The future of reproduction in a long-lived world

What I'm reading: The Future of Fertility, an article in last week's issue of the New Yorker. The basic premise is, we are living longer. What does that mean for fertility, specifically for women?

The article does a whirlwind summary of the incredible, sci-fi-like research that's happening in the field of reproduction. A few highlights:

1. In 2016, a lab in Japan took skin cells from the tip of a female mouse's tail, reverted those cells to stem cells, then turned those stem cells into egg cells. The scientists then fertilized the eggs, put them into female mice, and produced live mouse pups, some of which went on to have babies of their own.

2. The same lab repeated the procedure but with skin cells of a male mouse. Everything else worked out the same. The result was “mice with two dads,” as a headline in Nature put it.

3. Predictably, we now have well-funded biotech companies working to do the same kind of sci-fi stuff in humans also.

4. Other biotech companies are looking to do less shocking but still transformative stuff, such as in-vitro egg maturation, which would make the process of IVF much easier and which would eliminate the need for disruptive hormone injections.

The big question: In 20 years time, will we have rejuvenation therapies that simply make us — all parts of us — younger and keep us that way? Or will we have a patchwork of therapies that fix individual organs and functions such as reproduction? I am not a betting hound by nature, but if I were, I would bet on a bit of both.

The article also raises an inspiring and possibly frightening point: There is an enormous amount of longevity research going on inside the labs of stealth, privately-funded companies. We are unlikely to know what these companies are doing until and unless they have a big breakthrough.

I've previously made the comparison to OpenAI and ChatGPT. ChatGPT exploded onto the scene over the past six months, even though a year or two ago, many experts in the field still said it would take decades to get to a comparable technology.

Might we be in store for something similar in the field of longevity, and in particular, of fertility? In case you'd like to dig a bit deeper into this question, the New Yorker article is worth a read.