Eggs can now be created, more bad news for the planet. This is the most depressing news we’ve heard in a long time, right up there with the planet’s population passing 7 billion. Apparently human eggs can now be created from stem cells. More eggs, more fertility, more people. Do we really want this?
From NPR Monday, February 27:
‘Study Suggests Way To Create New Eggs In Women
by Rob Stein
NPR – February 27, 2012
For decades, scientists have thought that one of the big differences between men and women is that men can make children all their lives because men never stop making sperm. But scientific dogma said women aren’t so lucky when it comes to their eggs.
“The traditional belief in the field has been that when a baby girl is born, she is given a bank account of eggs, and that bank cannot be added to, only withdrawn from,” said Jonathan Tilly, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
In 2004, Tilly shocked the scientific world when he claimed he had found primitive “stem” cells hiding in the ovaries of adult female mice that could generate new eggs. That raised the possibility that it might be true for women as well.
In a series of experiments being published in the March issue of the journal Nature Medicine, Tilly and his colleagues say they have proved young adult women have the same cells.
“What this means is that little bank account of eggs that a little girl gets at birth is in fact open to continued deposits,” Tilly said.
Here’s what Tilly and his colleagues did: First, they got some ovarian tissue from young women. Then they isolated cells that appeared identical to the ones they had found in mice. Next, they say, they showed that the cells can develop into eggs in a dish in the laboratory.
“Right before our eyes, in culture dishes, we were watching that process happen for the first time,” Tilly said.
The researchers then injected the cells back into human ovarian tissue to see if they would turn into eggs on their own. To make sure they were looking at the right cells, the scientists genetically engineered them to glow green. The cells started turning into eggs — and even formed crucial structures called follicles, the researchers report.
“It is those follicle structures that are key to maturing that egg cell to the point where it becomes able to accept sperm and produce an embryo,” he said.’