Will scientists be able to get egg cells from men?

New technologies for creating genetically related children could transform family life, giving same-sex couples and infertile women more options for parenthood.

Conception founders, from left, chief scientific officer Pablo Hurtado, head of engineering and chief operating officer Bianka Seres and chief executive Matt Krisiloff. Picture: Winni Wintermeyer / The Wall Street Journal

Earlier this year Japanese biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi said he believed it would be possible to create a human egg from skin cells within a decade. He and his colleagues already have turned skin cells from male mice into mouse eggs and used them to breed baby mice.

Conception Biosciences chief executive Matt Krisiloff has dozens of scientists working at a lab in California trying to make eggs outside ovaries. Such a technique could allow women to have biological children later in life.

Krisiloff, who is gay, says the technology, known as in vitro gametogenesis or IVG, also could help male couples have biological children without anyone else’s genes. Echoing the desire that has driven so many advances in reproductive technologies, Krisiloff says, “I want the chance to have biological kids with my partner.”

Reproductive technology has already reshaped the way families are made. Flash-freezing techniques enable eggs to be stored in banks for years, then thawed for use. Babies have been born using a technique that incorporates DNA from three people. And IVF, which involves taking mature eggs from ovaries, fertilising them in a lab and implanting the embryo in a uterus, facilitates more than 5 per cent of births in Australia.

Getting the egg out of the female body was a revolution, says Vardit Ravitsky, president of bioethics institute the Hastings Centre. IVF, introduced more than 40 years ago, severed the connection between eggs and motherhood. A mother could be the person who supplied the egg, gave birth or raised a child.

“Socially, emotionally, legally, we changed how we think about parenthood and bonds,” Ravitsky says.

A potentially limitless source of eggs is the next frontier.

People who want to test embryos to eliminate potential health risks may choose to use reproductive technology to conceive even if they are fertile.

“Once you can make thousands of eggs from a woman or man’s skin cells, you can have thousands of embryos,” Stanford University law professor and Centre for Law and the Biosciences director Hank Greely says. “Future parents can pick the one they like.”

There are scientific obstacles to making eggs in a dish, says Harvard Medical School professor of genetics George Church, whose lab has been working on creating ovarian cells that secrete sex hormones and support the development of unfertilised egg cells.

The egg is one of the biggest cells in the body. The process by which eggs and sperm cells divide is complex and not easy to replicate in a lab. The recent experiments by Hayashi making eggs from male mice and breeding baby mice have required a lot of engineering, Church says.

“Humans are harder,” he says.

Petri dishes with stem cells. Picture: Winni Wintermeyer / The Wall Street Journal

If the scientists succeed in developing lab eggs, it still will require experiments to determine if the eggs are good enough or safe enough to create babies, says Katie Hasson of the Centre for Genetics and Society.

“The only way now to know if the embryo will develop the way it is supposed to develop is to make an embryo and see how it develops,” she says.

Researchers are already interviewing people who may benefit from using lab-generated eggs or sperm, and they are starting to think through some of the dilemmas, says Anne Le Goff, a philosopher at the University of California, Los Angeles studying the ethics of IVG. Such advances could require new ways of thinking about parenthood.

“You won’t need to know who the mother or the father is on a birth certificate,” says Le Goff. “You can just put down the names of the parents.”

In researching her 2011 book Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm, Yale University sociology professor Rene Almeling found egg donors did not define themselves as mothers. They referred to their contribution as “just an egg”.

Advances such as egg banking, the use of surrogates who weren’t genetically connected to a fetus but gave birth, and IVF itself had allowed egg donors to break the connection in their own minds between eggs and maternity. They described the mother as the person who was pregnant and gave birth or the person who raised the child.

Sperm donors Almeling interviewed defined themselves as fath­ers to the children born from their donations, even though they never intended to parent the children.

In recent years, donor-conceived people have argued that they should be told about their genetic origins.

Some want to know the identities of their biological parents, even if the donors don’t consider themselves mothers or fathers.

The donors’ views, Almeling says, were based on culture more than biology. Egg donors did not want to be considered mothers because “if that were the case, they were paid money to give up their children. They would have been considered terrible mothers.” Sperm donors may feel differently, she says, in part because “a man who provides sperm for a child and walks away is in a less stigmatised position”.

Almeling’s latest research focuses on how men and women view reproduction. Most still adhere to the traditional notion of sperm cells racing to penetrate and deliver genes to a passive egg. Scientists now know an egg emits chemical signals that pull in sperm and that sperm don’t penetrate an egg so much as move aimlessly in circles, enveloped by it.

But different concepts are also emerging in the popular imagination, Almeling says, perhaps because science and society have shifted when it comes to thinking about gender and sex.

About one-third of men and two-thirds of women in the study described fertilisation in more egalitarian terms, recognising that neither cell can operate on its own.

Still, Almeling says, even now, none of the people in the study described the egg as the active agent when it came to conception.

The prospect of scientists finding ways in the lab for both male and female bodies to make eggs, she says, could reshape cultural expectations again. But she says: “It may not happen as thoroughly or as quickly as one might expect. You can’t just scrub cultural beliefs out of science.”

Krisiloff, head of the Berkeley, California biotech firm trying to make a human egg in a lab, says he recognises the challenges. He says the entry of companies such as his, funded mainly through private investors rather than research grants, may speed up the technology. He says the company has made follicles – egg cells surrounded by special helper cells – and is making progress towards full eggs: “You have to get every step exactly right.”

The technology may not be ready for him to build his own family. “I am not closing the door on adopting a child or using an egg donor. I see this as increasing options for people to have kids the way they want. That’s a good thing overall.”

Aimee Berger, 51, became a mother this year through embryo donation and surrogacy. When she started the process, she wanted more than anything to use her own eggs. She took hormones and underwent surgery to enable doctors to retrieve her eggs in the hopes they might create an embryo in the lab. They weren’t able to get any eggs.

Berger could have kept going with egg retrieval, she says, but what she wanted more than a genetic connection to a future child was to be a mother. Had the technology to use her skin cells to make eggs in a lab been available, “I would have gone that route. No questions asked.”

Now that her daughter Saylor is here, she says, she doesn’t dwell on the question of their lack of biological connection. “I am very consciously focused on Saylor and mothering her and giving her a great life.”

Technologies such as IVF have given some LGBTQ people greater reproductive autonomy, says Katherine Kraschel, an expert on fertility care and reproductive technologies and assistant professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University school of law. The resulting children may be genetically related to only one parent, but being born into families with two parents of the same sex has led to a paradigm shift in the way we think of parenting, she says. “I can see IVG drawing away from that powerful, visible example of how families are strong and loving and healthy without a genetic connection.”

Georgetown University assistant professor of philosophy and disability studies Joel Michael Reynolds says lab eggs and easier embryo testing may lead to a world in which someone such as his late brother, who was born with muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and other disabilities, may not exist.

“New technologies are opportunities to reassess our values,” Reynolds says. “Historically, reproductive technologies have resulted in there being less disabled people in the world. Is that what we want? Do we value diversity?”

Moral questions involved with embryos were part of the work of the US President’s Council on Bioethics, a group established in 2001 by president George W. Bush, says Gilbert Meilaender, who was a member of the council.

Lab-grown eggs will likely lead to the creation of more embryos, something he takes a dim view of given there are already millions of frozen embryos across the globe.

“There is no good solution for what to do with them,” Meilaender says.

Reproductive technologies can lead people to think about children “as a product or a project we undertake rather than a blessing bestowed on the love of the parents”, he says “When you train yourself to think of the child as a product, then quite naturally one of the first questions you ask is, shouldn’t we try to get the best product we can?”

Jacob Hanna, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is co-founder and chief scientific adviser of Renewal Bio, a company trying to use cells in the lab to make embryo models that have developed organs, including an early ovary from which eggs could be extracted. Such a technique, if it worked, could allow an infertile woman to use her own eggs rather than those of a donor.

There is debate among scientists about whether and when it is ethically acceptable to use embryo models for research because these entities contain human cells and take on the characteristics of a human embryo.

Reproduction is among the most personal acts. Depending on the circumstances, it can be an expression of love, the fulfilment of deep biological and social drives, and a way to create families of all shapes and kinds.

Too often, the technology behind reproductive assistance is seen not in this broader sense but as a way to fix individual problems.

In the lab, there are reminders of another way of thinking. To make eggs, or a family, takes collaboration.

Amy Dockser Marcus is the author of We the Scientists: How a Daring Team of Parents and Doctors Forged a New Path for Medicine.

The Wall Street Journal