Heidi Ledford in Nature:
Off a quiet hallway on the top floor of a building at the University of Osaka in Japan, Katsuhiko Hayashi is hatching a revolution. He is on a decades-long quest to grow eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Hayashi wants to understand the fundamental biology of these reproductive cells. But, if he succeeds, it could forever alter how humans reproduce. Even for a scientist known for extreme doggedness, it has been a tortuous road. It has taken Hayashi to some strange places: his lab grows fragments of faux ovaries and testes in dishes and has produced mice with two fathers and no mother1. Every paper he publishes brings e-mails from people clamouring for help with their fertility. “I tell them, ‘This is still experimental’,” Hayashi says. “But sometimes, I can’t respond. There are too many.”
The work that Hayashi and others in the field are doing could offer fresh hope to people struggling with infertility, and to same-sex couples who want children who are genetically related to both partners. But despite the dazzling results researchers have achieved in rodents, that future remains distant. “The technology is super cool,” says Christian Kramme, chief scientific officer at Gameto, a fertility-focused biotechnology company in Austin, Texas. “But fundamentally, I don’t believe there is a single person in the world that should attempt to enact this clinically in the next decade.”
More here.
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