Is it possible to create life in a laboratory? The most recent advances in synthetic biology have made it possible to develop artificial cells with some of the functions typical of living organisms, rekindling the debate over the boundaries between [...]
International experts analyzed at the Catholic University of Valencia the possibilities, limits and bioethical challenges posed by gene editing and the creation of organoids. On April 20, the Bioethics Observatory at the Catholic University of Valencia (UCV) held its annual [...]
On April 20, 2026, the congress “Synthetic Biology and the Human Future: Possibilities, Limits, and Bioethical Challenges,” organized by the Bioethics Observatory, will take place. This event seeks to address the new ethical frontiers that arise from the current capacity [...]
The launch of the Synthetic Human Genome Project, supported by the Wellcome Trust, marks a new milestone in genetic research by raising the possibility of creating human DNA synthetically. This advance, supported by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence tools, opens up enormous [...]
Introduction From the very beginning, the creation of increasingly realistic models of human embryos has raised significant bioethical questions, which have intensified as the “humanization” of these synthetic models adopts a configuration closer to that of true embryos obtained by [...]
Scientists from University College London (United Kingdom) have published research in Nature Medicine in which fetal stem/progenitor cells were obtained from amniotic fluid and grown in the laboratory to give rise to organoids. These are three-dimensional models of miniature organs [...]
In the mid-nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur conducted the famous experiments refuting the theory of spontaneous generation, according to which spontaneously living organisms could originate from inert, organic or inorganic matter. It was a belief, already noted by Aristotle, which was [...]
The suffix oid is Greek in origin, and may be used to form adjectives or nouns from other adjectives or nouns to mean “having the form or resemblance of”. Hence, we have the term embryoid. At the beginning of August, [...]
Current scientific evidence allows affirming that “an intact human embryo is created [I would say more like ‘produced’] by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm cell and by the resulting formation of embryonic and embryo-surrounding cell lineages, which [...]
As recent findings suggest, the transplantation of lungs produced in mice offers new possibilities for future transplantation in humans. Millions of people worldwide suffer from severe and irreversible lung diseases that require transplants, but this cannot always be done due [...]
New biological entity produced by synthetic biology. Biobots American scientists have published an article in the journal PNAS in which they describe a method for designing completely biological machines from scratch, based on the computer processing of multiple designs and [...]
On 1 April this year, the journal PNAS published an interesting article in which Swiss researchers described how they obtained a minimal artificial genome. Obtaining minimal genomes, which contain only the genes that are essential to maintain the life of [...]
