What If Men Could Make Their Own Egg Cells?

Krisiloff, who is gay, says the technology, known as in vitro gametogenesis or IVG, could also 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 for years in banks, then thawed for use. Babies have been born using a technique that incorporates DNA from three people. And in vitro fertilization, or IVF, which involves taking mature eggs from ovaries, fertilizing them in a lab and implanting the embryo in a uterus, facilitates approximately 2% of births in the U.S.

Getting the egg out of the female body was a revolution, says Vardit Ravitsky, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics institute. 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 will still have sex,” says Hank Greely, a law professor and director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “They just won’t have sex to make babies as often.”

People who want to test embryos to eliminate potential health risks may choose to use reproductive technology in order 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,” he says. “Future parents can pick the one they like.”

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

If the scientists succeed in developing lab eggs, it will still require experiments to determine if the eggs are good enough or safe enough to create babies, says Katie Hasson of the Center 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 might 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 UCLA studying the ethics of IVG. Such advances could require new ways of thinking about parenthood, she says.

“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,” Almeling says.

Advances such as egg banking, the use of surrogates who aren’t genetically connected to a fetus but give birth, and IVF itself allowed egg donors to break the connection in their own minds between eggs and maternity, Almeling says. They described the mother as the person who got pregnant and gave birth or the person who raised the child. Sperm donors she 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 feels, were based on culture more than biology. Egg donors did not want to be considered mothers because, Almeling says, “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 stigmatized position.”

Almeling’s latest research focuses on how men and women view reproduction. The majority still adhere to the traditional notion of sperm cells racing to penetrate and deliver genes to a passive egg. Scientists now know that 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 fertilization in more egalitarian terms, recognizing that neither cell can operate on its own. Still, she 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 biotech firm trying to make a human egg in a lab, says he recognizes the challenges ahead. He thinks the entry of companies like 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 toward full eggs. “You have to get every step exactly right,” he says.

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 earlier 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 that 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.”

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.”

Joel Michael Reynolds, an assistant professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University, says that lab eggs and easier embryo testing might lead to a world in which someone like his late brother, who was born with muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and other disabilities, might 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 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 that there are already more than a million frozen embryos in storage around the U.S.

“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,” says Meilaender, senior research professor at Valparaiso University. “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 to make embryo models in the lab that have developed organs, including an early ovary from which eggs could be extracted. Such a technique, if it works, could someday allow an infertile woman to use her own eggs, rather than those of an egg donor, to conceive a baby. 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.

Egg donation and surrogacy, where people are paid for their services, also carry ethical concerns, says Hanna, who is gay and has many gay friends using these methods to try to create their families. Some women might not agree to be donors or surrogates if they were not experiencing financial difficulties. “There is no easy way out,” he says.

Reproduction is among the most personal of acts. Depending on the circumstances, it can be an expression of love, the fulfillment 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 a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of “We the Scientists: How a Daring Team of Parents and Doctors Forged a New Path for Medicine.”