First Two-Week Human Embryo Grown Outside the Womb

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in cultivating a human embryo outside the mother's womb for two weeks. According to Reuters, this achievement is significant as it provides unique knowledge about the 'most mysterious early stage of human life.' Previously, scientists could only keep an embryo in the lab for seven days before it needed to be transferred to the mother's body to continue living and growing. However, in this new method, which had previously been used for cultivating mouse embryos in the lab, the team was able to monitor the embryo's growth hour by hour for 13 days. Dr. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz from the University of Cambridge, one of the research team leaders, states, 'This is the most obscure and mysterious stage of human development. This is when the initial shape of the body is determined.' This work (which includes two separate studies published in the prestigious scientific journals Nature and Nature Cell Biology) shows how cells that ultimately form the body shape themselves into the structure of the embryo. Dr. Martha Shahbazi, another member of the research team, says, 'Embryonic growth is a very complex process, and while our system may not be able to replicate all these stages, it shows us how remarkable self-organization (in these cells) exists.' The results of this research are as intriguing for biologists as they are appealing to fertility specialists. However, another issue that scientists in this field face is international regulations that limit embryo growth outside the mother's womb to two weeks. Dr. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz states that cultivating embryos for a longer period would provide very important information about human biology. But the question also arises: how far can this go?