At the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing, held in March 2023 at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Japanese researcher Katsuhiko Hayashi stunned attendees when he explained how he had successfully reproduced mice from two male parents.
In effect, Hayashi had developed a complex procedure for turning male pluripotent (meaning embryonic or inducible) stem cells into female stem cells, allowing him to obtain eggs from a male. His surprising findings were published in the journal Nature a few weeks later.
Almost two years later, a team of Chinese researchers – led by Zhi-kun Li, Wei Li and Qi Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences – has once again shocked the field of genetics with a similar procedure.
