Word: asch
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Like the Jorges, the woman who gave birth to the children (whose names have been withheld) sought treatment from Dr. Ricardo Asch, a celebrated fertility specialist at the Center for Reproductive Health at the University of California at Irvine (UCI). She and her husband thought their travail had finally ended when, in 1989, she gave birth to twins. Then last month they received a letter from the Jorges' lawyer demanding that the boy and girl undergo genetic testing. "We do not want to unduly disrupt your lives," the letter read without intended irony, "but rather to help facilitate a relationship...
...breakthrough came in the mid-1980s at Dr. Ricardo Asch's laboratory at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Asch was trying to find a simpler way to do IVF, one that would not require the skills of an embryologist, when he hit upon the procedure he called gamete intra-Fallopian transfer, or GIFT. Rather than attempting fertilization in a Petri dish, he simply loaded the sperm and eggs (known to biologists as gametes) into a fine pipette and inserted them into the Fallopian tube, where he hoped they would take care of business by themselves. Not only...
...embryo is squirted, rather violently, into a reproductive tract that has been pretty roughly treated, first by various hormone treatments, then by the egg-retrieval procedure. In GIFT, by contrast, the embryo drifts quietly into the uterus, much as it would naturally. To further improve the success rates, Asch's researchers tried fertilizing the egg in a lab dish and then placing the pre-embryo, or zygote, directly into the Fallopian tube -- a procedure known as ZIFT (zygote intra- Fallopian transfer...
...results were startling. Using GIFT and ZIFT, clinics were soon reporting + implantation rates two to three times as high as those achieved in their own IVF facilities. Among couples for whom sperm quality is not a factor, a single cycle of GIFT or ZIFT at Asch's clinic can result in pregnancy 40% to 50% of the time. A healthy, fertile couple trying to conceive naturally in any given month has about a 25% success rate...
...frightened anymore. Once I get the mask on, I spend the rest of the time in our sealed room playing Nintendo," says Yoni Radzinski, 10, of Herzliya, a town just northeast of Tel Aviv. "By and large, Israeli kids are coping very well," says psychologist Robert Asch of the Ministry of Education. He predicts that tensions and boredom, a growing problem, will ease still further once children begin returning to school. But a residue of fear and bad dreams is likely to remain even after the gulf war ends...