My husband Michael is a regular softy where babies are concerned. Not ALL babies, mind you. Just the blond, blue-eyed kind, who also happen to be twin boys. And as long as I’ve known him, Michael has long spouted his desire to add a pair of blond twins to our family “as soon as possible.”
As a French creole, Michael has experienced his share of racism, so before you scream that his preference to add a pair of blonds into the Hack-Davis household is reverse racism at its most obvious, know that he also wants a French creole baby named Little Ricky. Michael also expects perfection. And while normally I would say “good luck” to that, a new announcement out of Cambridge University may make his “order to go,” easier than we could have possibly imagined.
The researchers at Cambridge teamed with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science to pair stem cell lines from embryos with the skin of five different adults, according to the study published in the journal Cell. The experiment was a resounding success, resulting in what can most easily be understood as “manufactured” babies. Since they are created from the skin cells of two adults of the same gender, it is the very first hint that same-sex couples might have their own babies with no help from the opposite sex.
Last year, the researchers has made quiet news by creating live baby mice using nothing more than mice skin cells. The skin cells turn into the precursor for sperm and eggs, eventually maturing into fertile sperm and egss capable of producing life.
This week’s announcement marks the first time ever that engineered cells created in a laboratory were compared to aborted fetuses to determine an identical match. And match they did.
“We have succeeded in the first and most important step of this process, which is to show we can make these very early human stem cells in a dish,” Azim Surani, Wellcome Trust project leader and professor of physiology and reproduction at Cambridge, told the London Sunday Times. “We have also discovered that one of the things that happens in these germ cells is that epigenetic mutations, the cell mistakes that occur with age, are wiped out,” he said.
The researchers said that stem cells and adult human skin were used from ten different donor sources and new germ-cell lines were created from all the experiments. The SOX17 gene is critical in the “reprogramming” process of human cells, according the researchers. They have stated that the technique could mean same-sex couples could have babies in just two years.
The team says it is possible to make human egg and sperm cells from the skin of two adults of the same gender – prompting interest from people with infertility diseases and gay couples.
“It has already caused interest from gay groups because of the possibility of making egg and sperm cells from parents of the same sex,” Jacob Hanna, the specialist leading the project’s Israeli arm, said in the Sunday Times.
The researchers noted to the Sunday Times that the development raises serious ethical issues, but many can potentially benefit from the technique they’ve been testing on humans since creating artificial human eggs and sperm for the first time last year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Assisted Reproductive (ART) was performed at 456 clinics in the U.S. in 2012, resulting in 51,267 live births. Although still relatively “rare,” just over 1 percent of all infants born in the U.S. each year are conceived using ART methods.
