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Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Human being grown raises so many question: who are the legal parents, can they inherit, who's responsible for the chid education and welfare, what's the effect on culture, what's the effect of human generic diversity and evolution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

At the moment these artificial "embroys" aren't really human beings though, any more than a kidney is a whole ass person. These clumps of cells don't grow lungs, a brain, or any of the other structures required to form a full person and they are extremely unlikely to form viable pregnancies if implanted into a womb.

The ethical questions are likely to be more related to how long scientists should be allowed to grow these artificial embryos for in a lab and more generally whether the laws for scientific growth of real human embryos should apply to artificial ones or if the potential benefits outweigh the ickyness.

Any debate about actually growing full humans using this tech is probably decades away from being really relevant and could potentially harm research into pregnancy - research that could easily save a lot of lives.