Israel Scientists ‘Create’ Human Embryo (Worthy News In-Depth)
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Worthy News
REHOVOT, ISRAEL (Worthy News) – Scientists in Israel say they have managed to “create” an entity resembling an early human embryo without using sperm, eggs, or a womb.
Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, just south of Tel Aviv, announced that a “research team headed by Professor Jacob Hanna” at the Weizmann Institute of Science “created complete models of human embryos.”
They based the ‘creation’ on “stem cells cultured in the lab – and managed to grow them outside the womb up to day 14.”
Chemicals were used to coax these stem cells into becoming four types of cells found in the earliest stages of the human embryo.
In a statement seen by Worthy News, Hanna said that “it closely mimics the development of a real human embryo, particularly the emergence of its exquisitely fine architecture.”
He added in separate remarks that “this is really a textbook image of a human day-14 embryo,” which “hasn’t been done before.”
The first weeks after sperm fertilizes an egg is a period of dramatic change – from a collection of indistinct cells to something that eventually becomes recognizable on a baby scan.
REAL DRAMA
Hannah stressed that the research was done realizing that “the drama” of any pregnant woman “is in the first month; the remaining eight months of pregnancy are mainly lots of growth.”
Yet, “that first month is still largely a black box. Our stem cell–derived human embryo model offers an ethical and accessible way of peering into this box,” Hanna claimed.
The findings, also published in the respected Nature magazine, added to a debate about how far scientists can go to create or manipulate human embryos.
This week, The New Yorker magazine documented the life-changing ambitions of He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist whose gene editing of human babies led to infamy and a prison sentence.
His experiments involved the birth of twin girls, Lulu and Nana, as well as a third gene-edited baby named Amy
He — known as JK to friends and colleagues — was intrigued by gene editing to cure or even prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s, and HIV-AIDS.
But his ambitions were “almost godlike” in scope, critics said, with JK telling colleagues he planned to cure a range of severe diseases and radically extend the human lifespan to 120 years.
WORK CONTROVERSIAL
“I understand my work will be controversial,” he said later. “But I believe families need this technology, and I’m willing to take the criticism for them.”
Back in Israel, Professor Hanna defended her teams’ research as a different tool to produce healthy babies. He said their models faithfully emulated a process by which an early embryo gains all the structures it needs to transform into a fetus.
Hanna made clear that the ambition for embryo models is to provide “an ethical” way of understanding the earliest moments human lives. “Many failures of pregnancy occur in the first few weeks, often before the woman even knows she’s pregnant,” he said in a statement obtained by Worthy News
“That’s also when many birth defects originate, even though they tend to be discovered much later,” Hannah stressed. “Our models can be used to reveal the biochemical and mechanical signals that ensure proper development at this early stage and the ways in which that development can go wrong.”
Yet, critics say embryo research is legally, ethically, and technically fraught.
However, Hanna and other researchers point out that their embryo models were allowed to grow and develop only until they were comparable to an embryo 14 days after fertilization.
In many countries, this is the legal cut-off for usual embryo research for now. However, questions remained Wednesday if other safeguards are needed and whether the science community should extend its role in (helping) to create other humans.
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