Word: sperms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...their cars or borrowed from relatives to scrape together the $3,510 fee for foreign visitors to be treated at Bourn Hall (British citizens pay $2,340). All are brimming over with hope that their prayers will be answered by in-vitro fertilization (IVF), the mating of egg and sperm in a laboratory dish. "They depend on Mr. Steptoe utterly," observes the husband of one patient. "Knowing him is like dying and being a friend of St. Peter...
...variations on the original technique are multiplying almost as fast as the test-tube population. Already it is possible for Reproductive Endocrinologist Martin Quigley of the Cleveland Clinic to speak of "oldfashioned IVF" (in which a woman's eggs are removed, fertilized with her husband's sperm and then placed in her uterus). "The modern way," he notes, "mixes and matches donors and recipients" (see chart page 49). Thus a woman's egg may be fertilized with a donor's sperm, or a donor's egg may be fertilized with the husband's sperm, or, in yet another scenario...
Much has been learned about the technique since the pioneering days of Steptoe and Edwards. When the two Englishmen first started out, they assumed that the entire process must be carried out at breakneck speed: harvesting the egg the minute it is ripe and immediately adding the sperm. This was quite a challenge, given that the collaborators spent most of their time 155 miles apart, with Edwards teaching physiology at Cambridge and Steptoe practicing obstetrics in the northwestern mill town of Oldham. Sometimes, when one of Steptoe's patients was about to ovulate, the doctor would have to summon...
...licensed its patented procedure to 24 fertility clinics around the world, from Gretna, La., to Amman, Jordan. (In the U.S., such technology is not subject to federal regulation.) The clinics pay Ericsson's company up to $15,000 in licensing fees, and many overseas clinics also buy sperm-separation materials from Gametrics. The Gametrics procedure generally costs between $225 and $350, and three or four inseminations are often needed before pregnancy occurs. Customers come to these clinics for a variety of reasons. Many already have children of one gender and wish to ensure that their next child will...
Some independent researchers suggest that the investment is a poor one. Reproductive Endocrinologist Sandra Carson helped test the Gametrics method at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital. Although early results seemed encouraging, she says, "the final figures were insignificant." In their testing, Reese researchers found that the Gametrics sperm-separation method did not raise the concentration of Y sperm high enough to influence gender...