Lab-grown babies could be a reality as soon as 2028

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Japanese scientists have claimed they’re on the cusp of growing human babies in the lab, by incubating eggs and sperm in an artificial womb.

Indeed, tykes from concentrate could be available to mothers in as little as five years, according to Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a stem cell biology expert at Kyushu University, the DailyMail has reported.

His team notably used this synthetic surrogacy method to create baby mice from two daddy rodents — as pre-proof-of-concept of the tech’s implications for same-sex parents.

According to the novel study published in March in the journal Nature, the team transformed male mice’s skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, which have the potential to develop into various types of cells or tissues, like a cellular shapeshifter.

Researchers then grew these cells and treated them with a drug that converted the male rodent stem cells into female cells, thereby producing functional egg cells.

Fertilizing those eggs and implanting this baby blueprint into female mice, meanwhile, resulted in the artificial conception of male mice.

And while only 1% of the embryos — seven out of 630 — grew into live mouse pups, researchers thought the experiment potentially had important implications for human reproduction.

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Dr. Hayashi estimated, that it would take around half a decade to replicate egg-like cell production in humans, and 10-20 years of testing to ensure this artificial reproductive method is safe for use in clinics.

One of the concerns is the mutations and errors that may be introduced in a culture dish before using stem cells to make eggs.

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