by BRENDAN P. FOHT
by BRENDON FOHT
Last September saw the announcement from scientists of the first manufacture of human egg cells in the lab. As surprising as it may sound, the creation in a lab of human sex cells using stem cells has been in the works for over a decade, with earlier experiments succeeding in deriving primordial germ cells, the cells of an early embryo that eventually give rise to sperm and egg cells.
In the past, embryonic stem cells were used for these experiments. But researchers have begun to favor a relatively recent innovation: induced pluripotent stem cells, which have essentially the same properties as embryonic stem cells but are created by manipulating ordinary adult cells rather than by destroying embryos. For reproductive applications, creating egg or sperm cells using stem cells taken from adult patients would be more desirable than using embryonic stem cells, since patients would be able to use the resulting cells to make children genetically related to themselves, rather than to destroyed embryos.
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