Sex For Procreation Will Be Obsolete In 30 Years, Researcher Says

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Publish Date:
July 10, 2017
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CTV News
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Summary

A U.S. biomedical researcher believes most babies will be made in the lab instead of the bedroom within the next two to three decades — a bold prediction that could halt genetic predisposition to certain diseases and introduce a new plane of biological inequality.

Hank Greely, the director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this week that replacing sex as the primary means of baby-making will save women from undergoing fertility treatments, reduce health care costs, and give non-traditional families more avenues to have children.

Greely predicts most prospective parents will soon opt to choose from a range of embryos created by taking female skin samples and using stem cells to create eggs, which are then fertilized with sperm.

Some of this can already take place through costly pre-implantation genetic diagnostics and in vitro fertilization. But Greely imagines, in the future, such selection will become commonplace as the technology becomes cheaper and perhaps even subsidized due to the offset in other medical costs.

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