Word: fallopian
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...fertility decreases with age. Each month, starting at puberty, hundreds of eggs begin the maturation process. One of them, growing in a fluid-filled sac called the follicle, quickly establishes itself as the first among equals. In a normal cycle, only that single egg will be released to the Fallopian tubes for possible fertilization. About 1,000 more will wither away and disappear. So although a woman may have 400,000 eggs to start with, the number she can effectively use is closer...
There are treatments for each of these conditions. Blocked Fallopian tubes can be freed or cleared of obstructions by a variety of operations, ranging from laser-beam surgery to inflating a tiny balloon within the clogged passage. Men with extremely low sperm counts can be helped toward fatherhood by artificial insemination, which puts what sperm they have directly into the cervix, or by microinjection, which puts a single sperm right into the egg. And for couples with sperm-allergy problems, a procedure known as sperm washing strips the sperm of some of the chemical antigens that trigger the allergic reaction...
...human biology, and perform them in vitro, "in glass." By removing mature eggs from the ovaries, mixing them with sperm in a Petri dish and reintroducing the resulting embryos directly into the uterus, doctors can bypass most of the important barriers to fertility, from low sperm counts to nonfunctioning Fallopian tubes...
...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 did they fertilize, but they implanted...
...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...