Creating a sperm or egg from any cell? Reproduction revolution on the horizon

It's a Wednesday morning at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in downtown Washington, D.C., and Dr. Eli Adashi is opening an unprecedented gathering: It's titled "In-Vitro Derived Human Gametes as a Reproductive Technology."

It's the academy's first workshop to explore in-vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, which involves custom-making human eggs and sperm in the laboratory from any cell in a person's body.

"It is on the precipice of materialization," says Adashi, a reproductive biology specialist from Brown University. "And IVF will probably never be the same."

For the next three days, dozens of scientists, bioethicists, doctors, and others describe the latest scientific advances in IVG and explore the potentially far-reaching thicket of social, ethical,