• Question: Will it ever be possible to another human without using sperm cells?

    Asked by Nikola Tesla to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Kylie Belchamber

      Kylie Belchamber answered on 20 Jun 2016:


      Good question!
      I think this is possible now. Scientists have used chemicals to make an egg start dividing, and forming into an embryo. Noone has seen whether this embryo could become a baby, or even survive past a few weeks, but I think it is possible.
      Doing this raises a lot of questions ethically though. Is doing this ok? Why would we want to not use sperm and make two person babies?

      Also, by doing this, the baby would be an exact copy of the mother. They would look the same, think the same. They would also have to same genes and same genetic diseases as the mother. the benefit of having two person babies, is that they get half their genes from the mother, and half from the father, so are a new entity and so less likely to get any bad genes.
      So yeh, it is possible, but whether we should ever use it in real life is a whole other question!

    • Photo: Matt Dunn

      Matt Dunn answered on 21 Jun 2016:


      The sperm is the genetic material from the father, which not only supplies 50% of the genetic material for the baby, it decides the sex of the baby (sperm have either a Y or X sex chromosome).

      So you’d need some way to reproduce a Y chromosome, as well as genetic material from a male, otherwise as Kylie says the children you develop will be just clones from the mother. The important thing about mixing two different genomes together is that you get variability, as the genes mix randomly and you get variation, which is why everyone is unique! 😀

      So it would be very difficult to reproduce this without extremely accurate genetic engineering, which might be possible in the future.

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