Making babies without eggs may be possible, say scientists

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News website

Scientists say early experiments suggest it may one day be possible to make babies without using eggs.

They have succeeded in creating healthy baby mice by tricking sperm into believing they were fertilising normal eggs.

The findings in Nature Communications, could, in the distant future, mean women can be removed from the baby-making process, say the researchers.

For now, the work helps to explain some of the details of fertilisation.
End of mum and dad?

The University of Bath scientists started with an unfertilised egg in their experiments.

They used chemicals to trick it into becoming a pseudo-embryo.

These "fake" embryos share much in common with ordinary cells, such as skin cells, in the way they divide and control their DNA.

The researchers reasoned that if injecting sperm into mouse pseudo-embryos could produce healthy babies, then it might one day be possible to achieve a similar result in humans using cells that are not from eggs.

In the mouse experiments, the odds of achieving a successful pregnancy was one in four.

Dr Tony Perry, one of the researchers, told the BBC News website: "This is the first time that anyone has been able to show that anything other than an egg can combine with a sperm in this way to give rise to offspring.

"It overturns nearly 200 years of thinking."

Those baby mice were healthy, had a normal life expectancy and had healthy pups of their own.
Fertilisation

The goal of the researchers is to understand the exact mechanisms of fertilisation because what happens when a sperm fuses with an egg is still a bit of a mystery.

For example, the egg completely strips the sperm's DNA of all its chemical clothing and re-dresses it.

That stops the sperm behaving like a sperm and makes it act like an embryo, but how the "costume change" takes place is not clear.

Removing the need for an egg could have a wider impact on society.

Dr Perry said: "One possibility, in the distant future, is that it might be possible that ordinary cells in the body can be combined with a sperm so that an embryo is formed."

In other words, two men could have a child, with one donating an ordinary cell and the other, sperm.

Or one man could have his own child using his own cells and sperm - with that child being more like a non-identical twin than a clone.

Dr Perry stressed that such scenarios were still "speculative and fanciful" at this stage.

Earlier this year in China, scientists were able to make sperm from stem cells and then fertilise an egg to produce healthy mice.

Dr Perry suggested that combining the two fields of research may eventually do without the need for sperm and eggs altogether.

Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, from the Francis Crick Institute, commented: "I'm not surprised that the authors are excited about this.

"I think it is a very interesting paper, and a technical tour de force and I am sure it will tell us something important about reprogramming at these early steps of development that are relevant to both fertilisation and single cell nuclear transfer [cloning].

"And, perhaps more broadly, about reprogramming of cell fate in other situations.

"It doesn't yet tell us how, but the paper gives a number of clear pointers."

Bypassing the Grape but Enjoying Its Fruits

Cameron Hughes sampled wine blends at his company’s offices in Calistoga, Calif. It owns no vineyards or wineries, and outsources all the labor that goes into making a bottle of wine. Credit Peter DaSilva for The New York Times        

By NICOLE LaPORTE JUNE 9, 2012

CAMERON HUGHES sees nothing romantic about being a winemaker. Having a rolling vineyard to call his own? Taking that first sip of a homegrown pinot noir? He can live without it, thanks — and he does, even as he has become a prominent name in the California wine industry.

Mr. Hughes, who started by selling wine out of the back of his Volvo station wagon in 2002, is a wine négociant, or wine merchant. He does not own a vineyard or a winery. Instead, from offices in San Francisco and Calistoga, Calif., he outsources all the labor that goes into making a bottle of wine — growing the grapes, crushing and fermenting them, and other steps in the process — to others.

“All we do is bring the barrels,” Mr. Hughes said.

Actually, he does a bit more than that. During the worldwide wine glut of the recent recession, his company, Cameron Hughes Wine, flourished as he bought up excess wine from wineries, repackaged it under his own label and sold it at a discount.

One of the first wines he ever sold was a syrah from the Lodi region of California that had a retail price of $28. Mr. Hughes sold it at Costco for $8.99 under his generic-sounding Lot series — it was Lot 1. (Per nondisclosure agreements he has with sellers, he does not reveal where his so-called bulk wines come from, but merely describes their aromas, flavors and area of origin.)

Initially, Mr. Hughes said, he “stood in Costco doing my carnival barking act” as he tried to sell his wines to customers. “You’d hear me on the other side of the store, talking about wine. I had store managers come over and be like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to tone it down.’ ”

Mr. Hughes has stormed in on a profession that many consider sacred and has imbued it with some capitalistic swagger — not unlike Fred Franzia, the vintner behind Trader Joe’s discount wine, Charles Shaw, a k a Two Buck Chuck.

Négociants like Mr. Hughes are much more common in Europe. In the United States, “most people want to have a vineyard,” said Liz Thach, a professor of management and wine business at Sonoma State University. “The soil, the terroir, they want to have the whole thing. We have more than 7,000 wineries in the U.S. and most of them are very small and run by people who want to have a small, family business and the pride that goes into that.”

It is notoriously difficult to make a profit on a vineyard, and some wealthy owners pour money into tending grapes knowing full well that they may lose money for years. Winemaking is “a labor of love for many, many people,” Mr. Hughes said. “And it is for us, too, but we figured out how to make a buck, too.”

Most of his bucks were made buying and selling bulk wine, but these days, Mr. Hughes puts most of his resources behind actually making wine — or, rather, having others make it for him.

The Lot series are among the offerings. Credit Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Working with wineries and vineyards in California, Oregon and Washington, as well as in Europe, he is on track to produce 300,000 cases of wine — equaling 5,000 tons of crushed grapes — this year. That’s even as poor harvests have resulted in a projected wine shortage for the next several years. In some cases, Mr. Hughes pairs a vineyard with a winery to create a wine according to specifications that he devises with his three winemakers and viticulturist.

“We outsource the work, but we oversee it very closely,” Mr. Hughes said. “We visit these vineyards numerous times. We have our viticulturist traveling the state right now, visiting all the vineyards. When the time comes for crushing and fermenting, our winemakers are there as well, getting daily lab updates.”

In other instances, Mr. Hughes might come in just after wine has been fermented, assemble various blends and then send them to the barrel to age.

Either way, the low-overhead nature of his business means that his wines, sold in places as diverse as Sam’s Club, boutique wine shops and on the Internet, are 50 percent to 70 percent cheaper, he said, than they would be under their winery’s label.

So how did he enter this idiosyncratic profession? “Purely by accident,” he says.

After starting out as a cellar rat — a low-level winery employee — at Corbett Canyon, a popular inexpensive wine label, he decided that he didn’t want to be a wine producer, and went into wine sales and marketing instead. A few years later, when he was working for a French wine importing company, he first heard about négociants.

When the importer went bust not long thereafter, Mr. Hughes saw a place for himself in the wine world. “I bought 500 cases of Napa Valley cabernet, I had a guy bottle it up for me, and I sold it out of the back of my Volvo station wagon.”

After struggling to the point that he teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, he said, he got his big break in 2004, when he persuaded Costco to start selling his Lot series.

Because both he and the origins of his wine were unknowns, building trust among customers was its own kind of labor. At Costco in San Francisco, where Mr. Hughes would stand for hours personally selling his wine, “They’re like, ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ and they’d walk on by,” he recalled.“I used to tell people, ‘If you don’t like it, I’ll come wash your car for you.’ You just did whatever it took to get people to try it.”

PROFESSOR THACH said she admired Mr. Hughes’s “heady vision.”

“He worked really hard to get Costco to pay attention to him, and when they did, it put him on the map,” she said.

Over the years, Mr. Hughes has built up his business “one foxhole at a time,” as he puts it — in 2011, he sold 80 different Lot wines, compared with three his first year.

And never once did he have to wash a car.

The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry

By VIET THANH NGUYEN SEPT. 2, 2016

Many people have characterized my novel, “The Sympathizer,” as an immigrant story, and me as an immigrant. No. My novel is a war story and I am not an immigrant. I am a refugee who, like many others, has never ceased being a refugee in some corner of my mind.

Immigrants are more reassuring than refugees because there is an endpoint to their story; however they arrive, whether they are documented or not, their desires for a new life can be absorbed into the American dream or into the European narrative of civilization.

By contrast, refugees are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves. An estimated 60 million such stateless people exist, 1 in every 122 people alive today. If they formed their own country, it would be the world’s 24th largest — bigger than South Africa, Spain, Iraq or Canada.

My memories of becoming a refugee are fragments of a dream, hallucinatory and unreliable. Soldiers bouncing me on their knees, a tank rumbling through the streets, a crowded barge of desperate people fleeing Vietnam.

I have no guarantee these images are true. They date from the early 1970s, when I lived in the country synonymous with war. I wonder if the fact that I cannot stand the taste of milk today has to do with being a 4-year-old boy on that barge, sipping from milk a stranger shared with my family.

Perhaps this is how history becomes imprinted in the body, how fear becomes a reflex, how memory becomes a matter of taste and feeling.

My real memories began soon after we arrived at the refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., in the summer of 1975. Only those refugees with sponsors could leave the camp. But no sponsor would take our family of four, so my parents went to one home, my 10-year-old brother went to another and I went to a third. My separation from my parents lasted only a few months, but it felt much longer. This forced separation, what my childhood self experienced as abandonment, remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades.

A few years later we moved across the country. My parents, merchants in their homeland, had no desire to do the menial work expected of them in Harrisburg, Pa., where we had settled.

Instead, they opened a grocery store in a depressed area of downtown San Jose, working 12- to 14-hour days, seven days a week, except for Christmas Day, Easter and New Year’s Day. They became successful, at the cost of being shot in an armed robbery.

Today, when many Americans think of Vietnamese-Americans as a success story, we forget that the majority of Americans in 1975 did not want to accept Vietnamese refugees. (A sign hung in the window of a store near my parents’ grocery: “Another American forced out of business by the Vietnamese.”) For a country that prides itself on the American dream, refugees are simply un-American, despite the fact that some of the original English settlers of this country, the Puritans, were religious refugees.

Today, Syrian refugees face a similar reaction. To some Europeans, these refugees seem un-European for reasons of culture, religion and language. And in Europe and the United States, the attacks in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando, Fla., have people fearing that Syrian refugees could be Islamic radicals, forgetting that those refugees are some of the first victims of the Islamic State.

Because those judgments have been rendered on many who have been cast out or who have fled, it is important for those of us who were refugees to remind the world of what our experiences mean.

I was — I am — the lucky kind of refugee who was carried along by his parents and who had no memory of the crossing. For people like my parents and the Syrians today, their voyages across land and sea are far more perilous than the ones undertaken by astronauts or Christopher Columbus. To those watching news reports, the refugees may be threatening or pitiful, but in reality, they are nothing less than heroic.

They will remain scarred by their history. It is understandable that some do not want to speak of their scars and might want to pretend that they are not refugees. It is more glamorous to be an exile, more comprehensible to be an immigrant, more desirable to be an expatriate. The need to belong can change refugees themselves both consciously and unconsciously, as has happened to me and others.

A Vietnamese colleague of mine once jokingly referred to his journey from “refugee to bourgeoisie.” When I told him I, too, was a refugee, he stopped joking and said, “You don’t look like one.”

He was right. We can be invisible even to one another. But it is precisely because I do not look like a refugee that I have to proclaim being one, even when those of us who were refugees would rather forget that there was a time when the world thought us to be less than human.