It's still one of the biggest mysteries in science: How does a human cell - too small to see with the naked eye - divide and reproduce to ultimately become a human body made up of more than 30 trillion cells?
: How does a human cell - too small to see with the naked eye - divide and reproduce to ultimately become a human body made up of more than 30 trillion cells?
Recent breakthroughs in the field, the culmination of years of painstaking lab work, have generated hope and some alarm, raising urgent questions about the ethical status of these models, to what extent they should be treated like human embryos and whether they are open to misuse.The embryo-like structures are essentially clumps of cells grown in a lab, which are smaller than a grain of rice and represent the very earliest stages of human development, before any organs have formed.
"But by day four, you start seeing … this has a structure, you know, you can see where the embryo is going to form … and see where the yolk sac is going to be." However, only one per cent of the aggregated cells went on to self-organise into an embryo-like structure. The boundary was established by the United Kingdom's Fertilisation and Embryology Act in 1990 in the wake of public concern about test tube babies before in vitro fertilisation was widely accepted, as well as worries that scientists were ignoring the special moral status of human embryos.It's possible in the future that these models could be used to study human development well beyond the 14-day point.
"Because of their stem cell base, we can scale everything up. We can do experiments on them that we are not able to do on precious, rare embryos. And so it just changes the types of experiments we can do and the questions we can answer," said Naomi Moris, group leader at the Francis Crick Institute's Developmental Models Laboratory in London.Pregnant people have often been excluded from drug trials because of concerns about the safety of the parent and unborn child.
Some in the field envision a "tipping point" wherein human embryo models might be afforded some protection like those surrounding human embryos, as scientific advances diminish the differences between the embryo models and their real-life counterparts.
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