The story I keep going back to happens in the dark.
Near midnight, on a July night in 1978, in a hospital in a Lancashire mill town, a woman was wheeled toward an operating theatre with only a torch to light the way. Just a few of the staff knew who she was. Her family was afraid that if the wrong person recognized her, a reporter would hear of it, and the reporters had already tried a bomb hoax and posed as cleaners to reach her room. She had come to these doctors after nine years of trying for a child. Her tubes were blocked. The theatre was small and, that night, crowded: the usual surgeons and anesthetists, plus people from the research trial and observers holding a government film camera. They delivered her daughter by Caesarean. The baby cried, hard, and did not need reviving. A pediatrician looked her over and found nothing wrong. The doctors had been almost sick that some small flaw, a cleft palate, anything, would be pinned on what they had done and would end the work; they wanted, one of them said later, to count the fingers and count the toes.
I want to be exact about what was new that night, because it is easy to get wrong. It was not the egg. It was not the sperm. Both belonged to the couple. Her ovaries worked. The only trouble was that her one ripe egg could not reach the place where a sperm was waiting. So the doctors borrowed the egg, introduced it to her husband's sperm in a shallow dish, let the fertilized cell divide until it was eight cells, and slipped it back inside her. An assistant had stayed up through the night to watch those first cells divide under the microscope. The Caesarean was chosen partly as proof: the only way, one of them said, to show the world this woman had no working tubes. The whole astonishing thing was a change of venue. Sperm met egg in glass instead of in a body. The meeting was moved. The two that met were already there.
I have been trying to work out why the newest version of this story unsettles me, when the first one, read now, mostly reads as joy.
This summer, researchers reported that they had taken ordinary human blood cells, wound them back into stem cells that can become any tissue, and coaxed them a long way toward sperm. They did it by building a kind of testicle. They mixed the cells with supporting testicular cells from mice and grew the little organ under the kidney of a living mouse, where it sprouted tubules and blood vessels and the supporting cells a real testis has. The human cells were tagged so the team could watch them change color as they matured. They reached the stage called spermatogonia, the cells that sit at the very start of sperm production. And then they stopped. To become sperm they would still have to divide, halve their chromosomes, and grow a tail. They did none of it. When the team read the cells' chemistry, they found the chemical marks that switch genes on and off had been stripped away, as they must be, but never rebuilt, as they also must be. There was no sperm. There was no embryo. There was no child. There was a fluorescent cell inside a mouse, arrested partway through becoming the thing a body makes without being asked.
The egg version has gone a step further, far enough to show where the wall is. A different group took the nucleus of a skin cell, slipped it into a donor egg emptied of its own nucleus, and forced it to shed half its chromosomes, roughly the way a real egg does. They made eighty-two eggs this way and fertilized them. Most of the embryos stopped at four or eight cells. Many carried the wrong number of chromosomes. Nine in a hundred reached the stage where an embryo is usually transferred, and none were allowed to grow past six days. The researchers expected it would be at least a decade before anyone could even ask whether the method was safe enough to try in a person. One of them said, "Nature gave us two methods of cell division, and we just developed a third."
So the science is not close. I want to say that flatly, because the unease I am describing does not depend on the science being close. It depends on what the science is trying to do. And here I have to be careful not to reach for the easy version of my own worry.
The first answer is that this is the old fear coming back around: the recoil people felt in 1978 at a baby begun in glass, now aimed at a cell begun in a mouse. But that reading does not survive the record. The main reaction to the first birth was not horror. The newspapers called the pregnancy hope. The alarm that did exist, the demands to stop the work, looks in hindsight like the flinch of people frightened by a thing that turned out to be ordinary. Four million people had been born this way by 2010. In Britain now, about one baby in thirty-two is. If my unease is only the 1978 flinch in new clothes, it should age into the same embarrassment, and I should probably drop it.
There is a second answer, and this one is real: safety. A mistake made inside a sperm or an egg is not like a mistake made anywhere else in medicine, because it does not stay in one body. It can be handed down. The researchers say so themselves, that an error introduced into a germ cell could be passed to future generations. But safety is not the root of the unease, and I can show that to myself with a small test. Imagine the method is one day perfectly safe: the chromosomes always right, the marks always rebuilt, the children as healthy as any others. The disquiet does not go away. So it was never really about the risk.
There is a third answer too, about designer babies, about buying traits, about vanity. Set it aside as well. It is a separate argument, and it slanders the people actually standing in these clinics. What is left, once the flinch and the risk and the vanity are cleared off the table, is not about danger or hubris at all. It is about the act itself.
The first time, the hard thing was letting a sperm and an egg that already existed meet somewhere new. This time, the hard thing is making the sperm. That is a different act, and no amount of safety turns it back into the first one. Reproduction has always been something a body attempts and often fails at. What this work quietly proposes is to make it something an adult authors. The cure is real. The unsettling part rides in with it, and it will trouble even those of us who want the cure to work.
The strongest reply to me is that I have drawn a line across what is only a slope. We have been authoring parenthood for decades. A couple uses donor sperm, and the child carries a stranger's genes. A lab picks one sperm and injects it straight into an egg. Embryos are frozen, graded, thawed, or discarded. One woman carries a child grown from two other people. If all of that is authored, then making the gamete is one more step down a road we are already far along, and to bless every earlier step and flinch at the last is just sentiment.
And the wanting behind it is not vanity. This is the part I cannot wave away. Infertility is common; something like one in six adults meets it. When you ask infertile couples what they want, almost all of them, ninety-eight in a hundred in one careful study, say a child genetically their own, for themselves and for their partner. Asked why, the reason they put first is the plainest one there is: to experience a natural process.
They are reaching into a laboratory in order to feel ordinary.
Sit in the actual rooms and the wanting stops being an abstraction. For a man with no sperm in his semen, and there are enough of them, roughly one in seven infertile men, the only way to learn whether any sperm exists at all is for a surgeon to open the testicle and hunt through its tubes under a microscope, most of them empty, searching, as one doctor puts it, for the plumper strands, like looking for penne in a field of angel hair. The surgery is timed to the hour of his partner's egg retrieval; the doctor books it for half past five in the morning so nothing collides. Over the table hangs a question the team has already rehearsed: if we find nothing, what is the backup plan for the eggs. Somewhere else a young man with a fresh cancer diagnosis is handed a cup and a private room and sometimes only days before the drugs that may save him take his fertility with them. A relative carries the sample across a city inside sixty minutes, kept warm in a coat pocket against the body, and a form asks him to decide, now, what should be done with it if he dies before it is used. These are not people playing god. These are people who want a specific, everyday thing so badly they will do anything undignified and precise to get it.
Which is exactly why the last step matters more than its smallness suggests. Everything on that road so far, the donor, the injection, the freezer, the surrogate, still starts from a sperm and an egg that some body grew. The cell was given. The technology only arranged the meeting. So the new work is not the first time we would author parenthood. It is the first time we would author the gamete itself. What is new is a technology that does not wait for the cell to be given, that offers to write it from the beginning out of blood or skin. And I do not think safety settles that, because what unsettles is not that the child might be harmed. It is that the child's origin moves. It stops being a meeting a body attempted and becomes a cell an adult decided to make.
I notice I cannot tell you this is wrong. That is the honest place I have arrived, and I distrust anyone who arrives somewhere cleaner. The couples are right that their longing is ordinary. The scientists are right that the suffering is real and the old alarms aged badly. Maybe this one will too. Maybe in fifty years a person made this way will be as unremarkable as the woman in the dark corridor turned out to be, and the counting will just have moved, from fingers and toes after the birth to chromosomes and chemical marks long before it, and no one will feel the difference.
But I keep going back to that corridor, and to the one thing that was true in it and is quietly not true in the mouse. The hardest thing those doctors did was let two cells that already existed find each other. They did not make the seed. They moved the meeting into the light of a microscope and stayed up all night to watch it happen. The child who grew from that dish could always be told a story that starts with two people and a thing their bodies could almost, but not quite, do alone. A child made the new way will be told a story that starts earlier, with a sperm or egg no body grew and someone who chose to build it. We are close enough to imagine giving that answer. What I cannot decide is whether it is one we will be glad to have given.