'It is reminiscent of such spectacular scientific advances as the birth of Dolly the sheep.'
Scientists have created"synthetic" mouse embryos from stem cells without a dad's sperm or a mom's egg or womb.
People are also reading… A study published Thursday in the journal Nature, by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues, was the latest to describe the synthetic mouse embryos. A similar study, by Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues, was published earlier this month in the journal Cell. Hanna was also a coauthor on the Nature paper.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS Feed | Omny Studio Scientists said next steps include trying to coax the synthetic mouse embryos to develop past 8 ½ days — with the eventual goal of getting them to term, which is 20 days for a mouse. Other scientists have already used human stem cells to create a"blastoid," a structure mimicking a pre-embryo, that can serve as a research alternative to a real one.
"In the future, similar experiments will be done with human cells and that, at some point, will yield similar results," he said."This should encourage considerations of the ethics and societal impact of these experiments before they happen."The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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