Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
This really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, thinking it's possible to get out a chemistry set and just make a living thing. To be clear, they started with stem cells, and teased them into doing the right thing - they did not create a new living artifact from scratch;> Instead, they used stem cells - the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type - and then mimicked natural processes in the lab.