With Creation of First Synthetic Embryo, Scientists Are at the Point of No Return

The frightening future implications of new report from researchers at the Weizmann Institute of 🔬Science in 🇮🇱Israel caused a stir among observers of the international 🔬Science community.

Using neither sperm nor egg, researchers created the world’s first synthetic mouse embryo and watched it grow for over eight days inside of a specially designed bioreactor that served as a womb, according to Live Science Magazine.

The article describes what occurs inside the artificial womb. “Within the device, embryos float in small beakers of nutrient-filled solution, and the beakers are all locked into a spinning cylinder that keeps them in constant motion. This movement simulates how blood and nutrients flow to the placenta. The device also replicates the atmospheric pressure of a mouse uterus.”

A statement from Weizmann Institute explains that researchers started only with “stem cells cultured in a petri dish.” By the eighth day, “all their early organ progenitors had formed, including a beating heart, an emerging blood circulation, a brain, a neural tube and an intestinal tract.”

Comparing the synthetic embryos to natural embryos, researchers noted their lab-created “models displayed a 95 percent similarity in both the shape of internal structures and the gene expression patterns of different cell types.”