Word: grifo
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...using a technique developed by Dr. James Grifo at New York University, Dr. Zhuang Guanglun of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou took the patient's fertilized egg, scooped out the chromosome-bearing nuclear material and put it in a donated egg whose nucleus had been removed. In this more benign environment, development proceeded normally, and the woman became pregnant with triplets who carried a mix of her DNA and her husband's--pretty much like any normal baby...
...likely, says Grifo. "The obstetric outcome was a disaster," he admits, "but the embryos were chromosomally normal. We have no evidence that it had anything to do with the procedure." Even so, concern over potential risks is why the Food and Drug Administration created a stringent approval process for such research in 2001--a process that Grifo found so onerous that he stopped working on the technique and gave it to the researchers in China, where it was subsequently banned (but only this month, long after Zhuang's patient became pregnant...
Another problem, says Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University School of Medicine and president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, is that the only information recorded about these babies was their low birth weight. There was no assessment of their outcome or follow-up through the years...
...sounds almost as if it came from science fiction. Researchers know that older women's eggs are less fertile than those of younger women, and suspect that the fault lies not in the chromosomes but in the biological machinery that controls cell division. To test this idea, Dr. Jamie Grifo, director of reproductive endocrinology at New York University Medical Center, and his colleague, Dr. John Zhang, have microsurgically transplanted the chromosome-containing nuclei from older women's eggs into younger women's eggs from which the nuclei have been removed. The transplants took, and while 40% to 50% of older...
...Grifo's eggs have not yet resulted in any births, but an upside-down version of the procedure has succeeded. At the St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., Drs. Richard Scott and Jacques Cohen have been taking cytoplasm--the nonnuclear part of a cell--out of young women's eggs and injecting it into the eggs of older women. One egg with refurbished cyotoplasm has grown into babyhood; another birth is expected next spring...