Scientists grow whole model of human embryo, without sperm or egg

[Bowman 5,211]

"Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb. The Weizmann Institute team say their "embryo model", made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo. It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab. The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives. The first weeks after a sperm fertilises an egg is a period of dramatic change - from a collection of indistinct cells to something that eventually becomes recognisable on a baby scan. This crucial time is a major source of miscarriage and birth defects but poorly understood.

"It's a black box and that's not a cliche - our knowledge is very limited," Prof Jacob Hanna, from the Weizmann Institute of Science, tells me.

Starting material

Embryo research is legally, ethically and technically fraught. But there is now a rapidly developing field mimicking natural embryo development. This research, published in the journal Nature, is described by the Israeli team as the first "complete" embryo model for mimicking all the key structures that emerge in the early embryo.

"This is really a textbook image of a human day-14 embryo," Prof Hanna says, which "hasn't been done before".

Instead of a sperm and egg, the starting material was naive stem cells which were reprogrammed to gain the potential to become any type of tissue in the body. Chemicals were then used to coax these stem cells into becoming four types of cell found in the earliest stages of the human embryo:

epiblast cells, which become the embryo proper (or foetus)

trophoblast cells, which become the placenta hypoblast cells, which become the supportive yolk sac

extraembryonic mesoderm cells

A total of 120 of these cells were mixed in a precise ratio - and then, the scientists step back and watch."

 

 

[HiddenWeirdo 3,924]

That sounds like new material for AHS or Black Mirror 

[Helxig 36,766]

Oh my god???????

Literally so much science and tech is coming out so fast that all feels like a futuristic movie but it's NOW

Bookmark me, in 20 years people will be editing their DNA at will and splicing humans with other creatures

[Magic Mike 2,110]

6 minutes ago, Helxig said:

Bookmark me, in 20 years people will be editing their DNA at will and splicing humans with other creatures

We have ethical limits fortunately 

[Helxig 36,766]

22 minutes ago, Magic Mike said:

We have ethical limits fortunately 

They constantly get around them by pretending it's all for the greater good for medical advancements and health care... They push and push until they cave and let them do it.

Also do you think for a second that neuralink isn't going to be streaming ads directly into our brains? Or literally scanning out brains for targetted advertising? 

Neuralink + AI that can replicate people's voices seamlessly + AI that can write stories, create art and photorealistic images + deepfakes + that new technology that can read people's brainwaves and decode it into audio... we are literally a couple years away from Ashley O being fully possible.

It blows my mind how close we are to actually living in what we would still consider a 'futuristic' sci-fi movie... except it's not the crazy future from movies, it's here 

[RebeldeFaith 3,255]

Life starts at lab. 

[RAMROD 90,614]

Might be good to some people who are unable to bear a child for many reasons but want one. Yay science!

[Borislshere 52,143]

2 hours ago, Helxig said:

Oh my god???????

Literally so much science and tech is coming out so fast that all feels like a futuristic movie but it's NOW

Bookmark me, in 20 years people will be editing their DNA at will and splicing humans with other creatures

When I finally get to be a mermaid >>>

[Red 84,302]

This could go extremely well or terribly bad, let's pray

[Lukas96 701]

 

2 hours ago, Helxig said:

Bookmark me, in 20 years people will be editing their DNA at will 

you're a few years late : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6724388/

[Lukas96 701]

4 hours ago, Bowman said:

Instead of a sperm and egg, the starting material was naive stem cells which were reprogrammed to gain the potential to become any type of tissue in the body. Chemicals were then used to coax these stem cells into becoming four types of cell found in the earliest stages of the human embryo:

So they started form stem cells, which we already know have the potential to transform into any cell type, and stimulated them as they would be during that stage of development. Yeah, the results make sense

[Helxig 36,766]

17 hours ago, Lukas96 said:

 

you're a few years late : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6724388/

Nooo I know about crispr and gene editing. I meant more... freely changing our DNA as adults to mutate us into something different. It could be the new plastic surgery. Maybe even making themselves less humanoid idk. Something strange

[Lukas96 701]

10 hours ago, Helxig said:

Nooo I know about crispr and gene editing. I meant more... freely changing our DNA as adults to mutate us into something different. It could be the new plastic surgery. Maybe even making themselves less humanoid idk. Something strange

Well... some viruses already do that naturally, and genic therapy is currently a thing. So it remains to be seen how far people are willing to go with in vivo editing of human DNA.

Edited September 8 by Lukas96

[Economy 42,962]

On 9/7/2023 at 6:27 AM, Helxig said:

Oh my god???????

Literally so much science and tech is coming out so fast that all feels like a futuristic movie but it's NOW

Bookmark me, in 20 years people will be editing their DNA at will and splicing humans with other creatures

I think editing DNA may prove much more complicated for a grown human with 100 Trillion+ cells

 

Not saying it cant be done some way. But our current technological advancements for gene editing work in individual cells not a buncy at once

[phantasmas 6,671]

dont let Musky see this 

but for real... these kinds of things can quickly descend to eugenics

like a lot of techies are already reaching that point trying to create super babies  thinking their own DNA is the most suitable just because they code websites 

Edited September 12 by phantasmas