“It seems like what they have created is a model of certain parts of an embryo … [but it] does not seem to have the fully whole organizational potential of a real human embryo, which is why they call it a model,” Moschella said.
Based on the information available, Moschella said the model appears to be more analogous to other models created to study types of human tissues, such as models of kidneys or models of brains, which “is not a whole human being.”
Still, Moschella warned that the creation of a model synthetic embryo that closely resembles a natural embryo is “worrisome.” She cautioned that “there are some real uncertainties about where the line is” between an embryo model and a real human embryo, and it’s possible that researchers “may cross that line from something that is merely a model and something that actually is a human being” without even knowing they did so.
“We are playing with fire here [by] experimenting with the origins of human life when it’s not quite clear how we would know when what we’ve created is actually a human being,” Moschella added.
Moschella said that embryonic models are only useful to the extent that they are similar to real embryos, so researchers are likely to “try to create models closer and closer to the real thing.” She believes this is “quite dangerous and troubling [for the] dignity of human life” because they “may not actually know whether or not it’s a real human embryo … until it proves that it has developmental capacity [and] it’s too late.”
If researchers create a synthetic embryo that appears to develop in the same way as a natural embryo, Moschella said “we would have to conclude, likely, that it is” a human life, but the only way to know whether it could develop to full maturity would be to gestate the embryo, which would require “live experiments on human beings.”