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A child without sex or children "on order"
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
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The natural way of continuing life, namely sex – a physiological act in which male sperm fertilizes a female egg, will soon be replaced by a completely different procedure, i.e. in order to conceive a baby, people will not have to have sex at all. This assumption was made by geneticist Hank Greely, a professor at Stanford University. According to him, in the future, people will be able to choose the gender, facial features, character of the future baby, and this approach to conception will be considered quite normal in just a couple of decades. The advantage of this approach is that changing the genome of the embryo will eliminate hereditary pathologies.
Professor Greely explained that to create children, only the mother's skin cells would be needed to obtain genetic material, on the basis of which the father's eggs and sperm would be created for fertilization. The new method would allow hundreds of embryos to be obtained, and parents would be able to choose "the one" baby from among them.
It can be said that on the one hand, humanity has already reached the level of development to create children “to order”, but according to Greely, specialists currently have insufficient “baggage” of theoretical knowledge for the practice of creating “custom” children to become widely used, but this is only a matter of time.
Having a child without sex may seem like an unrealistic and even utopian idea, but this topic has stirred up serious debates and various publications are already discussing issues related to the ethical side, in particular, whether it is possible to interfere with the DNA of an embryo to rid the offspring of hereditary pathologies. Many experts support Hank Greely, but there are still those who condemn such experiments with "nature". But be that as it may, in the USA they have already permitted experiments with genes, during which children from three parents are created - abnormal chondriosomes of embryos are replaced with donor ones (from a third person), and in Great Britain a similar procedure has already been legalized.
It is worth noting that such experiments are widespread, for example, in China, specialists managed to grow spermatozoa fully fit for their main function in laboratory conditions. The research of Chinese experts can be considered a real breakthrough in the field of reproductive health. The experiment was conducted by a group of scientists from Nanjing Medical University and Beijing Academy of Sciences. The scientists took embryonic stem cells treated with cytokines and influenced them with androgens, as a result, artificial spermatozoa with a full haploid set of chromosomes were obtained. Experiments on mice showed that female mice fertilized with sperm grown in the laboratory successfully conceived, carried and gave birth to healthy offspring on time, which confirms the suitability of artificial sperm.
Chinese experts intend to repeat their research to eliminate inaccuracies and confirm the effectiveness of artificial sperm. If subsequent experiments show the same results, then in the future, the participation of men will not be needed at all to continue the human race.