skin cells

There are test-tube babies and three-parent babies, and both generate plenty of controversy. But as it stands, making a baby still requires an egg from a mother and sperm cells from a father. Scientists say that won’t always be the case, though, because someday it will likely be possible to make babies from skin cells alone.
Last year, scientists in Japan revealed that mice had been born of eggs made from a parent’s skin cells, and researchers believe the same technique can one day be used in humans. [1]

British researcher Madeleine Lancaster is growing human brains in her Cambridge University lab. A few hundred of them, in fact. That’s about 2 million neurons. [1]
No, this isn’t a Halloween gag. This sci-fi experiment is intended to help scientists understand disorders like autism and schizophrenia.
It’s not just Lancaster who is invested in growing human brains outside of the body. It’s a project being undertaken by scientists around the world.

The birth of baby mice made from eggs grown in a lab has sparked an ethical debate over whether the technique should ever be offered for humans by fertility clinics.
The experiment is a step up (or down, depending on how you look at it) from creating human organs from stem cells, which scientists at the University of Edinburgh successfully did for the first time in 2014.