Researchers are making progress on producing cows from just stem cells, with no eggs or sperm involved. Some people are wondering if the same tech might one day work with humans.
Researchers are making progress on producing cows from just stem cells, with no eggs or sperm involved. Some people are wondering if the same tech might one day work with humans.
Can animals be made without sperm or eggs? The answer could upend our ideas about what life is.
There's no reason it couldn't work with any animal.
Ethical research guidelines bar any attempts to culture human embryos beyond 14 days of gestation, so as usual it’s clickbait and not something that will be explored anytime soon.
All it takes is one eccentric billionaire that wants to clone themself.
Any animal we have DNA for, I assume.
Do we have any dino DNA? Cave bear? Mammoth?
No, a critter is more than just DNA. And most genome sequences aren't complete, and DNA is currently slow to print artificially, and the OG samples from anything dead in ambient conditions for more than days are badly degraded.
If we have DNA we could maybe do it one day, in principle. Especially for critters like mammoths with living relatives. This particular tech from the story isn't highly related, though.
As a general concept, sure. Actually making it happen in a petri dish can be detail-intensive and unreliable, which is why we haven't been doing it routinely for decades.
New ipod ad just dropped.
Oh, is that how they make new customers? That tracks.
Holy Hell!
Synthetic embryos are clones, too—of the starting cells you grow them from. But they’re made without the need for eggs and can be created in far larger numbers—in theory, by the tens of thousands. And that’s what could revolutionize cattle breeding. Imagine that each year’s calves were all copies of the most muscled steer in the world, perfectly designed to turn grass into steak.
“I would love to see this become cloning 2.0,” says Carlos Pinzón-Arteaga, the veterinarian who spearheaded the laboratory work in Texas.
The article said it was not just for cattle, more for general science research.
Sure is a brave new world
Clone Wars (Star Wars) /joke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_Wars_(Star_Wars)
