Could you "create" a fertilized human foetus without sperm?
Arising from the comments in This Question, which started to stray offtopic into the question of whether men are needed at all.
In Short: Could you create a fertilized human (necessarily female) foetus by splicing two eggs together?
Or, alternatively, what it is about sperm that triggers the cell splitting process, and could it be replicated using just X-chromosomes from eggs?
Questions:
- What is it specifically that triggers the cells to start splitting
- Could you effectively create an X-Chromosome "sperm payload" using a female Egg
- If not, what's the difference between a female X-Chromosome (from an egg) and a male X-Chromosome (from sperm) that makes this impossible?
Methods
Clearly this is unlikely to happen naturally in human physiology. A scientific method (preferably using real existing methods, but theoretical will be considered) or achieving fertilization is fine, Provided it doesn't involve using any component that would have to be harvested from males.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33864. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
What you're looking for is parthenogenesis.
Scientists from Japan have done it with mice, back in 2004 by changing one egg to behave like a sperm cell genetically.
With enough genetic engineering technology it may even be possible to splice a Y chromosome in, and grow males.
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