Forget everything that your biology teacher taught you at school because it may soon be possible for guys to conceive a child.
Yeah, I'm not talking about that bull shit that you probably didn't watch on Channel 4 a few years ago about the first pregnant male, who wasn't actually a male. I am talking about new, hard research that could allow two men to create a child.
The new study eradicates the idea that it is only possible to produce a child using an egg and fertilising it with sperm. Instead, new research now suggests that it might be possible to conceive children using skin cells.
Scientists have called this technique 'speculative and fanciful'. It's very much in a junior phase, but a new experiment on mice shows that it is possible to conceive mice using other kinds of cells.
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It's not as simple as that, though. The experiment is said to have used 'parthenogenote' mouse embryos that were formed by scientists. Those are all-female embryos made without any sperm, created by tricking an egg into developing as if it was fertilised.
Usually, those embryos die after a few days because they are not completely programmed. However, in the new study that's come to light, scientists found that they could inject them with sperm and transform them into normal embryos.
The findings showed that it was physically possible to produce healthy offspring while bypassing the normal route of fertilising an egg with sperm, reports the Independent.
Going forward, this result could very well lead to human reproduction that completely cuts female eggs being used as part of the process of creating life.
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Featured image credit: PA
If the study were to evolve and it proves that it is physically possible to conceive a child using skin cells, then it would allow gay biological men to have children with each other. It would, theoretically at least, make it possible for a man to fertilise his own cells with his own sperm.
Okay, it is slighting dipping its toe into genetically engineering children but there are significant pros, should the theory work on humans.
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These findings could suggest that women, whose fertility has been compromised by cancer drugs or other treatments, could still have their own children.
"Our work challenges the dogma, held since early embryologists first observed mammalian eggs around 1827 and observed fertilisation 50 years later, that only an egg cell fertilised with a sperm cell can result in live mammalian birth," said lead scientist Tony Perry, a molecular embryologist from the University of Bath.
There is so much more research that needs to be carried out before we can start re-writing the biology textbooks, but it certainly is an evolution of research that could lead to significant development into how we create life.
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Featured image credit: PA
Featured Image Credit:Topics: Science