Posted on 03/17/2021 6:24:51 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Quivering with life, the developing mice moved ever-so-slightly in their vials. Just a few days since they were fertilized, the rodent embryos were minuscule—smaller than an Aspirin tablet—but their existence a is monumental feat: they developed in an artificial uterus, a first in early mammalian science and a big step in improving scientists’ understanding of embryonic development.
The research, published today in the journal Nature, describes how the scientists took new embryos and developed them over the course of six days, about a third of the total mouse gestation period, outside of a rodent uterus.
“If you give an embryo the right conditions, its genetic code will function like a pre-set line of dominos, arranged to fall one after the other,” said co-author Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, in a Weizmann Institute of Science release. “Our aim was to recreate those conditions, and now we can watch, in real time, as each domino hits the next one in line.”
The initial mouse embryos consisted of just a few hundred cells and were placed on laboratory dishes mimicking the uterine wall. After a couple of days, the team moved the embryos into beakers filled with a nutrient solution and regulated the oxygen and carbon dioxide amounts and pressure of the embryos’ new environment. After about six days, the embryo’s growth was unsustainable, and they were destroyed before they came to term.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
Playing God. We’ve all seen this movie.
Several years ago there was a video of a sheep fetus growing in a large plastic container of some type. Scientists have been working on this for years. Maybe it has an application to help women who have miscarriages when they get pregnant.
Multiplying embryonic cells is one thing, but providing a full artificial placenta and umbilical that nourishes those cells to a fully viable fetus is quite another.
That’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw the headline.🤔
Test tube baby. Womb with a view.
It’s not as much fun as making life the old fashion way.
Wasn’t there something in BRAVE NEW WORLD about test tube babies?
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), something odd is going on at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The process is ectogenesis – the development of embryos in artificial environments – entailing the growth of individuals on flaps of fresh sow’s peritoneum in bottles on a conveyor belt “travelling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimetres an hour”.
If this even ever works for humans, how many horrific existences will the thousands of precursor embryos have to endure before they get it “right?”
Soon they will create replicants. Blade Runner is in our future.
Now they can grow new workers in beakers.
Brave New World here we come!
It was the next logical step after Doctor Bunsen Honeydew cloned him.
At 6 days, growth wad artificial smh unsustainable?
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