Wow, that’s a major breakthrough!!! 🤩🤩

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Researchers Create Human Egg Cells From Blood Cells

A team of Japanese Researchers has succeeded, for the first time, in creating human eggs cells from adult human blood cells. Their technique involves extracting the blood cells and turning them into induced pluripotent stem cells, placed inside miniature ovaries created from mouse embryonic cells, where they transform into egg cells.

The current product of this process is immature egg cells, but in the future it will almost certainly be possible to produce mature, and therefore reproductively viable, egg cells by this technique, and to create such cells from nearly any type of adult DNA-containing cell.

The ramifications of this are hard to overstate. An end to infertility issues? Quite likely. New techniques of creating ‘Designer Babies’, even before the fetal stage (and thus avoiding any legal barriers that apply or may some day apply only at fetal stages and beyond)? Probably. A means for LGBTQ+ people to have babies together which are wholly the product of their own DNA? Possibly. Getting pregnant by willing or unwilling Dead People, Celebrities, or anyone else for whom a single DNA-bearing cell sample can be obtained? A near certainty, barring probable laws against or severely curtailing such things.

Most dramatically: Could this become the basis for a radical evolutionary change in human reproduction, resulting in as-yet-unknowable changes to our species, perhaps even the eventual end of sex itself as a human behavior? That is, remarkably, not even remotely outside the realm of possibility, though this would likely take many, many generations to develop.

These are just some of the issues raised by this, alongside the ever present question regarding all such technologies: if everyone can make babies of their own, then how will we ever hope to solve the problem of Orphans? Each such innovation reduces the available pool of potential parents for children who have lost their caretakers, been abandoned, or simply been unwanted.

#BlindMeWithScience #Biology #ReproductiveHealth

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/20/649552734/scientists-create-immature-human-eggs-from-stem-cells?ft=nprml&f=1007//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js