NEW: For the first time, researchers have created “synthetic” embryos with monkeys—animals closely related to humans—and tried to establish pregnancies with these embryo-like structures.
they could create human blastoids using stem cells. And last year, researchers at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology reported that they created mouse structures mimicking natural embryos at 8.5 days of development, which even had beating hearts and neural folds, the foundations of the brain.
For now, scientists want to use them to better understand early pregnancy. “Because monkeys are closely related to humans evolutionarily, we hope the study of these models will deepen our understanding of human embryonic development, including shedding light on some of the causes of early miscarriages,” said Zhen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, one of the authors of the study, in aStill, trying this in a monkey is the closest approximation to what could happen in a human.
Embryo models give researchers an alternative without having to rely on the real thing. But as they get more sophisticated, they are raising concerns of their own. “I think what we’d really like to know is: Can an embryo model give rise to a living organism?” Greely says. “If it can, then it should be treated like an embryo. If it can't, then it doesn't need to be treated like an embryo.”
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