Male Rat Was Made Pregnant and Had Pups. Result: Outrage

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

Should men ever, through medical intervention, be permitted or given the capacity to have a baby? Any time this subject comes up, there is enormous interest. People who think that such a thing would fundamentally be a violation of the laws of nature pay close attention. Everybody is just interested in something that crosses boundaries.

Very recently, a team of scientists in China at the Naval Medical University in Shanghai tried to create a model to test the hypothesis that you could get a male rat to deliver babies. They published this paper and reported some success. It has created almost a predictable firestorm to the point where they're thinking of retracting the paper.

What did they do? Something called heterosexual parabiosis. They took a male and a female rat and literally joined their blood circulation to get female hormones into the male bloodstream. Then they transplanted the uterus of the female rat into the male rat. They created a space, put it there, then they put in embryos transferred from the female that they had created in vitro.