Can two women make a baby? (update)

[Sublight]

Cecil’s article from long ago: Can two women make a baby?

[Pierre]Soupart used a special process involving a virus to fuse two unfertilized mouse eggs, resulting in a single cell that subsequently began dividing as if it were an ordinary fertilized egg. Soupart stopped his experiment once the embryo (if that’s what it was) got to the 64-cell stage, but it’s possible the thing could have been implanted in a mommy mouse’s womb, so that today we’d have some little rodent waltzing around with two mothers and no father. The mind reels.

It’s from after 1980, but beyond that I don’t know how old it is.

And from CNN, science marches on: Scientists conceive mouse with two moms.

[the researchers] say they produced two mice, one of which grew to maturity and gave birth. Kono said this mouse, named “Kaguya” after a Japanese fairy tale character, appears to be perfectly healthy.

And some big new questions:

For the study described in Nature, the researchers got around the need for male-derived DNA by turning to mutant mice. The female mice were missing a chunk of DNA, and as a result, two of their genes would behave in an embryo as if they’d come from a male.
…
Marisa Bartolomei, who studies imprinting at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said she was “stunned” that manipulating just the two genes removed the roadblock to producing live mice.

In fact, analysis showed that an array of other imprinted genes had somehow taken on their normal levels of activity, as if there’d been a standard fertilization. The researchers said they don’t know how that happened.