to be born? Unless you’re talking some militant matriarchial society that somehow has perfected cloning, males would be allowed. If all the males died, more males would have to be born to insure more genetic diversity.
The worse case scenerio would be a society that allowed males to grow up in institutions until they were old enough to have their sperm harvested and frozen, whereupon they would be killed. The frozen sperm would then be used to impregnant the females, who would comprise the whole of society.
The episode’s premise was that a plague killed all the men and male infants died within days of birth. The women’s society had fallen to an agricultural level, but with bits and pieces of leftover technology (like radio communications and presumably freezers).
Hey, I can parallel park, first go, better than any other guy that I know. 
Would there be beer in said institution?
It didn’t start that way, but after I said that males would survive I’m curious about whether or not it’s in anyway possible. There have been heart transplants from non-humans to humans and the like. I’d think that with the urgency there’d be to solve the problem that it’d be possible.
Is that the voice of a volunteer? (Minus the killing, I assume.)
We could probably use chimps and/or gorillas as surrogates, although a Caesarian Section would be needed, and the success/failure ratio would probably be low.
The women would be much better off, in terms of reproduction.*
You’ve got the frozen sperm (much more plentiful than frozen eggs, btw), which, if the next generation of boys is okay, saves the species by itself.
Even if something happened to all the sperm, or boys died before they could impregnate more women, we’re much closer to cloning than we are to an artificial womb or raising a human fetus in an animal womb. It’s even possible turn a female into a kind of psuedo-sperm and fertilize another egg (although, like cloning, it’s never been done in humans and had a variety of problems).
The means for an all-male species to reproduce are theoretically possible. The means for an all-female species to reproduce are not only possible, they’re practically already being done. If all ethical objections were blocked, we could have viable clones within two years, and cloning done safely within a decade.
*Of course, a suddenly all-female society would find itself with a lack of engineers, government leadership, and others needed for maintaining the infrastructure we’ve all come to rely on. It’d take a good while before the remaining female engineers took the reins and got enough women trained to get things rolling again. The most patriarchal places, like Saudi Arabia, would be completely fucked. Then again, the women are less likely to freak out and blow each other to hell, since the boys are also the ones who know where all the weapons are.
Not really, but it rarely is.
As far as I know no attempt has been made to grow a human fetus to term in the womb of another species, but there are likely to be significant difficulty with that, not the least of which are compatibility and immuno-rejection problems with the host animal and the fetus/placenta. Even trying to grow a human fetus to term in a chimpanzee or gorilla is likely to be impossible or result in significant, potentially lethal developmental problems. And birthing a human from an ape would almost certainly require Ceasarian delivery even if it were viable.
There is the theoretical possibility of allowing the placenta and fetus to gestate exutero, say in the subcutaneous fat layer in front of a man’s peritoneal cavity, where it would presumably grow to viability like a tumor. The fetus/placenta is relatively independent functionally of the parent save for absorbing nutrients and respiration exchange via blood and doesn’t actually much care were it is located (although mislocation–say, in the fallopian tubes–can have detrimental consequences). You may need to route some additional blood sources near the placenta to get sufficient blood flow, and again, immuno-rejection problems may crop up, requiring pharmeucitical suppression. This has actually been done in the laboratory with some placental mammals with varying degrees of reported success, but never, so far as I’m aware, with humans or any of the great apes. This would certainly require various hormone treatments for the host to develop the necessary hormones and growth factors, and we’d expect morbidity and mortality to be at similar if not greater levels to abdominal ectopic pregnancies; in other words, very high for both host and fetus.
Then you have the problem that without eggs you have to take the egg of another species, remove its gametal genome, and replace it with a human genome by somatic cell nuclear transfer. (You can try seperating out chromosomes to come up with a correct pairing from two male gametes but that’s a hell of a lot of work and very likely to damage something. You can’t just Shake’N’Bake the nuclei of two male gametes together into one ovum and expect to have anything viable. Using an existing, functional genome is your best hope to make this silly scheme work.) Now because the other machinery in the ovum drives the schedule for growth and division and provides the basic building blocks and backbone for replication of the cell, you’re going to have to use something very close to human to make this even work. Even so, because mitochondrial DNA has a much higher mutation rate than nuclear DNA you’re likely to come into conflict there, particularly if there are some protein replication instructions that have been exported into the nucleus of a chimp gamete but not paralleled in humans. I suspect the pregnancy would hit a wall where something wasn’t on track and the pregnancy is aborted.
There are, of course, frozen ova, but the viability of preserved eggs is generally pretty low–in the few percent–and the likelyhood of damage or developmental problems are high, so it’s not your best bet. Plus, I kind of regard this as cheating; it’ll get you a generation, and even if we assume that half are women (or have been manipulated to produce women) you’re still going to have a very small pool to draw from. And if what killed off women is still around, it doesn’t help you deal with the future.
No, gentlemen, we’d be figuratively screwed if all women died off. However, going in the other direction is much more optimistic; gamete gene transfer from one ovum to another is much more likely to result in a fully viable offspring, and if development begins normally and proceeds in a human female uterus there’s little reason to believe that it would progress any differently from a “normal” pregnancy. There have been a few suggestions from reserchers that the male gamete provides more than just genetic material, including some contributions that may transfer genetic information to the ovum mitochondria or other structures, but nothing that has gained general acceptance. In all likelyhood, men will become entirely disposable within a few decades at most, and our utility will be diminished to moving couches and reading maps, as demonstrated by Campell Scott’s the brilliant if disturbing opening monologue to Roger Dodger. “By saying that, you disregard the primary importance of utility in human relationships. Our ability-- Men’s ability to read mapsm to navigate, makes us useful. You should discourage your sister from even looking at a map!”
Stranger
Can I ask what your reasoning is behind this statement? Humans and chimps are very, very closely related, so close that placing us into separate genera is unsupportable cladisticaly. There isn’t another pair of species pair of species so closely realted that aren’t to some degree interfertile, and certainly none that would have any significant rejection issues with embryo implantation.
So I really have to wonder whether what you say is true. We can readily implant bison embryos into cattle, or llama embryos into camels, or sheep embryos into goats or Asian elephant embryos into savanna elephants with near perfect success, and those are all species far more distantly related than humans and chimps.
Unless you have some specific evidence that foetal rejection is likely to occur I really can’t see what basis you could have for such a claim.
Again, what evidence is there for this? My understanding is that the pelvic opening in a chimp is wider than it is in humans. If that is the case then I can’t see why Caesaren would be necessary. Of course it’s a moot point anyway. When you are talking about using a chimp as an incubator to save a species you would perform a Caesarean as a matter of course even if the risk of natural birth was considerably lower than in human births simply becuse you want to keep the risk to the child at absolute minimum.
That technique only works with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
God help me, why did I see that movie anyway?