New Japanese discovery paves the way for raising babies in a lab by 2028

Japanese scientists say they are going to grow human babies in the lab by incubating eggs and sperm in an artificial womb.

With this new breakthrough, Japanese scientists will be able to produce human eggs and sperm in the lab from scratch, which can then be developed in an artificial womb.

Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, the stem cell biologist at Kyushu University who discovered the process in mice, thinks he has only five more years to replicate the results in humans.

Hayashi’s team used this “artificial surrogacy” method to create mouse babies from two male biological parents, using the mouse’s skin cells to create a viable egg and then fertilizing it.

According to a new study published in the journal Nature, scientists have transformed male mouse skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, which have the ability to develop into different types of cells or tissues, such as cell formers.

The team then grew these cells and treated them with a drug that transformed the male stem cells into female ones, thereby producing functional eggs.

Meanwhile, the fertilization of these eggs and the implantation of this baby model into female mice simultaneously resulted in the artificial conception of male mice.

Although only 1% of the embryos (seven out of 630) turned into live mice, the scientists believe the experiment could have important implications for human reproduction.

“It’s a very smart strategy,” says Diana Laird, a stem and reproductive cell expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “This is an important step in both stem cells and reproductive biology.”

In fact, this process could theoretically be replicated in humans by introducing embryos produced by pluripotent stem cells into the uterus of a female.

However, while the scientists were able to create human eggs and sperm in the lab — a process known as in vitro gametogenesis — they were unable to create the original embryos. In other words, the artificial conception of children is still in its infancy.

Dr. Hayashi calculated that it would take about half a century to replicate the production of ovoid cells in humans, and 10 to 20 years of testing to confirm that this artificial reproduction method is safe to use in clinics.

One of the problems with this scientific breakthrough is the mutations and errors that can be introduced into the Petri dish before the stem cells are used to produce eggs.

If successful, the technology could be a huge boon for those suffering from infertility, which affects one in six people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The idea of ​​lab-grown children is not without legal and ethical issues, including concerns about creating certain traits in children using gene-editing tools, giving way to the concept of a supposed ideal child.

There are also fears that some may be forced to have children against their will, using a lock of hair or a piece of skin.

Source: New York Post.