I started hearing the echoes of the stomping of Birkenstock clad feet and the roars of approval from feminists the world over. As I continued reading about mice that were produced without fathers in a recent edition of Nature, I was met with a sense of impending doom for myself and my male brethren.
Dr. Kono and a group of scientists from Tokyo University of Agriculture were the first people to successfully create a living mouse without the use of any male genetic material, by combining unfertilized eggs. While this process, called parthenogenesis, or development of an unfertilized egg to adulthood, is common in some plants and animals, it has never happened before in mammals.
But breathe easy, 'fellas,' because it was a painstakingly arduous process. The scientists used 598 oocytes, cells that develop into eggs, and only one measly oocyte, named Kaguya, made it to adulthood.
The key to making healthy offspring whether in the lab or naturally is to have the right amount of DNA -- 46 chromosomes in humans -- and have genetic material from each parent. But it is not quite as simple as having half the chromosomes from each parent, because of a complex concept called genomic imprinting that occurs in mammals.
Genomic imprinting can be thought of like an argument between Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne -- a confusing struggle where no one is totally sure what the heck is going on. Nevertheless, to elucidate genomic imprinting, it is important to understand the basic genetics behind mammalian reproduction. Essentially, a sperm contains half the genetic material needed by the offspring and the egg contains the other half, and the genetic material combines in a complicated fashion to create the offspring. During the development of the offspring, genomic imprinting causes genes from the mother to be expressed differently than genes from the father in the offspring. In other words, getting a certain gene from the mother would cause different effects in an offspring then getting the same exact gene from its father.
So the scientists at Tokyo University tested the concept of genomic imprinting. They combined genetic material from different oocytes in order to have the right amount of genetic material for the offspring without having any male input.
While this might be a good strategy when making wedding plans, leaving out male input has been a big mistake in genetics.
In the past, scientists who tried to combine half the chromosomes from an animal of one sex with the other half from another animal of the same sex were not able to produce any offspring. In fact, the attempts usually resulted in hideous balls of mutant tissues.Imagine mashing your fist into a strawberry cheesecake; add some teeth and hair to it and that should give you a pretty accurate picture of what it looks like.
Consequently, these scientists had to toy with genes as they combined the oocytes and isolated the two key genomic imprinting genes, IgF2 and H19. Significantly, this experiment makes the complexities of genomic imprinting more reasonable for scientists to understand.
Aside from genomic imprinting, sexual determination is an issue that came into play in this experiment. Kaguya was a female, and without a father she could not have been born a male. Females carry two X chromosomes, while males carry one X and one Y. Therefore, a female can only pass on an X chromosome to her offspring while the male passes on the second sex chromosome, either an X, which would make the offspring a female, or a Y, which would make it male. Thus, a father's genetic material randomly determines the sex of the offspring in nature.
A controversy arises in the future implications of the sexual determination issues of this scientific advancement. The far-reaching implications in humans deal with the biological and social aspects of homosexual men and women making such children from their own genetic material. But even thinking about attempting such experiments would be foolish because of how much is still unknown about the basic genetics.
Let me be the first to say that if people want to use this science to eliminate men from the world, they should be locked up for life. Men are predominantly responsible for bringing things like gangster rap and ear hair into the world. Is it not our human right to have the chance to pass these treasures on to future generations?
Omid Fatemi is a biweekly Science olumnist.He can be reached at ofatemi@cavalierdaily.com
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