If any investors want to give More Dakka to in vitro gametogenesis research, my startup Ovelle Bio is fundraising! (I started this company last year after completing my PhD in IVG research, taking a synthetic biology approach.)
Generally I think that IVG won't cause a major increase in society-wide fertility rates (which are mainly due to economic factors like housing, as you wrote), but paired with other technologies like embryo selection it will still make a big difference in humanity's future. In other words, we may not get many more kids but the kids we do get will be much better.
Also: I've noticed there's a huge variation in IVF prices at different clinics, even just within the USA. Some like CNY Fertility will do it for $6000 (though you have to travel to Albany NY) whereas most will be around $20000 and some even higher. It seems the market isn't very efficient here.
There's a duplicate on your list: this paper is listed twice via different sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63454-7
Thanks for explaining, I appreciate it!
1As someone who hasn't kept up much with the local jargon, what exactly does that mean?
4
4Agreed. You may be interested in my writings on herpesviruses:
https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-human-herpesviruses-much-more
https://denovo.substack.com/p/answering-your-burning-questions
https://denovo.substack.com/p/herpesvirus-treatment-and-prevention
>if you've already gone to the moon I think you've already solved the hardest engineering problems involved in going to Pluto.
You specifically mention "footprints" on Pluto. The life support requirements alone for a multi-decade journey will be orders of magnitude harder than anything we've done so far. Depending on the trajectory we'd be looking at ~20 - 46 years of spaceflight (with shorter ones generally using more delta-V). I was going to say you'd also need to bring fuel for a return trip, but your astronauts would die of old age by the time they got back!
Funnily enough, last night was the first time I did a manned moon landing in Kerbal Space Program with the Realism Overhaul mod (which adds things like realistic engine performance, life support, etc). Even as a veteran player it was no easy task. Landing on Pluto would be insane: you'd probably need to put somewhere on the order of 10,000 tons of mass in LEO, plus a way to keep your astronauts alive. By contrast a manned moon landing requires about 100 tons in LEO.
My response from a few days ago: https://x.com/Meta_Celsus/status/1973152477681012893
Basically this approach is scientifically interesting, but not going to work for healthy babies anytime soon because of massive problems with chromosome segregation and imprinting.
1Agreed. Even if this tech gets working, it will be very hard to catch up to photovoltaics.
Yeah, if anyone is interested in learning more, this is called the phasing problem. For common enough variants, it's often possible to figure this out by looking at general patterns of co-inheritance if you have a large reference dataset for the population (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01415-w). Long read sequencing which you mentioned is another approach. But you're right that these days it would just be cheapest to get the parental genomes (assuming that's an option).
This post is a good overview of near-term prospects for human biological enhancement, arguing that selection is more tractable than editing, and further that iterated selection has the potential to be exceptionally powerful. The biology is largely accurate as of the time of writing, although the claim "we can now do iterated meiosis" was premature. Since 2024 I've been working on refining my meiosis induction to improve epigenetics and also allow for iterated meiosis. As of early 2026, I've made significant progress but this still isn't ready for use in humans. Sergiy has also made advancements in SuperSOX to allow more efficient reprogramming and epigenetic control.
I think this area of research is important for human flourishing in general, and may potentially help with the AI alignment problem depending on timelines (I know that these days many people's central estimates are short, but there's definitely high variance).
Followup work includes biological research (like what we're doing at Ovelle Bio and what Sergiy is doing at Soxogen) and additional theoretical modeling of genetic optimization.