(Newswire.net — June 2, 2016) — The ban on the cultivation of human embryos in labs has been holding back researchers, until now. The Dutch government has allowed labs to grow human embryos, although in a limited number of fields, the Guardian reported.
The government issued a statement on Friday stating it will allow researchers to grow embryos, however under strict conditions. Such embryos could be used only in research related to “infertility, artificial reproduction techniques and hereditary or congenital diseases,” the statement reads.
The new regulations would not change the so-called “14-day rule”, designed to avoid a debate on when an embryo should be considered a human being rather than a tissue sample.
The rule that demands that any human embryo must be destroyed no later than two weeks after fertilization, was excessive due to the fact that there was no technology that allowed embryos to live that long in laboratory conditions.
US and UK scientists, however, published a paper earlier this month, describing a new technology that can maintain human embryos in a laboratory as much as necessary, which could challenge the 14-day rule.
Reports state that an embryo can survive in laboratory conditions no longer than 9 days. However, scientists have managed to develop a chemical environment that tricks the embryo into thinking it was already in a womb.
“This new technique provides us with a unique opportunity to get a deeper understanding of our own development during these crucial stages and help us understand what happens, for example, during miscarriage,” said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, who led the UK team.
Although critics urge the scientific community not to disregard the 14-day rule, adopted in the US in 1979, more scientists worldwide agree that science must advance beyond ethical questioning.
“It’s really embarrassing at the beginning of the twenty-first century that we know more about fish and mice and frogs than we know about ourselves,” said Ali Brivanlou, a biologist at Rockefeller University in New York City.
According Azim Surani from the Gurdon Institute “there has been a case to allow culture beyond 14 days even before these papers appeared.”
On the other hand, critics say the race in cultivating human embryos for research purposes was started due to fear that some countries without ethical limitations in research fields could advance much faster.
Last year, Chinese researchers reported they successfully had modified genomes of human embryos. The report launched a heated debate in the scientific community because some countries such as China simply do not recognize the 14-day rule, which puts other research teams behind in an important field of science.