A team of researchers in the United States and United Kingdom say they have created the world’s first synthetic human embryo-like structures from stem cells, bypassing the need for eggs and sperm. These embryo-like structures are at the very earliest stages of human development: They don’t have a beating heart or a brain, for example. But scientists say they could one day help advance the understanding of genetic diseases or the causes of miscarriages. The research raises critical legal and ethical questions, and many countries, including the US, don’t have laws governing the creation or trea ..read more

Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether ..read more

Families are smaller and people are waiting longer to have children than in years past, according to data released this week by the National Center for Health Statistics. The U.S. teen birth rate hit a record low in 2019, the NCHS report shows, with fewer than 1.7 births per 100 teen girls ages 15 to 19. The teen birth rate has fallen sharply since 2007 amid a decades-long pattern of decline, according to the report, but it’s still higher than the rates in many other high-income countries. The overall fertility rate in the U.S. declined from 2015 to 2020, additional NCHS data shows, reaching ..read more

Patients who have undergone in vitro fertilization (IVF) are exploring moving their frozen embryos to ‘safer’ states, even as there's no threat to them for now. In recent days, several of the country’s fertility networks, has fielded calls from worried patients in abortion-ban states who are inquiring about moving their frozen embryos to a “safer” place. “We’re hearing a lot of concern and fear from patients” that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade could also affect fertility treatments, said Boston IVF’s CEO, David Stern. Legal experts say the ruling doesn’t pose an immediate thr ..read more

The US saw the first increase in the number of births last year since 2014, after a pronounced drop during the shutdowns of the first year of the pandemic that disrupted much social and economic activity. The total number of births rose to 3.66 million in 2021, up from 3.61 million the year before, provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics showed Tuesday. Last year’s 1% gain marked a big turnaround from the 3.8% drop in 2020, which had outpaced the average 2% annual decline over the 2014-20 period. The baby bump offers good news from a long-term economic perspecti ..read more

Babies whose moms were vaccinated during pregnancy against COVID-19 have long-lasting antibody protection, a new study finds. "Many interested parties from parents to pediatricians want to know how long maternal antibodies persist in infants after vaccination, and now we can provide some answers," said co-senior study author Dr. Andrea Edlow. She is a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), in Boston. For the study, Edlow and her team compared babies born to women who had received two doses of an mRNA vaccine with those born to unvaccinated mothers who w ..read more

The finding that some genes are active from the get-go challenges the textbook view that genes don't become active in human embryos until they are made up of four-to-eight cells, two or three days after fertilization. The newly discovered activity begins at the one-cell stage -- far sooner than previously thought -- promising to change the way we think about our developmental origins. The research, published in Cell Stem Cell, was co-led by Professor Tony Perry at the University of Bath, Dr Giles Yeo at the University of Cambridge and Dr Matthew VerMilyea at Ovation Fertility, US. Using a met ..read more

An intense but short-term exposure to cannabis vapor lowered sperm counts and slowed sperm movement, or motility, not only in the directly exposed male mice but also in their sons. The Washington State University study, recently published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, builds on other human and animal studies, showing that cannabis can impede male reproductive function. The current study uses more controlled circumstances than human studies, which often have to rely on surveys, and is the first known reproductive study to use vaporized whole cannabis in mice, which is the more common ..read more

Keeping human embryos alive in a dish is getting easier. How are researchers and ethicists responding? In a laboratory in Israel, an incubator drum spins on a bench. The two glass bottles attached to the drum contain mouse embryos, each the size of a grain of rice, with translucent, pulsing hearts. Whole mouse embryos have typically been grown in vitro for only about 24 hours. But by carefully tuning the mix of chemicals that the mouse embryos are bathed in, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, managed to sustain five-day-old embryos outside the uterus for six more ..read more

Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days. Here’s what they could learn. It was day 13 in a set of experiments in Ali Brivanlou’s laboratory and he had an agonizing task ahead. His team of developmental biologists had thawed dozens of human embryos, placed them into individual culture dishes and watched them grow through the earliest stages of development — something that only a handful of researchers worldwide had ever seen. But he knew that it had to end. The embryos would soon bump up against the 14-day rule, an international consensus that huma ..read more