Lab-grown models of embryos increasingly resemble the real thing
“Embryoids", as such creations are called, can help with the study of embryology and pregnancy, and how they can go wrong. Some of the facsimiles look strikingly real. In 2022 two teams, one led by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, who works at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge, and another by Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, published papers describing mouse embryoids with rudimentary guts, brains and beating hearts. In June Dr Zernicka-Goetz published a…