TR Editors' blog

Female Sperm?

Scientists generate primitive sperm cells from female stem cells.

Emily Singer 01/31/2008

  • 5 Comments

Good news for lesbians who want to have biological children related to both parents: a new stem-cell technique could allow scientists to convert female cells into sperm. Use that sperm to fertilize an egg, and voila: children with two female biological parents.

In unpublished work reported by New Scientist and the Telegraph, British scientists at the University of Newcastle coaxed female embryonic stem cells to develop into primitive sperm cells. Next, the researchers, led by stem-cell biologist Karim Nayernia, plan to create sperm cells from female bone marrow, making the procedure more practical. They haven't yet made the primitive sperm undergo the final cell division that generates the correct amount of genetic material for fertilization, a process known as meiosis.

Scientists have been skeptical that sperm can be produced from female cells, which lack a Y chromosome and thus whichever Y-linked genes are crucial to sperm production.

According to the Telegraph:

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell and sex determination expert at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, doubts it will work: "The presence of two X chromosomes is incompatible with this. Moreover they need genes from the Y chromosome to go through meiosis. So they are at least double-damned."

Nayernia's team has had success generating sperm from male stem cells. Last year, the researchers made primitive sperm from stem cells collected from adult men. And in a 2006 proof of principle experiment, Nayernia used "sperm derived from male embryonic stem cells to fertilize mice to produce seven pups, six of which lived to adulthood, though the survivors did suffer problems," according to the Telegraph.

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gregaha

1 Comment

  • 1475 Days Ago
  • 01/31/2008

Additional developments with female sperm

A web site reviewing decades of research into samesex procreation for humans, including a copy of a patent application which addresses how to create female sperm while compensating for the missing Y chromosome, is available at:  www.samesexprocreation.com.  The site mentions the 1997 work of Japanese scientists who created chicken female sperm.

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CountZ3ro

20 Comments

  • 1471 Days Ago
  • 02/04/2008

Brave New Science

Why thank you people! Great news everyone! It is great to know we are one step closer to satisfy every whim of a society that has completely lost its sense of humility... And millions out there are lacking basics like clean drinking water! Another sample of science in the benefit of a fringe category  that has the big bucks. Really, congratulations! What else can I say? When I read things like this, even Frankenstein seems more moral to me... Is perchance the likelihood to have genetically dysfunctional offsprings not increased by applying this technology?

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dmm

270 Comments

  • 1468 Days Ago
  • 02/07/2008

useful tech?

This might be useful for preserving endangered species.  It would give another tool for controlling inbreeding in small populations, especially if there were a shortage of males, as is often the case.  The usual sperm from remaining males could be sorted for XY and XX, and used to produce mostly male offspring.  Of course, you would need some female offspring from the males, or you would lose any genes on the males' X chromosomes.  However, the bulk of female offspring could be produced with "female sperm."  At first glance, I think this would lessen shrinkage of the gene pool compared to normal ways of procreation.

This could be useful for isolated human pops too, though most would probably reject it due to religious or cultural objections.

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zig158

64 Comments

  • 1460 Days Ago
  • 02/15/2008

Why don’t they call this what it is, non-identical cloning.

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StephenC

1 Comment

  • 1434 Days Ago
  • 03/12/2008

Breakthrough?

This scientific playground accomplishment, heralded as a "new" and "cutting edge" is nothing "new." New would be making life out of a block of wood. Female sperm are still sperm. Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that this method of reproduction still depends upon philosophically heterosexual (that is, opposite/complementary) means of reproduction. If one can make 2 eggs into a baby, or 2 sperm into a baby, then that would be a homosexual means of reproduction.
Until then, one has not done anything new but is dependent upon another idea; this is a parasitic idea, that is, a copycat--one dependent upon an already existent means of reproduction that is methodologically hijacked and called "new."
  I do not write this to be caustic, nor vitriolic, but philosophically honest. True LBGT rights movement people will recognize what I have written is true as the central movement people have written that gay marriage is not the goal; instead, they write that traditional relationships need to be completely reworked. Until that happens, a sperm/egg combination, whether in the womb via artificial insemination or in a petri dish, is heterosexual and an affirmation of the natural order.

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