A few days ago, The Guardian published the news of the creation of synthetic human embryos from stem cells. A subject as thorny as it is revolutionary, which generates reactions of a legal, ethical, and scientific competence nature.

A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology presented at the annual Scientific Congress in Boston models that resemble the early stages of human development without the need for sperm or eggs, managing to create models of synthetic human embryos.

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Learning more about the subject, I discovered that there is not much information available beyond the press. In the scientific community, studies are published in journals, after peer review by independent researchers who check for possible pitfalls.

I found that the International Society for Stem Cell Research regulated the 14-day limit for studying human embryo models, restricting their use in the laboratory.

It stipulates that such embryos can only be cultured in vitro for a maximum of two weeks. Not that it is permissible to do so; it so happens that there is really no time after fertilization of the ovum that entails a substantial change in the living being that is in the process of development.

Hence, the unexpected announcement has led a sector of the scientific community to look at the news with astonishment and ask for the regulation of a promising technology in the study of fertility, since they are neither human embryos, nor are they transferable to a womb, so they are far from creating babies.

The finding refers to synthetic embryos created without sperm or eggs from stem cells grown in a Petri dish (laboratory culture box). The scientific milestone raises crucial legal and ethical questions, as the creation and handling of synthetic embryos are unregulated in many countries.

These practices are well advanced in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom, where ethicists and scientists are working to establish guidelines to ensure that synthetic embryo research is conducted in a responsible and compliant manner.

Undoubtedly, opinions are divided. The accelerated pace of new scientific progress in this field and the constant increase in sophistication lead bioethicists to believe that they are approaching the threshold of life by leaps and bounds. So, in this sense, uncertainty is being served.

Others welcome scientific advances. They consider that models obtained from stem cells offer an ethical and more easily accessible alternative to those achieved by in vitro fertilization. They argue, and rightly so, that it would help to better understand the process at the moment when the embryo begins the process of implantation in the uterus and pregnancy is established, a development about which little is known.

Colophon: Should we grant these synthetic human embryos the same moral status, the same protection, the same supervision that exists for natural embryos? I think so. You never know where they will end up.

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