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| image credit: parentingatoz.com |
"About 13 years ago, Northeastern professor Jonathan Tilly, a reproductive biologist, made a discovery that challenged everything scientists thought they knew about female reproduction. The long-held belief that mammals were born with a set number of eggs -- and no ability to create new ones -- was wrong.
Now, Tilly and his colleagues have published a new study that "puts the final nail in the dogma coffin," showing unequivocally that stem cells in the ovaries are a critical piece of the mammal fertility puzzle, and may be harnessed to revolutionize fertility treatments and perhaps even delay menopause.
Males from every animal species can produce new sperm at any time. Female flies, fish, and birds can make new eggs. But for decades, the accepted paradigm in reproductive biology was that nature had not granted female mammals the same luxury as their male counterparts.
However, from an evolutionary standpoint, that conclusion makes little sense. "You'd have a population of eggs that you need to propagate the species sitting around getting stale. And in humans, they would get stale for decades," said Tilly, University Distinguished Professor of Biology and chair of the Department of Biology. "Why on earth would evolutionary pressure or nature make such a decision?"
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