Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel successfully generated living, growing, mouse embryos complete with organ progenitors from stem cells alone—and they did it entirely ex utero, keeping them alive for eight days with the aid of an artificial womb that previously maintained harvested embryos until they were 11 days old. The feat opens doors to new research on development and disease and raises questions about how far such research can—or should—go.
“As soon as the science starts to move into a place where it’s feasible to go from a stem cell population in a Petri dish all the way through to organ development—which suggests one day it will be possible to go all the way to creating a living organism—it’s a pretty wild and remarkable time,” Paul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, tells ...
