Tech
How Silicon Valley hatched a plan to turn blood into human eggs
A few years ago, a young man from California’s technology scene began popping up in the world’s leading developmental biology labs. These labs were deciphering the secrets of embryos and had a particular interest in how eggs are formed. Some thought if they discovered that recipe, they would be able to copy it and transmute any cell into an egg.
Their visitor, Matt Krisiloff, said he wanted to help. Krisiloff didn’t know any biology, and he was only 26. But after leading a research program at Y Combinator, the famous startup incubator in San Francisco that was an early funder of such companies as Airbnb and Dropbox, he said, he was “well connected,” with access to wealthy tech investors.
Krisiloff also had a specific interest in the artificial-egg technology. He’s gay, and he knew that theoretically, a cell from a man could be turned into an egg. If that were ever possible, two men could have a child that was genetically related to both. “I was interested in the idea of ‘When can same-sex couples have children together?’” says Krisiloff. “I thought that this was the promising technology for doing this.”
Today the company Krisiloff started, called Conception, is the largest commercial venture pursuing what’s called in vitro gametogenesis, which refers turning adult cells into gametes—sperm or egg cells. It employs around 16 scientists and has raised $20 million from well-known tech figures including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator; Jaan Tallinn, one of the founders of Skype; and Blake Borgeson, a cofounder of Recursion Pharmaceuticals.
The company is initially trying to make replacement eggs for women. That’s scientifically easier than making eggs from male cells, and it has an obvious market. People are having kids later in life, but a woman’s supply of healthy eggs nosedives in her 30s. It’s a major reason patients visit IVF clinics.
Conception is starting with blood cells from female donors and trying to transform these into the first “proof-of-concept human egg” made in the lab. The company hasn’t done it yet—nor has anyone else. There are still scientific puzzles to overcome, but Krisiloff sent out an email to supporters earlier this year saying his startup might be be “the first in the world to accomplish this goal in the not-too-distant future.” It says that artificial eggs “could become one of the most important technologies ever created.”
NICOLáS ORTEGA
That’s no exaggeration. If scientists can generate supplies of eggs, it would break the rules of reproduction as we know them. Women without ovaries—for example, because of cancer or surgery—might be able to have biologically related children. What’s more, lab-made eggs would cancel the age limits on female fertility, allowing women to have related babies at 50, 60, or even beyond.
The prospect of egg cells from a blood draw is profound—and ethically fraught. Conception’s process for making eggs from stem cells has required human fetal tissue. And if reproduction is dissociated from what have been the accepted facts of life, unfamiliar scenarios could result. It opens the door not only for same sex-reproduction, but perhaps even for one individual—or four—to generate an offspring.
More realistically, because the technology could turn eggs into a manufactured resource, it could supercharge the path to designer children. If doctors can make a thousand eggs for a patient, they’ll also be able to fertilize all of them and test to find the best resulting embryos, scoring their genes for future health or intelligence. Such a laboratory process would also permit unfettered genetic editing with DNA engineering tools such as CRISPR. As Conception put it in a pitch sent out earlier this year, the company anticipates that artificial eggs could allow “wide-scale genomic selection and editing in embryos.”
Says Krisiloff: “If you could meaningfully select against Parkinson’s risk, Alzheimer’s risk, I think this then becomes very desirable.” The potential commercial and health payoffs could be huge.
For scientific reasons, turning a man’s cell into a healthy egg is expected to be harder, and Conception hasn’t even tried that yet. But it’s part of the company’s business plan, too. Maybe, by the time Krisiloff is ready to start a family, two men will be able to contribute equally to an IVF embryo’s genetic makeup. A surrogate mother could then carry the child to term. “I do think it will be possible,” Krisiloff told MIT Technology Review. “It’s question of when, not if.”
A mouse tail
Here’s how the egg-making technology could work. The first step is to take a cell from adult—say, a white blood cell—and convert it into a powerful stem cell. That process relies on a Nobel Prize–winning discovery, called reprogramming, that allows scientists to induce any cell to become “pluripotent”—capable of forming any other type of tissue. The next step: cajole those induced stem cells to become eggs whose genetic makeup would match that of the patient.
It’s the last part that’s the scientific challenge. Certain cell types are very easy to make in the lab: leave pluripotent stem cells in a dish for a few days, and some will spontaneously start to beat like heart muscle. Others will become fat cells. But an egg might be the hardest cell to produce. It’s huge—one of the largest cells in the body. And its biology is unique, too. A woman is born with her full complement of eggs and never makes any more.
In 2016, a pair of scientists in Japan, Katsuhiko Hayashi and his mentor Mitinori Saitou, were the first to convert skin cells from mice into fertile eggs, entirely outside the body. They reported how, starting with cells from a tail clipping, they’d induced these into stem cells, which they then directed partway along the path to becoming eggs. Then, to finish the task, they incubated these proto-eggs alongside tissue collected from ovaries of mouse fetuses. In effect, they had to construct mini ovaries.
“It’s not a matter of ‘Oh, can I make an egg in a petri dish?’ It’s a cell that is contingent on its place in the body,” says David Albertini, an embryologist at the Bedford Research Foundation. “So it’s about creating an artificial structure that can recap the process.”
Unexpected visitor
It was a year after the mouse breakthrough in Japan that Krisiloff began visiting biology labs to learn if the process could be repeated in humans. He turned up in Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, Skyped with professors in Israel, and also made the pilgrimage to Hayashi’s center at Kyushu University, in Fukuoka.
That’s where he met Pablo Hurtado González, a biologist visiting that lab on a scholarship, who would join Krisiloff as a founder of Conception. A third cofounder, Bianka Seres, an embryologist who worked in an IVF clinic, later joined the team.
Krisiloff, a University of Chicago graduate, had until then been the director of Y Combinator Research, where he launched a project to study giving people in the San Francisco area a basic monthly income. Y Combinator is the most famous startup academy in the world. The idea of its research project was to give away money with no strings attached as a strategy to prepare for a future where jobs are taken by automation.
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Krisiloff says he resigned from that role after he started dating Altman, who was Y Combinator’s president at the time. Although the relationship didn’t last, the job change freed him to work on the nascent egg venture full time, with an initial investment from Altman. The company was originally called Ovid Research and changed its name to Conception this month.
Some researchers sensed that the young entrepreneurs were in over their heads. The science of in vitro gametogenesis is dominated by a small cadre of university research groups who’ve been working on the problem for years. “When I talked to them, they had no clue, absolutely no clue, how to start a project,” says Albertini. “They were asking me what kind of equipment to buy. It was ‘How would you know if you made an egg? What would it look like?’”
Another scientist Krisiloff got to know was Jeanne Loring, a stem cell biologist at the Scripps Research Institute. Working with the San Diego Zoo, Loring had previously frozen cells from one of the last northern white rhinos, a species on the verge of extinction. She was interested in egg-making technology if she was ever to resurrect the animal. “They are young and optimistic and have money in their pockets, so they aren’t dependent on convincing people,” says Loring. “Sometimes it’s a really good idea to be naïve.”
What Krisiloff knew for sure was that reproductive technology could have the same sort of appeal to tech investors as AI or space rockets. As the Stanford University reproductive endocrinologist Barry Behr puts it, “These days if you write ‘fertility’ on a piece of cardboard and take it to Sand Hill Road, you can get funded.”
The problem with artificial gametes is that there’s not going to be a medical product for many years—and there are complex liabilities, like who is to blame if any eventual baby isn’t normal. Krisiloff didn’t see those as obstacles to organizing a company. Indeed, he believes more startups should be trying to solve “hard” science problems and that discoveries can come about faster in a commercial setting. “My argument is there could be a lot more funding if people turned research organizations into for-profit entities,” he says. “I am a big believer in more basic research going on in a company context.”
Fetal tissue
Krisiloff’s company has never put out a press release or sought public attention. That is because his team hasn’t yet made a human egg, and he doesn’t want to be seen as promoting biological “vaporware.” Conception, Krisiloff says, is still trying to achieve its first technical benchmark—which is to produce a human egg and a patented process for making them.
That is also a goal of academic researchers like the ones in Japan who made the mouse eggs. But repeating the breakthrough with human cells is daunting. Because the recipe involves mimicking the natural steps by which eggs develop, experiments can last nearly as long as a pregnancy does. That’s not such a problem for mice, which are born in 20 days, but in humans, each experiment could take months.
When I met Saitou and Hayashi, in 2017, they told me copying the mouse technology in humans presented another troubling difficulty. Repeating the recipe exactly would require abortion tissue: scientists would have to obtain follicle cells from weeks-old human embryos or fetuses. The only alternative would be to learn how to manufacture these necessary support cells from stem cells too. That, on its own, would require a significant research effort, they predicted.
At Conception, scientists began by trying the fetal-tissue approach, which they believed was the fastest way to get a proof-of-concept egg. Krisiloff made extensive efforts to obtain the material—at one point even tweeting at abortion providers directly. He also sought collaborations with UCLA and Stanford, although these efforts didn’t pan out. He declined to say where Conception gets its tissue donations currently.
Fetal-tissue research is legal but extremely sensitive, and to some of the public it’s more than repugnant. During the Trump administration, health officials threw up new barriers, including empaneling abortion opponents to review grants. Krisiloff says the company still uses human fetal tissue, but now it’s more often used to understand the molecular signals that characterize key cell types so scientists can try to re-create those from stem cells.
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
