Monday, May 4, 2009

How Many Eggs Do You Have? Scientists Say Females Able to Make Eggs Later in Life.

 I opened up my issue of "Science" magazine from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and saw the article titled, "Study Suggests a Renewable Source of Eggs and Stirs More Controversy."  Wow.  

Apparently some stem cell biologists, Ji Wu and colleagues, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China found that adult ovaries have cells that can give rise to new eggs (oocytes) and then turn into offspring.   This really gives a slap in the fact to the idea of females being born with all the eggs they will ever have.   A now heated controversary is emerging in reproductive biology.  The researchers results come from a series of studies on mice, where they removed their ovaries and sorted through cells to find "germline cells" that eventually turned into eggs and offspring.

Much more research is to be done before we can say anything conclusively, but it looks like we might be able to disprove the idea that females cannot make more eggs.  John Tilly, professor of obstetrics and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, was not involved with the study, but has also published some controversial ideas about women's ability to produce new eggs.  Scientists and researchers everywhere, whom are already in a crazed controversy, have more science in favor of the fact that women are not born with a finite number of eggs.

So, is the biological clock really a psychological clock?  

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I will take mine sunny side up, please.