A study led by Jonathan Tilly of the Massachusetts General Hospital overturns the decades-long idea that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. It reports that women of reproductive age carry ovarian stem cells, meaning that they can produce new eggs. Tilly's team, which made a similar finding in mice in 2004, also discovered that mouse eggs derived from such stem cells can indeed be fertilized.
Our colleagues at Nature Medicine, which is publishing the paper today online, created this four-minute video explaining the results. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Philip Yam
Philip Yam is the managing editor of ScientificAmerican.com, responsible for the overall news content online. He began working at the magazine in 1989, first as a copyeditor and then as a features editor specializing in physics. He is the author of The Pathological Protein: Mad Cow, Chronic Wasting and Other Prion Diseases.
