Jef Akst, Managing Editor
The Scientist is cautious about covering preprints, given their preliminary, unreviewed nature, but this one raised so many questions that we thought it deserved a closer look. To summarize, researchers surgically joined the circulation of a female rat with that of a castrated male with a transplanted uterus. This allowed them to transfer embryos into the uteruses of each animal, and 4 percent of the time, the males were able to maintain the pregnancy and deliver viable pups via Cesarean section. The first author of the preprint, graduate student Rongjia Zhang at the Naval Medical University in Shanghai, China, told freelance writer Andy Tay that she was interested in the feasibility of the approach and suggested that it could serve as a model for interrogating reproductive biology more broadly, but outside experts questioned the utility and ethics of the work. Certainly, unlike the use of transplantation ...
