A group of enthusiastic high-school Japanese students led by their science teacher managed to hatch chicks sans an egg shell.
A video detailing the study was posted to the YouTube on Monday, which showcased a number of gleeful Japanese students breaking open the eggs and shifting the embryos into large clear containers. The containers, wrapped with cellophane, were left to incubate till they were ready to hatch in a period of 21 days. The video ends with a joyful chicken running across the floor.
The ideator of this science project is the biology teacher named Yutaka Tahara. Tahara has been working on this method for quite a few years and he has some pretty big ideas about his project. He has already published his findings in a research publication in the Journal of Poultry Science:
“The development of shell-less culture methods for bird embryos with high hatchability would be useful for the efficient generation of transgenic chickens, embryo manipulations, tissue engineering, and basic studies in regenerative medicine. [W]e successfully achieved a high hatchability with this method in chicken embryo culture using an artificial vessel.”
Tahara diligently worked on this project for more than 30 years so as to perfect his technique; and even after that he achieved an accuracy of nearly 50 percent only.
The students seem definitely happy with the project and a girl could distinctly be heard exclaiming in the video background:
“‘Peep, peep,’ just like that!”
It is quite interesting that the humans have been scratching their heads about the paradoxical proverb: “What came first: the egg or the chicken?”, only to realize that the chicken does not even need the egg!
