Word: embryos
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Pedersen--and the handful of other scientists working with human embryonic stem cells--uses embryos left over from fertility attempts that would otherwise be thrown away. Still, treating human embryos like so many tissue factories seems straight out of Huxley. It certainly doesn't sit well with antiabortion activists--or, in many cases, with lawmakers. In 1996 Congress banned human-embryo research by federally supported scientists, forcing researchers like Pedersen to seek private funding (most of which has been provided by Geron, a Menlo Park, Calif., biotech company...
...roughly twice as many species of their descendants still here on Earth as there are mammals, but we call them birds. Second, DNA is turning out to be a great deal more "conserved" than anybody ever imagined. So-called Hox genes, which lay down the body plan in an embryo, are so similar in people and fruit flies that they can be used interchangeably, yet the last common ancestor of people and fruit flies lived about 600 million years...
...support a fertilized egg were given Viagra in hopes of increasing blood flow to the problem areas - in the same way the drug delivers a surge of blood to a man's penis. The dosage worked for three of the women, whose linings thickened enough to accommodate an implanted embryo...
Once scientists succeed, the possibilities for comedic breeding are unlimited. By scraping cells from the fingernail of Lucille Ball, say, and from one of Ed Asner's eyebrows, a geneticist would have the tools necessary to fertilize the embryo of a child with specific kinds of comedic potential. Though testing so far has only been done on pigs--not a legitimate gauge, since it is hard to distinguish their laugh from an oink-snort--results are promising. Some studios and networks are toying with the idea of "development nurseries" that would venture to create the optimal candidates for sitcom stardom...
Jazz, an endangered African wildcat, last week became the first mammal to be born from a frozen embryo implanted in a house cat. But she's not the first rare animal to use a common species' womb. A bongo antelope was born to an eland in 1984 at the Cincinnati Zoo, and two Holsteins, one in Cincinnati and one at the Bronx Zoo, have given birth to gaur, a rare species of wild cattle...