Me too, but I think it’s unsuitable for making sturdy joints from, dammit.
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Oh, no. IVF is very much on the chopping block (or sacrificial alter). Personhood amendments and laws recognize those fertilized eggs as beings, and make IVF clinics scenes of mass murder on an unimaginable scale. Well, according to them…
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Yeah this is not how I would use “synthetic” either.
Usually that would imply some building from scratch (i.e. synthesizing DNA and injecting into cells etc).
However reprogramming stem cells is super cool!
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First off they created an embryo, not a fetus. A ball of largely undifferentiated stem cells is no more a human being than a cluster of cancer cells in a petri dish.
Second, if people hadn’t conducted similar experiments then my children wouldn’t exist. So I usually don’t have a lot of patience for the “These sadistic creeps are mad scientists playing God!” crowd.
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But can we stick some AI wetware between its ears to make a truly synthetic life form? I mean, what could go wrong?
No kidding! The way they portrayed Soylent Green was far more nauseating to me than the original Soylent Green.
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So they took cells from an embryo, and made more…embryo?
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No, reprogrammed skin cells to stem cells and made essentially fertilized eggs/first few cell divisions. A good many steps from here to an embryo.
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I’m not seeing anything in the article that says they started with skin cells. The article says they started with stem cells, but doesn’t specify if they were taken from fully developed human beings or from human embryos.
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I does sound like the research is intentionally following a path not to be derived from embryos. It will be interesting (and probably unlikely) if progress in the techniques comes full circle to making whole embryos.
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In the bbc article on the same story:
“Meanwhile, scientists in China have implanted synthetic monkey embryos into female monkeys - although, all the pregnancies failed. “
Oops, you are correct. My brain combined two different articles. The one in question and
https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-turn-skin-cells-stem-cells
to come to an unindicated conclusion. My bad.
@Tribune
I does sound like the research is intentionally following a path not to be derived from embryos.
They said there is a legal issue of only keeping them to a max of 14 days, so I guess that’s how far you get in 2 weeks?
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It does seem inevitable that those two accomplishments will be combined at some point.
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based on what they’re seeing with mice ( and i guess monkeys like @Tribune said ) it sounds like they can’t get much further anyway for some reason. ( i’m so curious why, although i probably wouldn’t know enough to understand the answer )
still, it does feel having some legal limits like the ones you’re mentioning are a good idea for the moment. it seems like a super useful technique, and a potentially ethical quagmire
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… a “dermoid cyst” perhaps 
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Here to read all about Improv Bowel Syndrome in embryos. It’s gonna be great s… well, exo-amniotic fluid.
You liked that, they’ll sort of say. Here are nine other sponsored organisms you can gestate in the skin on your back.
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Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage.
Lab “humans” instead of lab rats.
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Not one single mention of “Frankenstein” in the comments? Gentlemen, ladies, and others, I salute you! Though I can’t help thinking of Gibson’s “meat vats” in Count Zero…
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This certainly isn’t an all-purpose argument in favor of doing it; but I assume that, unless your commitment is actually to fertility medicine for rodents, there are some purposes for which lab humans are either essential or preferable even to lab great apes.
Synthetic embryos would also seem to be a promising ethical optimization vs. situations where human embryos are already used; since obtaining eggs is a relatively nasty business. I’m reminded of the case of Hwang Woo-suk who, in addition to a variety of research-related sins of fabrication, explored a sordid variety of…imperfectly voluntary…procurement techniques to get the necessary eggs.
A cluster of largely undifferentiated cells is not a human being. The majority of human embryos (whether conceived naturally or in a laboratory) never reach the implantation stage, let alone develop into a living breathing human.
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