Australian researchers say they may have found a way to fertilize an egg without the use of sperm. In a study that offers hope to people as diverse as infertile men and lesbian couples, infertility scientist Orly Lacham-Kaplan and colleagues at Monash University's Institute of Reproduction and Development in Melbourne report fertilizing mice eggs with somatic cells from the non-reproductive parts of the animals' bodies. The process has effectively "mimicked" fertilization with sperm, allowing the researchers to grow embryos in laboratory cultures. The next critical test in the study is to transfer hundreds of those embryos into surrogate mice mothers, to see if they can live and flourish. "Then we have a long process of testing those pups, (to see) whether they will be born, whether they are normal, whether they are capable of reproducing, and if the offspring from those pups will be normal as well," Lacham-Kaplan says. The mice experiments are expected to take up to a year.