On some morning in December 2020, a six-minute twenty-seven second video of a single cell turning into a full salamander made its rounds. I’ve thought about this video no fewer than five times a day since watching it the many, many times I’ve watched it. It is a video of both literal and figurative close looking. That we can peek over Nature’s shoulder and witness the 0-1 pop of a thing from a gooey dot to sneaky automaton is miraculous and bizarre. When does it “salamander?” The very definition of astonishing seems to be embedded in the way the cells move, as they grow from a “knowable” half-a-dozen dots to the millions and billions of the finished product. The phrase “sentience of the swarm” runs through my mind as I watch it. I am delighted and terrified: These little dots in aggregate know so much more than I ever will.

Craig Mod: Looking Closely is Everything

It’s a great question: ‘when precisely does this collection of cells become a salamander?’

And the simplest (and likely correct) answer is, from the very start. You cannot stop the video at any point and with 100% confidence say ‘from this moment on it is a salamander and before this moment it was not’.

Which makes scientists plan to drop the 14-day embryo rule, a key limit on stem cell research more than a little concerning.

The 14-day limit arose after the birth of the first test-tube babies in the 1970s. “It was ‘Oh, we can create human embryos outside the body—we need rules,” says Josephine Johnston, a scholar with the Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics organization. “It was a political decision to show the public there is a framework for this research, that we aren’t growing babies in labs.”

Scientists plan to drop the 14-day embryo rule, a key limit on stem cell research

What can be done will, eventually, be done.

No one is growing babies in labs, but they are also avoiding answering the question, ‘when exactly does it become human?’