WILL SEX BECOME OBSOLETE?

New technologies could reimagine baby-making as we know it. But will they actually replace tried-and-tested (and enjoyable) methods?

Over the past decade, I have made some bold predictions about the future of sex. One that's been easy is that people will still be having sex for years to come, but for different reasons: they simply won't do it so much to make babies. That's not to say that making babies will become obsolete, but, rather, that technology will change the ways we do it. There could be a much safer and easier way to reproduce and sex as we know it could end.

Until about a century ago, humans always created embryos and babies in the same old, largely random way - through sex. Then some started using artificial insemination and, 45 years ago, in vitro fertilisation. Important as these technologies have been, they still involve human eggs and sperm. Thanks to stem cell technologies, though, that will shift.

The step change will be in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) - turning skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, then turning those into eggs and sperm. IVG is tremendously exciting to millions of couples, but it does raise some tricky questions. For example, if we could make eggs from skin cells, 90-year-olds could become genetic parents. So could nine-year-olds, miscarried foetuses or people who have been dead for years, but whose cells were frozen.

Also consider this: what if we could ma sperm from women's skin cells, or eggs from men's? It could soon be a reality. In 2023, Japanese scientists announced that they had made eggs from a male mouse's skin cells and, using 'normal' mouse sperm, had produced mouse pups.