But it was created without sperm, eggs, or a womb.
It was made in a lab, by a group of scientists in Israel.
And what they've created so far offers a new glimpse into the early stages of embryonic development.
They've built a model that resembles an embryo at day 14 of human development...
according to Professor Jacob Hanna at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science.
"What we did, we took human stem cells that were derived years ago from donated early embryos..." // "...and what we did this time is - we put them in a special media that takes them to really really early stages..." // "...and again, about one percent of the aggregates, we can see that they start... cells start differentiating correctly, migrating and sorting themselves into the correct structure and the farthest we could get is day 14 in human embryo development."
That's when an embryo acquires internal structures but before it lays down the foundations for our organs.
He says the research could open a lot of doors... like testing the effects of drugs on pregnancies, better understanding miscarriages and genetic diseases, and perhaps even growing transplant tissues and organs.
"The human embryo makes all its organs, basically, by week five of pregnancy and we really don't know a lot, it's a black box of how organ formation happens and it's almost impossible to study this period because the embryo is very small, there are justified ethical limitations to really access such material. Therefore, the goal is really - can we bypass and create some kind of alternative model from cells, stem cells, and try to make a model for a human embryo."
He says their next goal is to advance to a model that resembles a 21-day embryo... and get their success rate up to 50%.
Six other human embryo-like models have been created this year by labs around the world.
These types of studies raise some ethical questions over the possibility of potential future manipulation in human embryo development.
But Hanna says the research provides valuable understanding... and creating a real embryo from scratch isn't on the table.
"I don't think we can ever really make a real identical embryo, just because in the end the uterus environment is really the most normal environment and it's controllable. I want to emphasize that if you are talking about trying to make a whole baby pregnancy outside the uterus, that is just impossible because the human embryo is very big, pregnancy is nine months, I mean even in mice where pregnancies are very short and the embryo is very small, we can only do so far 10 and a half days. So, that is not... It's not that it's not our goal, it's actually also impossible and there are no concerns about that."
