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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Project: bioengineering an all-female breed of chicken to end chick culling, published by Cienna on April 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In this post, "I" refers to Cienna's point of view, with Q&A answers and accuracy checking by Zane. I'm backing the research crowdfunding campaign Can bioengineering be used to create an all-female breed of chickens? which asks, what does it take to get male chickens to lay eggs so the egg industry won't cull them? This experiment is a step toward a possible solution to ending the cruel and wasteful practice of male chick culling in the commercial egg industry. Mr. Zane Oberholzer, PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, will be testing regulator sequences for their ability to selectively suppress the expression of the gene DMRT1 in gonadal tissue, resulting in the development of ovaries instead of testes. We’re posting here about this project and our conversation in case others are interested in funding this research experiment too. This all-or-nothing raise is open until EOD Pacific Time on May 4th, 2022 (unless it gets extended, which sometimes happens). The problem Commercial chicken meat and chicken eggs come from different specialized breeds. For the egg industry, laying hens are needed, but only enough males to maintain the breeding population. Chickens have a sex ratio of roughly 50/50, so the male chicks are regarded as a wasted investment and culled. One attempted partial solution to this problem is egg-sorting machines, which separate the eggs by sex before hatching. This saves part of the time investment, but despite having been around for a while, this tech is still disappointingly cumbersome. An on-paper partial solution would be to transfer the unwanted male chicks to the meat industry, where they would live several weeks longer and maybe die a less painful death. But in practicality the laying breeds are physiologically very different from the "broiler" meat chickens and would not be wanted. Broilers have been selected for rapid growth and efficient conversion of high-protein feed into muscle mass. Layer breeds take longer to mature and have different physical proportions. A marketing premium would be needed to compensate for the higher cost of raising smaller, slower-growing birds. The project Well, what if the male chicks could grow up to lay eggs too? Then all the chicks would be wanted. No sex sorting would be needed. The same size breeding flock with the same resource inputs could produce twice as many egg layers. Here's a background bit of clarification: hens lay eggs regardless of whether those eggs are fertilized. Ovulation results in egg laying. No roosters are needed for hens to lay eggs, only for those eggs to have the potential to develop into chicks. So a chicken doesn't have to be genetically fertile in order to lay eggs. The question is, does a chicken have to have the female combination of sex chromosomes in order to ovulate? Creating a breed of chickens where all the adults lay eggs is beyond the scope of this small experiment; luckily, other researchers in the same lab are working on synergistic projects toward the shared goal of engineering such chickens. I'll let you read about this experiment's scope, details, methods, budget, timeline, ethics documents, et cetera on the project page, since Zane has already covered those. Our conversation At first the idea of an all-female breed of chickens sounded pretty "out there" to me. I took a coffee walk to sort my thoughts, and found I could imagine that it was doable, just not how it could be done. I returned with a bunch of poorly formed questions about sex determination in birds, and a curiosity to learn what I didn't know that made this seem doable to someone else. I reached out to Zane, who agreed to a video c...