A team of scientists created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, without the need to resort to eggs or sperm. This is a revolutionary advance that could potentially help in the investigation of genetic disorders.
As published by the British newspaper The Guardian, it is an innovative step forward in the science and research that it proposes. However, at the same time, it brings ethical dilemmas and legal problems.
Experts from the United Kingdom and the United States indicate that these model embryos, which resemble those found in the earliest stages of human development, could provide, for example, a crucial window into the biological causes of recurrent miscarriages.
The structures do not have a beating heart or the beginning of a brain; although they include cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, the yolk sac, and the embryo itself. “We can create models similar to human embryos by reprogramming the cells”, says Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, from the California Institute of Technology (United States), commented during an intervention carried out within the framework of an annual congress in Boston of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Right now, it is not legal to implant these synthetic embryos
According to this, there is now no short-term prospect that these synthetic embryos will be used clinically and it would be illegal to implant them into a patient’s uterus. It is also not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue to mature beyond the earliest phases of development.
In another appearance at the conference, the head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute (London), Robin Lovell-Badge, said that “the idea is that if we use stem cells to really model normal embryonic development human, you can get a lot of information about how we started development; that is, what can go wrong, without having to use embryos in their early phase for research”.
