Stanford Researchers Create Germ Cells in the Lab
Embryonic stem cells are the building blocks of life and can be manipulated into a variety of tissues types. Perhaps most remarkably, the Stanford researchers were able to coax these embryonic stem cells to “go all the way through the reductional process of meiosis so the cells contain just one copy of a chromosome, a critical step in sexual reproduction,” Lisa M. Krieger writes for the San Jose Mercury News.
Making a baby from these cells isn’t the point of the research; instead, the Stanford team plans to study the earliest stages of human development in order to examine infertility, genetic disease and birth defects.
“Human development is a very complex process, and we’ve never had a system before to study it in the lab, to see the things we can see now,” Renee Reijo Pera, the lead investigator who directs Stanford’s Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education Center, told the Mercury News.
“One major hurdle is coaxing the cells to halve their number of chromosomes, which involves a form of cell division known as meiosis,” Dennis wrote. The Stanford researchers have done just that, bringing us one step closer to what Dennis calls “[s]ynthetic sex cells.”
As Krieger explains, it isn’t “ethical or feasible” to create a baby from sperm or eggs produced in a lab, due to the fact that the germ cells created by the Stanford researchers contain transgenes, or foreign DNA.
“We don’t make children that carry foreign DNA,” Reijo Pera told the Mercury News. “It’s not ethical; we don’t know where the DNA could land” during the development process.
According to Reijo Pera, researchers are also “waiting for guidelines and regulations” on how to work with artificial germ cells.