Back in the day, when Women’s Liberation was just beginning to bite, a popular T-shirt bore the motto “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Now, on its face, implementation of this idea would have negative implications for human reproduction. However, advocates of this principle were wont to cite the phenomenon of parthenogenesis, through which the females of some species could induce their own pregnancy sans a male partner.

But Science trumps Social Revolution. Scientists from the Land of the Rising Sun and Divine Wind (kamikaze to you), led by Katsuhiko Hayashi of Osaka University, have created mouse embryos without using female eggs. Instead, they used tail scraping from two boy mice. Employing CRISPR, CAT-9, and most likely invocations of The Evil One, they converted the scrapings into pluripotent stem cells, and thence into 630 mouse embryos which they implanted into lady mice. Seven (7) of these embryos developed into happy, healthy little vermin. Well, a success rate of 1% is not overly impressive, but great oaks from little acorns grow.

Now, to some extent, this seems like cheating. But in order to get females entirely out of the picture, we don’t even need to wait for the denizens of the country that created sushi and the Walkman to produce an artificial womb. Jun Wu of the University of Texas has already developed a bio-reactor which has successfully supported early mouse embryo development.

So we can now update the old slogan to read “Men need women, and women need men, like a fish needs a bicycle.” While this slogan will even further suppress underwater bicycle sales, it is highly unlikely to crash the economy.

So we have now figured out how to eliminate both men and women from the process of reproduction. And you thought AI was dangerous! HAH!

Terminator, eat your heart out!