Word: fallopian
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...British press ? "We could get baby farms, mass-produced kids, 1984 six years early!" exclaimed London Daily Express Editor Derek Jameson? the Brown venture fell far short of ushering in a Brave New World. Like countless other women with fertility problems, Lesley Brown suffered from a fallopian tube disorder. In their al most fanatic insistence on secrecy, her doctors declined to say whether the tubes were missing or merely blocked. Whatever the trouble, it was apparently serious enough to prevent her from becoming pregnant...
Under normal circumstances, pregnancy occurs when an ovum, or egg cell, released by a woman's ovary during ovulation is fertilized as it passes through the fallopian tube, successfully penetrated by just a single sperm that has traveled through the uterus. After the fertilized egg undergoes a number of cell divisions, the tiny clump of cells enters the uterus, where it burrows into the wall and develops for nine months or so until birth...
...bypass Lesley Brown's fallopian tubes, Oldham Hospital's Steptoe, 65, a highly respected gynecologist, and his colleague, Cambridge University Physiologist Robert Edwards, 52, undertook a remarkable procedure they have been experimenting with for a decade. They removed a ripe egg from Mrs. Brown's ovary, placed it in a laboratory dish and added sperm from her husband. After incubating the ovum as it began to divide, they finally placed the developing embryo in the uterus, where it became implanted and continued to grow into a fetus in what seemed to be an entirely normal...
...work of Steptoe and Edwards was conducted. The Uni versity of Pennsylvania's Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, who has him self fertilized eggs in vitro but never attempted to implant them, points out that the British researchers had not provided any details about the condition of Mrs. Brown's fallopian tubes. "If they are completely absent," said Mastroianni, "you must accept the fact that the egg was fertilized in vitro. But if they are just damaged, there's always the possibility that the egg may actually have been fertilized in vivo [in the body] ? that the tubes may have functioned...
...divide, first into two cells, then four, then eight, and so on. A few days later, the conceptus had reached the blastocyst stage: an aggregate of cells in the form of a hollow sphere. Ordinarily, fertilization and this initial division would take place as the egg traveled through the fallopian tube to the uterus. Thus it was at this point that the laboratory conceptus was introduced into Lesley Brown's womb...