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Ask HN: Is a non-human surrogate mother possible?

5 points by zunzun ↗ HN
Is a non-human surrogate mother possible? More generally, among mammals, can very different species act as surrogate mothers for fertilized egg cells and have the resulting baby mammals successfully brought to term?

9 comments

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celticninja
Pigs perhaps? Right sort of size, currently being looked at for organ transplant. It really I think if we get to the point where we could use a pig we are more likely to be able to build a womb from stem cells and grow a baby in that. I imagine that the latter would be an easier sell to the public, however the former would create quite a furore with 2 of the 3 Abrahamic religions.
vkaku
Good Point.

Reminds me of that study on the Internet which said that Humans = Monkeys who mated with Pigs; I'm speculating that the Abrahamic religions knew about the DNA link and made it sacrilegious.

[dead] Delete-Prod-Log
this is such a wild scary thought. I'm pretty sure 100% some secret govt agencies underground in many countries would have tried it and sealed the records due to catastrophe.
[dead] cordonbleu
there is a constant interplay of molecular signaling betweeen mother and fertilized egg, nurse cells and on through development until full foetus is delivered. in analogy the compiler would introduce corruption into code and the hardware would be incompatible with such a transgenic system.

You would be in a realm of engineering a developmental chimera, [see genetic chimera]

Someone
I think the first is likely (hybrids often exist, as with ligers and tigons, mules and hinny’s) but very different species? IMO less likely.

I don’t want to know the answer, and it may be because of my limited understanding of biology, but it wouldn’t even surprise me if humans could interbreed with some of the great apes (rationale: I wouldn’t know why that would be much different from lions and tigers or horses and zebras. Those are within-genus, but I don’t think ‘genus’ is that well-defined, and, certainly historically, biologists have wanted to keep humans well-separated from animals, so there’s a decent chance they exaggerated the separation between humans on the one hand and chimpanzees and bonobos on the other)

kazinator
One issue there is that the placenta generated by the fetus has to attach to the uterus of the foreign species. It's a tight integration of two tissues.
ausbah
i think we'll see artificial wombs before non-human surrogates, either due to moral or technological limitations
fosco
Why not?

This is the sort of question that gets raised at the end of Sapiens and throughout homo deus two books by Yuval Noah Harari.

The next 100 years are going to be very interesting as science is really testing the boundaries of what humans are capable of and I suspect more and more experiments will occur just to trial and error and see what happens.