Researchers have broken the record for growing a human embryo in the laboratory and keeping it alive beyond the stage when it would naturally implant in a mother’s womb. The human embryo was grown in a lab for twice the length of time previously possible in what has been hailed as a breakthrough that could “revolutionise” medicine…..but it also raises fresh ethical questions about when life begins. UK and US scientists have developed a new technique enabling an embryo to live outside the womb far longer than before, but future experiments put scientists into direct conflict with a decades-old law that prohibits donated embryos from being grown in the lab for more than 14 days. RT reports: The previous record for an embryo surviving in a lab was 9 days, and usually the embryo would be implanted into a womb as in IVF in the first seven, or die. However, two leading labs, which have published their studies in Nature and Nature Cell Biology, managed to create a chemical environment that tricked the embryo into thinking it was already in a womb while it remained in a petri dish. The embryos flourished until day 13, when they were terminated by [...]