Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens
nationalgeographic.com59 points by BaudouinVH 3 days ago
59 points by BaudouinVH 3 days 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!
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.
No spoilers, but I've come to think that "Brave New World" actually is Utopian—in the "give people what they want" department.
1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.
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.
The book "The Machine Stops" was posted here a a while back it's a 100 years old and just as prescient as "Brave New World" and "1984". https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/...
I will look up We.
There was a good theatre adaption of The Machine Stops by a UK group called Pilot Theatre (I saw it at York). They performed it as a live Youtube broadcast during the faf of 2020, though I can't see it listed anywhere now. Worth having a look for if you have better sources than mine. I must have a scan of my media array later, to see if I downloaded a copy I can rewatch.
Funnily enough, Orwell actually reviewed We in 1946: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/zamyatin/english/e_zamy
Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.
1984 was as much (or more) about Stalinism and totalitarian tendencies in 1948 as it was a cautionary tale about the future.
> Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984.
The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.
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..
Without spoiling anything, I wouldn’t say anything “goes wrong” in Brave New World, at least as far as procreation is concerned.
> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.
Colossal Biosciences has other ongoing projects including reviving the "Red Wolf" using DNA from coyote/wolf hybrids and CRISPR. They also want to introduce a Wooly Mammoth/elephant hybrid.
The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/1135222/red-wolv... (paywall)
How will they resurrect a dodo? Is the idea that they have some DNA somewhere?
The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.
Why? The current method is cheap.
Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous
At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.
Creating a food system that is more cruel to animals than what we already have is a very high bar. Not that I doubt we can clear it.
I always knew that egg came first.
requires real hen for fertilization and layingHuh… 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.Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?
They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.
I'm holding out hope we can get the moa birds back in my lifetime.
Or the South American terrorbirds, the extant species are tiny, seriemas, and they're very interesting. I bet one that weighs 700 pounds would be even more exciting
Yes, yes. Dodos.
The endgame of this is Dodos.
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.
Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.
A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.
[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...
How about a theme park? With velociraptors and other jurassic era animals?
I would pay money for that, it would give Disney a run for their money. Throw in some woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers as well.
Disney makes more from theme parks than from everything else combined. Dinosaurs would be better than anything Disney has ever made.
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?
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
I mean, if you can make a velociraptor, the skeleton isn't the bit you'll make money on.
And I feel like lab grown Velociraptor skeletons aren't going to fetch $10 million. Rarity and something new to study is part of the value.
Surely the rarity is partially due to the velociraptor skeleton cartel limiting the supply. And really, a velociraptor skeleton wasn't even a traditional engagement gift until they created the demand for it with that advertising campaign back in the day.
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.
No. This is a very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest. Do better.
To be fair, artificial womb technology would really mess with society.
Artificial womb developed decade ago (2016): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.
Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.
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.
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.
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.
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.