I'm plotting out a post-nano sci-fi story with a shapeshifting superagent who's changes are VERY thorough. The character is going to be stranded on an isolated station, unable to rejoin his side of the war for YEARS, with information that his side needs. In order to make sure it arrives, even if it's not in his lifetime, he's going to self-impregnate. Not something he was designed... it's at this point that I've confused myself, here's my questions:
I've already established that his changes include internal organs, because this is high-tech and if it were just superficial, they'd be able to detect it and I need him to be undetectable. So, he can make himself have ovaries and eggs--do I need to toss in some technobabble about him being a new, different chromosome to make this work?
What would the offspring be to him genetically? It would be a new combination of genes, so not a clone. Would it be the equivalent of a full sibling genetically? Or the equivalent of the child of full siblings? I have confused myself!
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105,000 / 50,000
Nov 30, 2008 - 20 33
from what i've read, there are dozens of types of real hermaphrodites. Your guy really is gonna be sci-fi if he can reproduce though, especially asexually. I don't think you need to go so far as having extra chromosomes if you don't want to. But you can just do a play off of being intersexed as it's called. I looked up the basics for ya:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001669.htm
I say just go off of the regular stuff if you want. Cells devide asexually, and create daughter-cells that are a complete replica of it's parent cell, if i remember my biology correctly. I'd think they only name them 'daughter' cells because traditionally only females give birth. You could play around with that though.
281 / 50,000
Nov 30, 2008 - 22 33
It sounds like an interesting concept. The ovaries of course are what the male testes form from in our own biology. All fetus go through a stage where they are female. It's just the influx of testosterone that starts the process of becoming male (if I remember my basic science right. You would probably have to have the nanites (or whatever you call them) somehow reprogram his biochemistry to produce female hormones. I understand men who undergo sex change operations have to do so already so that much is standard. Would need to somehow create a uterus and the other assorted parts unless you plan him/her to have a c-section. Though you might want to have those parts form anyway if he's deep undercover. Otherwise a Dr. might get suspicious if a pregnant woman comes to the hospital and doesn't have a clear means of becoming pregnant. Would need to change bone structure with the nanites too I'd think. Hormones would change his muscle tone but not the underlying structure it's attached to. Would also need to get rid of the adams apple since women don't have one. Might want to have him be knocked unconscious while all this is going on otherwise he's probably going to feel a lot of discomfort. I'd think that since the babies genetic material would come from him that it would be his child just as in a normal pregnancy. Of course he/she would have to have some story of why no 'father' appears in the picture. Probably some story of how he'd died in some accident or something. Since he would no doubt have had comrades who had died on missions while undercover maybe one of them could be the deceased father. Or he could have worked it out with someone back home ahead of time and they could 'fake up' a father who is dead. The English did something like that in WWII. Got hold of a john doe body and after dressing it in flying gear and planting fake papers on the body they left it where the germans would find it. The germans fell for the deception.
66,952 / 50,000
Nov 30, 2008 - 22 37
I say just go off of the regular stuff if you want. Cells devide asexually, and create daughter-cells that are a complete replica of it's parent cell, if i remember my biology correctly. I'd think they only name them 'daughter' cells because traditionally only females give birth. You could play around with that though.
He's (and I'm using the term 'he' very loosely) isn't reproducing asexually, though, that's the point. He's taking a male shape, producing a sperm sample, then taking a female shape and inseminating himself. He'd have to stay female for nine months then.
I'm trying to avoid making this character any more powerful than he already is--lol, that's why I'm trapping him and killing him off! Creating a clone would just give me a second overly power character. (His powers are non-hereditary, the offspring is going to be the much more challenged MC.)
I'm thinking the parent would need to be a totally technobabbled new thing, neighter XX or XY, because he's got to have something that would combine. But I need imput from someone better at science...
76,494 / 50,000
Nov 30, 2008 - 22 49
I'm intersexed myself and completely infertile.
For chromosomes, well, they would have to be XXXY to even have two different sets of genitals, and even then I'm not sure if they would work.
But then, the komodo dragon in the London zoo reproduced through parthenogenesis... however it was a female.
Gah, I don't know. It would be slightly difficult to suspend my disbelief if I read something like that. If anything it would be a bit insulting to my intersexuality.
AAAND it looks like I didn't read this properly.
Ok. I have XY chromosomes myself, BUT I am capable of carrying a baby to term with the right regime of hormone therapy, because I possess a uterus. I don't have ovaries though.
So it sounds plausible if this transformation could spontaneously change testicles into ovaries, but they would need the time to produce eggs. And the right hormones too.
53,774 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 06 20
I've got hermaphroditic characters - actual, true hermaphrodites. (They aren't human, by the way.) Generally speaking, such a thing wouldn't self-impregnate, since the whole point of sexual reproduction is to mix traits. Asexual reproduction produces clones of the parent organism.
The way you've set it up, with him being male and collecting sperm, then taking his female form and using artificial insemination... Well, I have shapeshifting characters who could do the same thing (not that most of them would). It would work, potentially, but I think it would push the boundary of belief more towards fantasy than science fiction. Is there any reason he can't just take his female form, wait to ovulate and just get pregnant by a random guy off the street? Why does it need to be totally self-contained?
Genetically speaking, I think the offspring you're plotting would more like a sibling, since it would (in effect) have the genetic information from the character's parents. I'm an identical twin, so I think about these things. (If I were to marry my sister's husband's brother, any kids would - genetically - be half-siblings. If we were to marry identical twins, the kids would, be genetic full siblings.)
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63,914 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 06 57
Sounds like the offspring would be a real case of a blended child. *Ow* It also sounds like it gives new meaning to the expression, "Go f**k yourself". *Ow, ow*. Or at least "F**k off and die..." *okay, I'm leaving now.
30,146 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 07 19
I think there are two different issues here;
a) the mechanics
b) the genetics
I studied genetics and anthropology, among other things, at university. Thinking about a) first, as some of the posters have already replied, with more personal insight than I would have, there are indeed intersex people, sometimes known as hermaphrodites. But everyone is limited to two gonads (testes/ovaries), and once you're past about 12 weeks or so of embryonic development,a testis is too different from an ovary to change from one to the other, or vice versa. Intersex people can come with many different combos of genitalia, such as external male genitals and internal female ones, but they almost always have two ovaries or two testes. I think your person would need one ovary and one testis, and would need to alternate between male and female phases. If he/she had a uterus and a penis, that would work. Ursula le Guin wrote some very good science fiction about a hermaphroditic race, which she made sound quite convincing without getting into technical details.
Moving on to b), this is quite a separate issue. The usual function of sexual reproduction is to mix up genes from different individuals, as I am sure you know. I have two daughters. Each shares only half my genetic material, because the other half comes from their father. Two siblings on average share half their genetic material, but since the exact genes that go into each sperm and egg are a matter of chance, they may by chance share more than half (if two very similar sperm and eggs got lucky) or less (if sperm and eggs containing very different shares of the parents' genetic material met up). The most similar two siblings can be is identical, as in identical twins: you can also get rare cases where an egg splits just before fertilisation, so you can get twins who are identical on the mother's side but from different sperm.
The other form of reproduction is asexual. One particular form of asexual reproduction is parthenogenesis, where the parent produces an identical offspring. Some species of stick insect usually reproduce this way, with the mother laying eggs without the action of a male, which hatch to little stick insects identical to herself.
In your case, the same person is producing eggs and sperm. Each egg and sperm will have only 1/2 his genetic material. Neither of them get any genetic material from anywhere else. Therefore all the genes in the baby will have come from the parent, but the baby won't necessarily have all the parent's genes, because it may get a double copy of some of them. For example, if the parent has one gene for blue eyes and one gene for brown, it could be that the egg and sperm he makes both contain the blue eyed gene or both contain the brown one. Therefore, the offspring will not necessarily be genetically identical to their parent, but won't contain any novel genetic material (except for any mutations that might occur) and will tend to much less genetic variation and more doubling up of genes than the parent. Sexual reproduction with yourself is, after all, the most extreme version of inbreeding that can be envisaged. It makes incest look positively healthy, genetically speaking, in comparison, because at least a normal parent and child only share 50% of their genetic material, rather than 100%, as when your own egg and sperm meet up.
The other possibility would be to use technology to make a human egg self-fertile, as with the stick insects, by not dropping its chromosome count in half during its maturation, or by some other means. But that would require your MC to be basically female. A sperm on its own has no long term future, because it doesn't have the food reserves to be anything but a jet propelled pack of DNA.
Hope this helps.
50,123 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 09 14
From what I understand, the child (assuming mechanics and biology and everything else allow a pregnancy) would be caught somewhere between--genetically speaking--a sibling, a clone, and an incestuous child.
----------50,874 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 11 35
Well ... I don't know about all this chromosome stuff, but here's a simple solution.
Okay. So. You could have him start off male. That way he could be, like, his own sperm bank. You know, when he's a male, he saves some of his sperm, and then uses it while he's female to impregnate himself.
But I have no idea what relationship that would be ...
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50,646 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 14 41
Like someone said, this is probably a bit more fantasy than it is scifi.
But, you know, in one phase, the XY chromosomes are going to be active, while in the other the XX will...
So don't the two phases have different-enough genetic material anyway?
66,952 / 50,000
Dec 12, 2008 - 15 08
Mechanics: think Odo from Deep Space Nine, or Mystique from the X-Men comics...
His mission is the steal the ultimate weapons platform, basically a space station that can create a wormhole and appear in orbit over anyone's planet. But he's overpowered and I have only about 100 pages worth of outline, so I'm trapping him with the station in a wormhole. There IS nobody else.
Yes it did, and thanks. I'm sorry if anyone was (even from reading things wrong) offended by what I'd wrote. My character isn't a naturally occuring hermaphrodite at all, which is why I didn't decribe him as intersexed.
50,347 / 50,000
Dec 2, 2008 - 15 08
If anything, I think that this would be harder. If the character has the right supplies to take a sperm sample and impregnate him/herself, then it would probably be the easiest way to get pregnant. You wouldn't have to worry about STDs or ugly genes or anything.
Which brings up another point. This shapeshifter...does he have an original form, and genes that correspond with that? Or do his genes change with his shape? And if so, does he have any amount of control over the genes themselves, such as recessive characteristics that don't show up physically? Because if all of that is true, then he could conceivably spawn the most gorgeous, perfect human the world has ever seen. Or, on the other hand, the ugliest. Which would be a very interesting viewpoint, and is kind of making me want to steal this vague perception of your idea and run away with it.
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Also...I can kill you with my brain. ~River Tam
20,006 / 50,000
Dec 7, 2008 - 14 19
I just got done reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which goes into this in great detail.
Your character's offspring must be some form of clone, because 100% of the original genetic material comes from a single parent. Because of the extremely narrow gene pool here, the genes and alleles must match up with their positions on the original DNA, or else the child will not be viable. There could be extremely small differences, I suppose, but only a genetics expert could answer that intelligently.
It sounds to me like it would be a lot easier for the character to just opt to get knocked up, and take it from there. (It would be healthier, too.)
If you're hoping that the offspring will carry information native to the parent via genetics, that's impossible: the matrix of brain memories cannot be passed on genetically. However, the child could be tutored very thoroughly. I also can't help but wonder if a culture this advanced technologically might have a variety of ways to encode information biologically.
----------They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday. - Robert A. Heinlein
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