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A startup that wants to change everything we know about reproduction: the children of the future will come from Silicon Valley laboratories
Silicon Valley has apparently found its core business: in the wake of the enormous sums of money raised by millionaires around the world, the attention of the dozens of start-ups that populate the San Francisco Bay Area seems to be increasingly focused on the prospects of creating human life in the laboratory . Among them is the start-up Conception, founded by Matt Krisilov, which aims to change the concept of reproduction forever.
Conception, the future of procreation
Matt Krisilov first appeared in Silicon Valley laboratories when he was only 26 and knew nothing about biology – despite claiming to be one of the founders of AirBnb, for example. Today, the start-up founded by Krisilov is going to make a sensation. His idea is to create human embryos from the cells of one or more donors.
“When will people of the same sex be able to have children?” this was the question that led to the birth of an ambitious industrial project that also aims to target women who cannot have children or are too old to conceive.
The company Krisilova is currently the largest company in the world dealing with the so-called in vitro gametogenesis, i.e. a technology that enables the reproduction and reproductive mechanisms of fertilization in the laboratory.
Conception, which raised over $ 20 million from ordinary millionaires investors who bankrolled Silicon Valley companies, started creating artificial eggs for infertile women, and now literally aims to create human life in the lab.
According to Krisilov, artificial eggs “could become one of the most important technologies of all time”. And that’s no exaggeration, they write in the MIT Technology Review: It really is about changing everything we know about human reproduction forever.
A ‘human factory’
The concept behind Conception stemmed from the discovery of the Nobel Prize winning so-called cellular reprogramming – the same technology behind experiments in neighboring laboratories that focus on tissue rejuvenation.
By reprogramming cells, it is possible to bring any cell in the body to the status of a “pluripotent” cell, that is, capable of transforming into any type of cell tissue, even an egg.
The project of Krisilov aims, in the words of the founder of Conception, “genetic selection and modification of embryos on a large scale”. Krisilov does not rule out the possibility of creating hundreds of eggs from each donor, testing them and choosing the best one.
This will allow men to have children, and women will be able to reproduce even after the age of 50 or 60, says Krisilov. On the other hand, it will also be possible to generate offspring in the laboratory from a single person or a large group of people.
A science fiction dream doomed to collide with the most fundamental ethical issues, but feasible. “The question is not if, but when we will succeed,” says Krisilov.
