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by moofight 3316 days ago
underlying tech is the following:

- reprogram cells (could be any cells, here they are considering skin cells as they are easy to get) to become embryonic stem cells capable of growing into different kinds of cells

- use signaling factors that occur in nature to guide those stem cells to become eggs or sperm

This has been done with mice

1 comments

Did it "work" with mice? Ie. were the created eggs and sperm able to combine and start multiplying when put inside the appropriate part of a mouse?

That would be great, however the backlash from the more... conservative population will be equally huge, I guess :)

The work by Hayashi published last year had derived precursor egg cells, but the sperm was from normal mouse testes as usual. As described in the article, they did successfully create healthy offspring, though the success rate was very small.