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The requests started trickling in after Hayashi published the results of an experiment that he had assumed would be of interest mostly to developmental biologists. Starting with the skin cells of mice in vitro, he created primordial germ cells (PGCs), which can develop into both sperm and eggs. To prove that these laboratory-grown versions were truly similar to naturally occurring PGCs, he used them to create eggs, then used those eggs to create live mice. He calls the live births a mere 'side effect' of the research, but that bench experiment became much more, because it raised the prospect of creating fertilizable eggs from the skin cells of infertile women. And it also suggested that men's skin cells...