News from all over - Edinburgh

Dr. Paul De Sousa and a research team at the Roslin Institute, told a professional audience that they had just created human embryos from female eggs without using sperm. De Sousa's team employed electrical shocks to "trick" 300 eggs into dividing as if fertilized and was successful six times, creating 50-cell "blastocysts" that could eventually produce stem cells. De Sousa denied that his embryos would be implanted into wombs to create female fetuses (and said his government license does not authorize that), but could grow replacement tissue for a faulty organ of the egg's donor.