For a book/movie with a decent (if optimistic) grasp of genetics, its grasp of chaos theory was utterly ignorant.
bookofjoe•May 24, 2026
For a sec there I thought the National Enquirer had gotten a new lease on life.
yewenjie•May 24, 2026
Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
Maybe short term, pumping out chickens. For food.
Long term, maybe chickens are just the test case and they will pump out human slaves. Replicants.
vitally3643•May 24, 2026
No. This is a very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest. Do better.
fragmede•May 24, 2026
To be fair, artificial womb technology would really mess with society.
himata4113•May 24, 2026
That's very likely to be the future of the human race where governments produce, train and push out artificial humans like a factory. Well if we don't solve aging and robotics by then, then we'll probably just stop having babies altogether or at least not in a quantity that matters.
It could end the abortion issue if fertilized eggs could be moved early enough. Any woman who didn't want a baby could have it transferred to an artificial womb and sign away all rights to/responsibility for it. Any father who wanted their child when the mother didn't could keep it. It could help premature infants too.
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
"very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest"
1. Take a common trope in fiction and research for a hundred years. With long known commonly linked ramifications.
2. A company actually starts doing it.
3. Suggest a link
4. -> Call it Stupid.
Yeah. Don't worry about it at all. Nothing to see here.
stavros•May 24, 2026
If we wanted to pump out human slaves now, I don't think the main obstacle is that we can't find enough women to bear them.
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
If they are born of woman, they would be human.
If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
Perhaps some gene editing to give them 'blue' skin, some non-historically-biased-color to identify them.
Really. There are ton of books with these themes already. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said, and now a company is doing it, so why am I getting downvoted.
stavros•May 24, 2026
Yeah but there's also the book where we make people in a lab and they're great and everyone lives happily ever after forever. Don't cherry-pick your data.
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
So I'm not providing a good literary survey of books with similar tropes and providing some of the positive ones? There are literally half dozen very famous negative examples, but I didn't do good enough search to find a positive one?
That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.
stavros•May 24, 2026
No man, it's just that saying "this scenario is popular because it makes for a good story therefore it'll happen in reality" is an absurd point to make.
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
Taking scientific breakthroughs and extrapolating and/or comparing to Science Fiction? Shock, clutch my pearls, who would do such a thing. The absurdity. Surely nobody has done this before.
stavros•May 24, 2026
And they were all about as right as chance!
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
Sure. If you take all of Science Fiction, if you want, take all of Literature. And compare it to everything that actually has happened. Then Fiction has guessed at more things than have actually happened. So, a poor predictor.
Not sure what that point is proving. We shouldn't look at fiction for any inspiration or cautionary tales? Just shut up and calculate?
stavros•May 24, 2026
The point is proving that "chickens now, maybe humans later" is just an extremely poor predictor. It's a useless disapproval of a new technology based on "hey, you can't prove it won't happen!".
Dylan16807•May 24, 2026
Gene editing is a whole different topic. And only the very first one would need to be "born of woman".
Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
Eggs are simpler than Wombs. Chickens are simpler than Humans. Of course we have to solve the simpler things first. Of course, this is leading along the same path as occurs in Brave New World. We have to be able to grow chickens before we can move on to humans.
We already have cloning. But have lacked being able to do it without implanting the egg into a female. This is just getting us closer.
Baby steps. That the dystopia isn't happening today doesn't mean we aren't working on it.
fragmede•May 24, 2026
What is "it", exactly? I have probably read some of the same dystopian science fiction novels as you have. But this is Jurassic Park, not A Brave New World.
FrustratedMonky•May 24, 2026
In one of the movies, they did clone a human, they just didn't lean into that story line. It was treated as a one-off, but the same science allowed both. (in the fictional story)
The point isn't that we'll have humans tomorrow. Just that this one step. We'll need to solve problems on simpler animals first. An egg is easier than a womb, a chicken is easier than a human. It's the start.
So yes. Brave New World isn't today. But its obvious this technology is on the same path.
jurgenburgen•May 24, 2026
> If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.
Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.
jfengel•May 24, 2026
They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.
hypfer•May 24, 2026
Yes, yes. Dodos.
The endgame of this is Dodos.
dandellion•May 24, 2026
Yes, first they'll focus on normal dodos. Then, they'll try very large Dodos. After that, very, very ancient dodos. Followed by island dodos. Then they might set up a whole island that people can visit, full of all kinds of dodos. They'll do tours with self driving cars so people can see all the dodos from a safe distance.
fontain•May 24, 2026
Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.
fragmede•May 24, 2026
They shall spare no expense.
incognito124•May 24, 2026
One thing is for sure: they'll still be using a UNIX system
Avicebron•May 24, 2026
I'm holding out hope we can get the moa birds back in my lifetime.
jaggederest•May 24, 2026
Or the South American terrorbirds, the extant species are tiny, seriemas, and they're very interesting. I bet one that weighs 700 pounds would be even more exciting
fontain•May 24, 2026
A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.
onion2k•May 24, 2026
[Colossal Biosciences] has raised over $600 million and carries a valuation exceeding $10 billion.
You're not making a return on that from selling velocirator skeletons. Nor is that sort of money in dodos and maos.
Human cloning on the other hand...
fragmede•May 24, 2026
It's been a while since high school biology class, and I can't ask my sister right now, but I don't think humans are born in eggs. What does an artificial egg hatching chickens have to do with cloning humans?
himata4113•May 24, 2026
Technically speaking, we could engineer it in a way where humans are born from eggs. It would just have to be a very big egg and would also have to continue growing in an incubator after hatching much like chickens rather than the standard womb senario.
... probably just easier to grow babies in a tube
margalabargala•May 24, 2026
Arguably humans are born from large, soft-shelled, ambulatory eggs.
stavros•May 24, 2026
I mean, if you can make a velociraptor, the skeleton isn't the bit you'll make money on.
bot403•May 24, 2026
And I feel like lab grown Velociraptor skeletons aren't going to fetch $10 million. Rarity and something new to study is part of the value.
stavros•May 24, 2026
Yeah. Imagine how much you can make on live velociraptors.
mauvehaus•May 24, 2026
Surely the rarity is partially due to the velociraptor skeleton cartel limiting the supply. And really, a velociraptor skeleton wasn't even a traditional engagement gift until they created the demand for it with that advertising campaign back in the day.
ProblemFactory•May 24, 2026
How about a theme park? With velociraptors and other jurassic era animals?
jurgenburgen•May 24, 2026
I would pay money for that, it would give Disney a run for their money. Throw in some woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers as well.
MagicMoonlight•May 24, 2026
Disney makes more from theme parks than from everything else combined. Dinosaurs would be better than anything Disney has ever made.
VladVladikoff•May 24, 2026
This article is so strange. It is written by the company, but written in a way that an outsider would write.
> Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.
mr_toad•May 24, 2026
Press releases are often written for lazy publications to copy and paste.
x-yl•May 24, 2026
It says at the bottom:
> This story is based on original reporting by Christina Larson for National Geographic. Read the full feature on National Geographic
Also, that is the kind of corporate PR articles that are made to be quasi copy/pasted by journalists.
daniel_iversen•May 24, 2026
I've just started listening to the book "Brave new world" (no spoilers please!) and this is literally how the book begins (but with humans) - what could possibly go wrong!
mplanchard•May 24, 2026
No spoilers, but I used to think, along the lines of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.
Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
kombine•May 24, 2026
I haven't read Brave New World but "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin left a similar impression on me, it's more subtle than 1984. It came out earlier than both books by the Western authors - even though Zamyatin was inspired while working in England in early 20th century.
Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.
There was a good theatre adaption of The Machine Stops by a UK group called Pilot Theatre (I saw it at York). They performed it as a live Youtube broadcast during the faf of 2020, though I can't see it listed anywhere now. Worth having a look for if you have better sources than mine. I must have a scan of my media array later, to see if I downloaded a copy I can rewatch.
detourdog•May 24, 2026
Thank you I will look for it.
Cassell•May 24, 2026
mephi
wartywhoa23•May 24, 2026
> Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984.
The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.
aaronbrethorst•May 24, 2026
1984 was as much (or more) about Stalinism and totalitarian tendencies in 1948 as it was a cautionary tale about the future.
dimes•May 24, 2026
1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.
JKCalhoun•May 24, 2026
No spoilers, but I've come to think that "Brave New World" actually is Utopian—in the "give people what they want" department.
Actually.. not much. Education is taken care of.
Gestation is taken care of.
You grow up your young with a company instead of a family, if you want to be involved at all. All things that could go wrong, already sort of have over the last ten years and have been accordingly ironed out of humanity.
Sexuality as couples is already gone for large parts of the yoynger population.
Culturally the family is as good as gone. Woman have kicked themselves enthusiastically out of all roles the species had to offer, except for that of work drone and that is going obsolete right now. They and their allies (almost all of those allies cheer on the ideas of incubators) wildly detest the idea of going back to traditional roles. Society has to come from somewhere and this is somewhere.. nothing of value was lost..
dimes•May 24, 2026
Without spoiling anything, I wouldn’t say anything “goes wrong” in Brave New World, at least as far as procreation is concerned.
technothrasher•May 24, 2026
Well, it's just like this except that... oh, you said no spoilers :)
lekevicius•May 24, 2026
I always knew that egg came first.
andy99•May 24, 2026
requires real hen for fertilization and laying
paul_ny•May 24, 2026
Huh… from the original Nat Geo article:
scientists inspect eggs newly laid by real hens within 24 to 48 hours. They select the most promising ones, crack them open, and delicately pour the contents—everything but the shell—into the artificial egg structure. But everything that happened before then, from fertilization to egg laying, required a real chicken.
paul_ny•May 24, 2026
So, this means the egg came first, right?
unfitted2545•May 24, 2026
Eggs are IaC.
guerrilla•May 24, 2026
The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.
maxerickson•May 24, 2026
Why? The current method is cheap.
sghiassy•May 24, 2026
Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous
zamadatix•May 24, 2026
At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.
dullcrisp•May 24, 2026
I agree we should focus more on reviving ancient horrors.
yehosef•May 24, 2026
like draw and quarter?
standardUser•May 24, 2026
Creating a food system that is more cruel to animals than what we already have is a very high bar. Not that I doubt we can clear it.
margalabargala•May 24, 2026
Is that a problem?
tao_oat•May 24, 2026
If you consider factory farming horrific, then yes
margalabargala•May 24, 2026
Factory farming refers to a wide set of practices that range from loathsome to banal.
I don't see how the use of this technology makes factory farming any worse than it already is. Maybe it saves male chicks from the shredder, making it slightly less loathsome.
aaronbrethorst•May 24, 2026
We already have Soylent
bushwart•May 24, 2026
life finds a way
eutropia•May 24, 2026
Colossal Biosciences
and its
goal of resurrecting extinct bird species
"bird species"?
C'mon.
They want to do a Jurassic Park.
yjftsjthsd-h•May 24, 2026
Baby steps:)
cbdevidal•May 24, 2026
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could…
jeroenvlek•May 24, 2026
Am I the only one wondering if it's 26 chickens at once from a single artificial egg or they just succeeded 26 times with different eggs? Rationally it probably has to be the latter, but the title confuses me.
dag100•May 24, 2026
You could RTFA and find out.
(26 different artificial eggs. The artificial egg is the main development. Basically they take a chicken embryo (by cracking open a fertilized egg) and allow it to develop inside the artificial egg, and from which it can eventually be "hatched". Other methods for growing chickens from embryos outside their eggs have not had very high success rates.)
jeroenvlek•May 24, 2026
Yeah..., or you could read the rest of the comment section and learn that I have RTFA, but that TFA was changed with one that explains it better:
Colossal Biosciences has other ongoing projects including reviving the "Red Wolf" using DNA from coyote/wolf hybrids and CRISPR. They also want to introduce a Wooly Mammoth/elephant hybrid.
The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:
> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.
wyager•May 24, 2026
It seems bizarre to model the end goal of this research as "grow more birds". Obviously that's not the point
deadbabe•May 24, 2026
How will they resurrect a dodo? Is the idea that they have some DNA somewhere?
16 Comments
Long term, maybe chickens are just the test case and they will pump out human slaves. Replicants.
1. Take a common trope in fiction and research for a hundred years. With long known commonly linked ramifications.
2. A company actually starts doing it.
3. Suggest a link
4. -> Call it Stupid.
Yeah. Don't worry about it at all. Nothing to see here.
If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
Perhaps some gene editing to give them 'blue' skin, some non-historically-biased-color to identify them.
Really. There are ton of books with these themes already. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said, and now a company is doing it, so why am I getting downvoted.
That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.
Not sure what that point is proving. We shouldn't look at fiction for any inspiration or cautionary tales? Just shut up and calculate?
Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.
We already have cloning. But have lacked being able to do it without implanting the egg into a female. This is just getting us closer.
Baby steps. That the dystopia isn't happening today doesn't mean we aren't working on it.
The point isn't that we'll have humans tomorrow. Just that this one step. We'll need to solve problems on simpler animals first. An egg is easier than a womb, a chicken is easier than a human. It's the start.
So yes. Brave New World isn't today. But its obvious this technology is on the same path.
We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.
Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.
The endgame of this is Dodos.
You're not making a return on that from selling velocirator skeletons. Nor is that sort of money in dodos and maos.
Human cloning on the other hand...
... probably just easier to grow babies in a tube
> Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.
> This story is based on original reporting by Christina Larson for National Geographic. Read the full feature on National Geographic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/artificia...
Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
I will look up We.
The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.
About his ideas for utopia he wrote "Island": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
Sexuality as couples is already gone for large parts of the yoynger population. Culturally the family is as good as gone. Woman have kicked themselves enthusiastically out of all roles the species had to offer, except for that of work drone and that is going obsolete right now. They and their allies (almost all of those allies cheer on the ideas of incubators) wildly detest the idea of going back to traditional roles. Society has to come from somewhere and this is somewhere.. nothing of value was lost..
I don't see how the use of this technology makes factory farming any worse than it already is. Maybe it saves male chicks from the shredder, making it slightly less loathsome.
C'mon.
They want to do a Jurassic Park.
(26 different artificial eggs. The artificial egg is the main development. Basically they take a chicken embryo (by cracking open a fertilized egg) and allow it to develop inside the artificial egg, and from which it can eventually be "hatched". Other methods for growing chickens from embryos outside their eggs have not had very high success rates.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257929
This was what I read: https://colossal.com/colossal-biosciences-artificial-egg-dod...
The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/1135222/red-wolv... (paywall)
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.