First of all, thank you Wired, not. I've had to explain to two separate groups of people this week that the Biobag, which is designed to replace NICU incubators, is not an artificial womb. (Nor fully tested in humans).
But in China, they used stem cells to create synthetic monkey embryos. The embryos were not viable and only survived for a week before disappearing (was this because they weren't viable or did the monkeys reabsorb?). They are saying their structures are not capable of full development and the purpose is to study early development without using naturally obtained embryos.
It might help us understand and prevent causes of early miscarriages.
But what if it's possible to create actual viable embryos from stem cells? This could resolve many fertility problems and, of course, let gay men have their own biological offspring with their partners. I fix this in my series...while no details are gone into, the gay couple with their own kid used a technique where their sperm was combined and then inserted into an egg donated by a woman, the sister of one of them, who then carried her own niece to term. That seems a more viable likely path to me, but if this did work, then you wouldn't need an egg donor.
You would still need to find a uterus somewhere, though.
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