Japanese scientists have claimed they’re on the cusp of growing human babies in the lab, by incubating eggs and sperm in an artificial womb.
Indeed, tykes from concentrate could be available to mothers in as little as five years, according to Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a stem cell biology expert at Kyushu University, the DailyMail has reported.
His team notably used this synthetic surrogacy method to create baby mice from two daddy rodents — as pre-proof-of-concept of the tech’s implications for same-sex parents.
According to the novel study published in March in the journal Nature, the team transformed male mice’s skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, which have the potential to develop into various types of cells or tissues, like a cellular shapeshifter.
Japanese scientists, led by professor Katsuhiko Hayashi (pictured), have claimed they’re on the cusp of growing human babies in the lab, by incubating eggs and sperm in an artificial womb.Kyushu University
Researchers then grew these cells and treated them with a drug that converted the male rodent stem cells into female cells, thereby producing functional egg cells.
Fertilizing those eggs and implanting this baby blueprint into female mice, meanwhile, resulted in the artificial conception of male mice.
And while only 1% of the embryos — seven out of 630 — grew into live mouse pups, researchers thought the experiment potentially had important implications for human reproduction.
“It’s a very clever strategy,” said Diana Laird, a stem cell and reproductive expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.
“It’s an important step in both stem cell and reproductive biology.”
Indeed, this process could theoretically be replicated in humans by infusing embryos spawned via pluripotent stem cells into a female womb.
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