Thursday, April 22, 2004



The holy grail

Scientists have made a mouse with no father, mixing chromosomes from two eggs then mucking with the gene-regulation mechanism to force the resulting egg to develop.

It's a "low efficiency" technique - only 2 out of 600 embryos made it to full term - but that's just teething problems. If perfected, this is the holy grail, at least for lesbians. Given an egg and someone willing to carry it, any two women will be able to have children together. Lesbians really will be able to be fathers, in the genetic sense. Suck on that, Peter Dunne!

Unfortunately, it's not the grail for men, as it relies on at least one set of chromosomes being from an egg. However, there are other promising avenues of research, and I've no doubt that we'll eventually find a way so that any two people can mix their DNA to conceive a child, irrespective of gender.

0 comments: