Weird concept, but stay with me. Twins occur when an embryo splits in two early in the incubation process, yes? So could a doctor do this on purpose and simply split embryos over and over again for extra eggs (and therefore extra children)? Maybe this is a dumb question, but I’m extremely curious.
In: Biology
in theory sure.
There isnt really a reason to though, but they could.
It is probably more complicated than just splitting the cells as you would probably have to do this in-vitro, and implanting fertilized cells isnt the easiest thing.
A little OT but the Dionne Quintuplets (the first naturally occurring and surviving quints) all came from one egg that split, split and split. And each of those split to make 3 sets of twins that were all identical. One fetus was lost in utero, making 5 that were identical except the smallest set were ‘mirror twins’ with opposite hair parts, etc.
Ethically, no.
Theoretically, unless one embryo could be paused in its development, no.
When embryos split, they’re still growing through their usual developmental stages which pretty quickly makes it so if the embryo splits again it’ll die as the cells it’s composed of are no long totipotent or of “infinite possibility”. The cells have instead moved into specific “jobs” and once they have that job they have to stay in it or specialize further while also working with other cells which have specialized into other jobs. Once specialized, they can no longer work alone. If the cells try to do that, they die.
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