Word: eggs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much has been learned about the technique since the pioneering days of Steptoe and Edwards. When the two Englishmen first started out, they assumed that the entire process must be carried out at breakneck speed: harvesting the egg the minute it is ripe and immediately adding the sperm. This was quite a challenge, given that the collaborators spent most of their time 155 miles apart, with Edwards teaching physiology at Cambridge and Steptoe practicing obstetrics in the northwestern mill town of Oldham. Sometimes, when one of Steptoe's patients was about to ovulate, the doctor would have to summon...
...happens, they were wrong. Says Gynecologist Howard Jones, who, together with his wife, Endocrinologist Georgeanna Seegar Jones, founded the first American in-vitro program at Norfolk in 1978: "It turns out that if you get the sperm to the egg quickly, most often you inhibit the process." According to Jones, the pioneers of IVF made so many wrong assumptions that "the birth of Louise Brown now seems like a fortunate coincidence...
Essential to in-vitro fertilization, of course, is retrieval of the one egg normally produced in the ovaries each month. Today in-vitro clinics help nature along by administering such drugs as Clomid and Pergonal, which can result in the development of more than one egg at a time. By using hormonal stimulants, Howard Jones "harvests" an average of 5.8 eggs per patient; it is possible to obtain as many as 17. "I felt like a pumpkin ready to burst," recalls Loretto Leyland, 33, of Melbourne, who produced eleven eggs at an Australian clinic, one of which became her daughter...
When blood tests and ultrasound monitoring indicate that the ova are ripe, the eggs are extracted in a delicate operation performed under general anesthesia. The surgeons first insert a laparoscope, which is about ? in. in diameter, so that they can see the target: the small, bluish pocket, or follicle, inside the ovary, where each egg is produced. Then, a long, hollow needle is inserted through a second incision, and the eggs and the surrounding fluid are gently suctioned up. Some clinics are beginning to use ultrasound imaging instead of a laparoscope to guide the needle into the follicles. This...
Once extracted, the follicular fluid is rushed to an adjoining laboratory and examined under a microscope to confirm that it contains an egg (the ovum measures only four-thousandths of an inch across). The ova are carefully washed, placed in petri dishes containing a solution of nutrients and then deposited in an incubator for four to eight hours. The husband, meanwhile, has produced a sperm sample. It is hardly a romantic moment, recalls Cleveland Businessman Popela, who made four trips to Cambridgeshire with his wife, each time without success. "You have to take the jar and walk past a group...