Word: petry
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...same holds true for many other experimental therapies emerging from the lab. One of the most promising is a technique that keeps embryos growing for a few extra days in a Petri dish. Until recently, clinicians had to put in-vitro embryos into the uterus when they were just one or two days old and relatively fragile. After that, the embryos' metabolism changes, rendering standard growth mixtures useless for nourishing them. That's why clinics insert several at once, which raises the odds of success but often produces triplets, quads and even quints...
While Europa may be the solar system's most promising Petri dish, it is by no means the only one. Saturn's Titan, larger than both Mercury and Pluto, has an atmosphere fully 60% denser than Earth's, forming a sort of photochemical haze that appears to be full of the stuff of prebiology. The problem is that Titan is cold. With temperatures hovering near -290[degrees]F and no signs yet of significant heat to drive chemical reactions, the moon could be awash in organics that are nevertheless unable to combine in biologically useful ways...
...embryo to eliminate a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis? Is it so far removed from in vitro fertilization? In both those cases, after all, an undeniable reductiveness is going on, a shriveling of the complexity of the human body to the certainty of a single cell in a Petri dish. If we accept this kind of tinkering, can't we accept cloning? Harvard neurobiologist Lisa Geller admits that intellectually, she doesn't see a difference between in vitro technology and cloning. "But," she adds, "I admit it makes my stomach feel nervous...
...What we were seeing," says Hayflick, now a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, "was the concept of cellular aging: growing old in the microcosm of a Petri dish...
...Elizabeth Blackburn, then with the University of California, Berkeley, did just that. Working with a single-cell pond organism, they discovered a telomere-preserving enzyme they dubbed telomerase. Five years later, Gregg Morin at Yale University confirmed their work, identifying the same substance in cancer cells. In the Petri dish, the agent of eternal life had been found...