“However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries.”
The Cambridge-Caltech lab grew embryo models from single stem cells to just past the 14-day mark, the legal limit for real embryos. The 14-day rule does not apply because the law never imagined an embryo without an egg or sperm. The results came in a conference talk, not a published paper. The field’s answer to the legal gap is voluntary guidelines written by the people doing the work.