
Skin cells might be used instead of eggs to make embryos - linhmtran168
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/13/skin-cells-instead-of-eggs-make-embryos-scientists-say
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just_observing
This makes sense in that it is less invasive and skin cells are more plentiful
but the current invasive methods at least ensure that there is consent.

If you could surreptitiously get enough of someone's skin cells you could
create an embryo with no consent. It's a given that this won't be within the
ability of Mr and Mrs J Public but it's still something that creates concern.

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gus_massa
I'd not worry too much for now. If you remove all the statements about how
great this would be, it's vaporware. From the article:

> _The potential to use skin cells instead of eggs remains highly speculative
> for now. But if researchers can overcome the remaining hurdles, of which
> there are many, they could in theory create embryos [...]_

The experiment they describe is misleading. They took an egg of a female
mouse. Read carefully, they took initially an egg not a skin cell. Then they
make it look like a skin cell using some hormones. Then they took the egg that
looks like a skin cell and fertilized it.

The takeaway is that it's possible to make an egg look like an skin cell and
fertilize it later. Perhaps this is useful to store them, or make many copies,
or something.

But to use a real skin cell directly, you have more problems, in particular
you must get ride of half the chromosomes ...

I can't find a good link now, but one important property if the eggs and the
sperm is that they come from a cell line that is selected in the early embryo.
This group of cell try to divide as few times as possible. Each cell division
may produce a mutation, and mutations are usually bad, so you want as few
mutations as possible for your kids.

But skin cells don't have this problem, so they divide as much as necessary.
(Actually, the skin cells use some schemes to reduce the number of divisions,
because and unlucky mutation may create a cancer, so you want to skip them
too. But it's more easy to get a mutation that breaks some part of the early
embryo development of your child than a mutation that creates an
uncontrollable cancer.)

