Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens

(colossal.com)

31 points | by BaudouinVH 3 days ago

10 comments

  • daniel_iversen 44 minutes ago
    I've just started listening to the book "Brave new world" (no spoilers please!) and this is literally how the book begins (but with humans) - what could possibly go wrong!
    • mplanchard 31 minutes ago
      No spoilers, but I used to think, along the lines of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.

      Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.

      • kombine 16 minutes ago
        I haven't read Brave New World but "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin left a similar impression on me, it's more subtle than 1984. It came out earlier than both books by the Western authors - even though Zamyatin was inspired while working in England in early 20th century.
    • warumdarum 21 minutes ago
      Actually.. not much. Education is taken care of. Gestation is taken care of. You grow up your young with a company instead of a family, if you want to be involved at all. All things that could go wrong, already sort of have over the last ten years and have been accordingly ironed out of humanity.

      Sexuality as couples is already gone for large parts of the yoynger population. Culturally the family is as good as gone. Woman have kicked themselves enthusiastically out of all roles the species had to offer, except for that of work drone and that is going obsolete right now. They and their allies (almost all of those allies cheer on the ideas of incubators) wildly detest the idea of going back to traditional roles. Society has to come from somewhere and this is somewhere.. nothing of value was lost..

  • VladVladikoff 1 hour ago
    This article is so strange. It is written by the company, but written in a way that an outsider would write.

    > Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.

    • x-yl 54 minutes ago
      It says at the bottom:

      > This story is based on original reporting by Christina Larson for National Geographic. Read the full feature on National Geographic

      https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/artificia...

    • mr_toad 1 hour ago
      Press releases are often written for lazy publications to copy and paste.
    • greatgib 50 minutes ago
      Also, that is the kind of corporate PR articles that are made to be quasi copy/pasted by journalists.
  • bookofjoe 1 hour ago
    For a sec there I thought the National Enquirer had gotten a new lease on life.
  • guerrilla 26 minutes ago
    The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.
    • maxerickson 18 minutes ago
      Why? The current method is cheap.
  • paul_ny 35 minutes ago
    So, this means the egg came first, right?
  • bushwart 21 minutes ago
    life finds a way
  • yewenjie 1 hour ago
    Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?
    • jfengel 1 hour ago
      They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.
      • Avicebron 59 minutes ago
        I'm holding out hope we can get the moa birds back in my lifetime.
      • hypfer 1 hour ago
        Yes, yes. Dodos.

        The endgame of this is Dodos.

        • dandellion 49 minutes ago
          Yes, first they'll focus on normal dodos. Then, they'll try very large Dodos. After that, very, very ancient dodos. Followed by island dodos. Then they might set up a whole island that people can visit, full of all kinds of dodos. They'll do tours with self driving cars so people can see all the dodos from a safe distance.
          • incognito124 41 minutes ago
            One thing is for sure: they'll still be using a UNIX system
          • fontain 45 minutes ago
            Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.
          • fragmede 44 minutes ago
            They shall spare no expense.
    • fontain 46 minutes ago
      A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.
      • onion2k 41 minutes ago
        [Colossal Biosciences] has raised over $600 million and carries a valuation exceeding $10 billion.

        You're not making a return on that from selling velocirator skeletons. Nor is that sort of money in dodos and maos.

        Human cloning on the other hand...

        • fragmede 27 minutes ago
          It's been a while since high school biology class, and I can't ask my sister right now, but I don't think humans are born in eggs. What does an artificial egg hatching chickens have to do with cloning humans?
          • himata4113 23 minutes ago
            Technically speaking, we could engineer it in a way where humans are born from eggs. It would just have to be a very big egg and would also have to continue growing in an incubator after hatching much like chickens rather than the standard womb senario.

            ... probably just easier to grow babies in a tube

        • stavros 18 minutes ago
          I mean, if you can make a velociraptor, the skeleton isn't the bit you'll make money on.
    • FrustratedMonky 1 hour ago
      Maybe short term, pumping out chickens. For food.

      Long term, maybe chickens are just the test case and they will pump out human slaves. Replicants.

      • vitally3643 56 minutes ago
        No. This is a very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest. Do better.
        • fragmede 42 minutes ago
          To be fair, artificial womb technology would really mess with society.
          • himata4113 21 minutes ago
            That's very likely to be the future of the human race where governments produce, train and push out artificial humans like a factory. Well if we don't solve aging and robotics by then, then we'll probably just stop having babies altogether or at least not in a quantity that matters.
        • FrustratedMonky 38 minutes ago
          "very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest"

          1. Take a common trope in fiction and research for a hundred years. With long known commonly linked ramifications.

          2. A company actually starts doing it.

          3. Suggest a link

          4. -> Call it Stupid.

          Yeah. Don't worry about it at all. Nothing to see here.

          • stavros 28 minutes ago
            If we wanted to pump out human slaves now, I don't think the main obstacle is that we can't find enough women to bear them.
            • FrustratedMonky 22 minutes ago
              If they are born of woman, they would be human.

              If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.

              Perhaps some gene editing to give them 'blue' skin, some non-historically-biased-color to identify them.

              Really. There are ton of books with these themes already. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said, and now a company is doing it, so why am I getting downvoted.

              • Dylan16807 15 minutes ago
                Gene editing is a whole different topic. And only the very first one would need to be "born of woman".

                Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.

              • stavros 20 minutes ago
                Yeah but there's also the book where we make people in a lab and they're great and everyone lives happily ever after forever. Don't cherry-pick your data.
                • FrustratedMonky 9 minutes ago
                  So I'm not providing a good literary survey of books with similar tropes and providing some of the positive ones? There are literally half dozen very famous negative examples, but I didn't do good enough search to find a positive one?

                  That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.

                  • stavros 6 minutes ago
                    No man, it's just that saying "this scenario is popular because it makes for a good story therefore it'll happen in reality" is an absurd point to make.
              • fragmede 10 minutes ago
                What is "it", exactly? I have probably read some of the same dystopian science fiction novels as you have. But this is Jurassic Park, not A Brave New World.
  • lekevicius 38 minutes ago
    I always knew that egg came first.
    • andy99 33 minutes ago

        requires real hen for fertilization and laying
      • paul_ny 12 minutes ago
        Huh… from the original Nat Geo article:

          scientists inspect eggs newly laid by real hens within 24 to 48 hours. They select the most promising ones, crack them open, and delicately pour the contents—everything but the shell—into the artificial egg structure. But everything that happened before then, from fertilization to egg laying, required a real chicken.
  • amelius 41 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • iwontberude 1 hour ago
    Have we already forgotten about chaos theory?
    • jfengel 1 hour ago
      For a book/movie with a decent (if optimistic) grasp of genetics, its grasp of chaos theory was utterly ignorant.