New discovery allows human embryos to continue to develop outside the mother's body.
Although research on human embryos outside of the body has been going on for some time, until now scientists have been unable to keep the developing for more than a week. But new research has found a way to keep them alive for up to fourteen days, possibly much longer, according to a story on NPR.
The research team ended the experiment due to a long-standing rule that put a limit on human embryo research of only being allowed in the first fourteen days, and some are beginning to question whether the rule should be changed in light of the new discovery.
The research was built on work done by scientists that found a way to keep mouse embryos alive for longer periods in a lab environment and prompted the team to wonder if the same could be done with human embryos.
Magdelena Zernicka-Goetz, a professor of developmental biology at the University of Cambridge in England and her colleagues came up with a mix of amino acids, hormones and growth factors, that according to Zernicka-Goetz “would allow embryos to feel as good as they would feel in the body of the mother.”
Zernicka-Goetz’s group, along with a team from Rockefeller University in New York, decided to conduct the experiment, and successfully kept the embryos developing for an additional week. Previously, scientists had thought human embryos would only continue to develop in the womb after reaching the critical seven-day mark, when the embryo becomes embedded within the womb.
The researchers were astonished to see the embryos in the dish begin to organize themselves into early stages of organs and tissues, without receiving instructions from the body of the mother.
This new discovery has scientists thinking about how much can be learned from studying the development of the embryos outside the body, but also fuels the debate about at which point life begins. Some suggest abandoning the 14-day rule would lead to researchers taking liberties with embryos, and asking if there is a limit to what we will do in search of scientific knowledge.
Likely there will be a great deal of debate, from both the scientific and the moral positions on human embryos before any rule changes can be considered, as was the case when the rule was first implemented. Scientists say there could be many valuable lessons learned that may even help prevent miscarriages and birth defects with increased research in the area.
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