Scientists Make Baby Mice from Cells of Two Fathers

A huge win for gay rodents, scientists have managed to make viable eggs from the cells of two male mice.

The feat was announced last Wednesday at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London, according to the scientific journal Nature. The research has yet to be published, but the journal notes indicate that it could be a “proof-of-concept” technique that could potentially lead to a treatment for human fertility or allow for single-parent embryos.

However, just to be clear, lesbians did it first in 2018. A team of researchers used eggs from two female mice to successfully breed pups, and they grew up into healthy adult mice that were fertile. Although the same team also created pups from two sperm, those baby mice only survived a few days.

Now, Japanese researcher Katsuhiko Hayashi and his team have done the previously unthinkable. Nature explains that the team took cells from adult male mice and reprogrammed them to create self-reproducing stem cells. They grew those cells until some spontaneously lost their Y chromosomes, treated the cells with a compound called reversine, and looked for cells with two X chromosomes.

The team gave the stem cells the genetic signals needed to form eggs, fertilized them using mouse sperm, and transferred the embryos into the uterus of a mouse. Out of 630 embryos, seven developed into pups, but those pups grew into fertile adults. While the relative success of the experiment seems to bode well for the future of same-sex human reproduction, researchers warned that there are plenty of caveats.

“There are big differences between a mouse and the human,” Hayashi tells Nature.

He also stresses that the bioethical implications of this technology should be examined further, stating, “I don’t know whether this kind of technology can really adapt to human society.”

Regardless of whether or not this technology makes it to a human application, we are here to celebrate all forms of queer love.