Developmental researchers and biologists have presumably waited a long time for this day to arrive. For a long time, scientists have cultured hundreds of embryos to understand and study the early stages of development. However, because of this 14 days rule, embryos could not be cultured and grown under laboratory conditions for more than 14 days.
Day 14 is when the embryo generally starts developing structures like the differentiation between the head and the tail with developing body axes. This becomes too soon for many researchers to stop culturing the embryos and hence, acts as a barrier to understand several other details related to the development of the human embryo.
With the relaxation of this 14-days rule, scientists will get an opportunity to observe more closely as to what happens during human development, the week after fertilization. Previously, as the culturing of the human embryo had a strict shelf life of 14 days, researchers were unable to observe the gastrulation phase of the embryo, generally taking place between 4 to 22 days, restricting from having an in-depth observation of the biological changes occurring within it. With the lifting of this limit, more of a thorough understanding can be gained which can prove to be of importance in the biological and research perspective.
Talking about the benefits of the increased limit from 14 days, this would prove to be somewhat of a breakthrough in its rights. It will allow researchers and scientists to get into the depth of reasons as to why 1/3rd of the pregnancy losses and miscarriages take place. In addition to this, several infants suffer from congenital diseases, and being given the opportunity of growing human embryos for more than 14 days would now allow the detection of these birth defects and give them the possible chance of preventing them.
Several of the laboratory studies of human embryos took place by utilizing model embryos to produce faster results which in most scenarios prove to be accurate. This also utilizes stem cell research and study, vital for the longevity of the human race. With the extended limit of being able to study human embryos, stem cell research would leap because regenerative medicines will now have a possibility to be developed. This is because, after the 14th day, the embryos go into the differentiation stage where the cells start developing into different organs of the body.
“I’m fascinated by the second, third and fourth week of development, which we cannot see with ultrasound, but starts the development of the progenitors for the main organs” said Zernicka Goetz, who works for her lab in the United Kingdom and at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Adding on to this, Brivanlou and Zernicka-Goetz want to keep pushing the limit to culture human embryos because they believe that studying this further would allow proceeds within gene therapy programmes and in understanding neurodevelopmental disorders.
Brivanlou goes on to say that his research group is trying to push the limit to day 21, applying to his university’s regulatory committee, because by then, the embryo will be developed into distinct structures like the heart, spinal cord, brain, bone and so on This would indeed prove to be of benefit within the scientific arena of education.
However, Naomi Moris, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute of London, suggests her ambivalence by posing a question on the ethical grounds of using human embryos as a model of research. This is because model embryos were used even after day 14 to get glimpses of later embryonic stages without anybody questioning the procedure and time limit allowed to study them.
In hindsight, the lifting of limits from 14 days is going to be an area filled with researchers to try and study more and discover more within this area of expertise with increased competition between research groups in the long run.
