No men OR women needed: Scientists create sperm and eggs from stem cells

29.10.2009

The British e-edition The Daily Mail reported about another important discovery in the field of reproductive medicine. The article “No men OR women needed: Scientists create sperm and eggs from stem cells” states that scientists at the Stanford University (CA, USA) have grown egg and sperm cells in vitro”.

The Daily Mail says that scientists in California found the right cocktail of chemicals and vitamins to coax the cells into becoming eggs and sperm. The sperm had heads and short tails and are thought to have been mature enough to fertilise an egg. The eggs were at a much earlier stage but were still much more developed than any created so far by other scientists.

Scientists at Newcastle University claimed to have made sperm from embryonic stem cells in the previous year, but the research paper has been retracted.

Now American scientists hope to be successful in using human skin as a material for producing stem cells. The skin cells would first be exposed to a mixture which wound back their biological clocks to embryonic stem cell state, before being transformed into sperm or eggs.

It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own. This research would allow gay couples to have children genetically their own. The successful research of the U.S. team could unlock many of the secrets of egg and sperm production, leading to new drug treatments for infertility, for example, creation of medicine to prevent menopause and make it possible for women to deliver children at a more mature age – edition adds.

However, the paper notices that a lot of moral and ethical problems arise. Will human beings be removed from the process of reproduction? Besides, for stem cells production one has to create an embryo, which than dies. This, according to the viewpoint of the experiment opponents, causes a moral dilemma: to create a life one has to take away another life.

Appeared in The Daily Mail and Newsru.com.