The Dance of Life: How Do We Become Ourselves?

Human and animal embryos are built from three types of stem cell that are established by the sixth day after fertilization and before the embryo implants into the womb. These three stem cell types can also be grown indefinitely in cell culture. In her lecture, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz will describe how she and her research group have been able to assemble embryo models not from eggs and sperm but from these stem cell types, and what those models are teaching us about human development.