Word: mother
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time making telephone calls, doing puzzles, knitting, nibbling on mints and eating ordinary hospital food (a typical lunch: steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes, followed by fruit tart). Occasionally, added the Evening Chronicle, she has become weepy and depressed, and was briefly worried, until reassured by other expectant mothers, about the seemingly small size of the baby in relation to the weeks of pregnancy. Steptoe apparently tried to get her to stop smoking, but she still sneaks an occasional cigarette. Presumably, she knows of all the concern about her and her baby because she has a television...
...moves through the tube. Finally, after several days, it will have become a blastocyst, a hollow, ball-shaped cluster of fewer than 100 cells. By now, it will have reached the uterus. There the blastocyst embeds itself in the uterine wall, where it begins drawing nourishment from the mother and starts the miracle of differentiation: the rapid transformation of cells into tissue that soon becomes recognizable as heart, brain, muscle, kidneys and all the other components of a living, self-sufficient being...
Unlike in vitro fertilization, which lets nature take its course (sperm from the father and an egg from the mother unite, albeit in a test tube), cloning is asexual, single-parent reproduction. Instead of being a mixture of genes from two parents, the clone (from the Greek word klon, meaning twig or slip) is a genetic copy of its single parent...
...long way off, scientists are moving closer to cloning mice by an indirect route. In this technique, devised by Yale Biologist Clement Markert, eggs are removed from a female mouse shortly after fertilization. At this early stage, genetic material from egg and sperm have not yet mixed; the mother's and father's genes are still in two distinct sacs, called pronuclei. Using microsurgery, Markert removes either pronucleus. The egg is then exposed to a chemical that causes the remaining pronucleus to replicate, thus giving the cell a full complement of genes. Then the cell itself divides...
Still, the mice are not clones. They each contain not a full set but two identical half sets of one parent's genes. But if the process is repeated with one of these mice, the new daughters would be clones of each other and the mother...