Artificial wombs and embryos made from skin cells – remarkable new techniques could revolutionise reproductive biology and help bring an end to infertility

Neil Bromhall/Science Photo Library

YUE SHAO wasn’t trying to create an embryo. But, a few years ago, working in a lab at the University of Michigan, he witnessed something mind-boggling. The cells he was working with seemed to assemble themselves into what looked just like an early-stage human.

“We were looking for something else,” says Shao, a bioengineer now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – but “serendipity hit”.

The idea that scientists could create the first steps towards human life is astonishing, but Shao’s discovery wasn’t the first. A year before he published his results in 2017, research by a team in Japan led to the birth of live mouse pups using eggs the team made from adult skin cells.

Discoveries like these are bringing us closer to solving some of the most intractable problems in reproductive biology and medicine. By recreating these first days of development in the lab, researchers are breaking open the black box of early pregnancy, a poorly understood and fragile time at which most miscarriages happen and fertility treatments fail.

Now 40 years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, the potential of these breakthroughs is heralding a new biological revolution, one that forces us to rethink what it means to reproduce and make a baby. And there’s a lot to consider. Imagine being able to conceive a child from someone’s skin cells, for instance – with or without their consent. Given the ability to make a human artificially, we need to decide whether we want to.

Already, some 1.5 per cent of all babies born in western Europe, North America and Australia are conceived …