PALESTINIAN CHRISTIAN SAVANT: MALE-TO-MALE REPRODUCTION POSSIBLE

Dr. Jacob Hanna, a Palestinian Christian scientist and a Mexican researcher have succeeded in growing a mammal embryo outside the womb, the first in the world, Smadar Reisfeld reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Hanna and his team have coaxed a mouse embryo to grow at his laboratory in Weizmann Institute in Rehovot for 11.5 days to the point of gastrulation (or the formation of three layers of tissues leading to the formation of organs), thus opening the possibility of growing synthetic embryos for organ implants, to creating an infant whose biological parents are two men.

“Now that we have before our eyes an embryo that is not hidden by the uterine wall, we can easily track the dynamics of its development. We can mark cells and see the path they follow, find the genes that are involved in the process of forming the organs, discover the mechanisms that are responsible for that wonder,” Hanna explained.

“We are indeed trying to move from a mature cell to a stem cell and back to a – different – mature cell (Prof. Shinya Yamanaka restored a mature cell to its former state in 2006, six years later, he won the Nobel Prize for medicine along with Sir John B. Gurdon.) Backward and forward, all along the way, or only a few stations. To maneuver as we wish, but not in order to ‘play God,’ but in order to understand the laws that organize the system. The ability to control the stages is the ultimate sign, the proof, that we have understood the basic principles, and in addition, this flexibility makes it possible to do a number of exceptional and marvelous things that could change people’s lives.”

He added: “We can already turn a skin cell into a stem cell in mice. You take a skin cell, take it backward to become an embryonic stem cell, and then move it forward so it differentiates into an egg. Among humans, we are able to reach only the station before the last – until the origin cell that is meant to develop into sex cells – but I hope that soon, we will also decipher the transition to the final stage, the creation of the egg, which by its nature takes place in the ovary. That means that women will be exempt from the need to provide eggs. We will not need to collect eggs from women, whom we previously flooded with hormones in order to stimulate their ovaries, in cases where they have difficulty producing eggs spontaneously. Egg donation will become unnecessary and there won’t be pressured to freeze eggs – in all these cases a simple skin cell will suffice, which can be turned into an egg in the laboratory.”

“I estimate that within a few years, unless we encounter an unexpected obstacle. And from there the way will not be long to something that sounds even more fantastic: to produce eggs from the cell of a man.”

He stressed: “Effectively, this is a route that’s very similar to the one I described earlier, of creating an egg from a skin cell – but this time the skin cell will come from a male. Just like before, we will take the skin cell and return it to the condition of a stem cell. We will program it to be the origin cell that creates the sex cells, as previously, but before that, we will remove the Y chromosome [the male sex chromosome] from it. That is possible thanks to a method we developed that causes the cell to ‘throw out’ that chromosome. In the absence of the Y chromosome in the origin cell, it can be expected to create only eggs, and if so, we will have caused a cell from a man’s body to become an egg. If that succeeds, it will mean that male couples will be able to have a child together, of their own flesh and bone. One parent will provide the sperm cell, the other will donate the skin cell that will become an egg.”

WEEKLY FEATURE : BONNER DYTOC SHOWS THE WAY IN STOCK PLAY