Word: tubefuls
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Couched in a halo of nutrient cells, an egg smaller than the dot on an i drifts slowly down a Fallopian tube, one of a pair of narrow passages that lead from a woman's ovaries to her womb. Like a beacon guiding ships at night, the egg sends forth a calling signal. A convoy of sperm -- the remnants of an armada that was once a couple of hundred million strong -- sails into view, their long tails thrashing vigorously. Lured by the chemical signal, several hundred of the most energetic swimmers close in on the egg, their narrow tips unleashing...
...result is a reproductive revolution: an explosion of new techniques for overcoming infertility and an unprecedented rush by would-be parents to take advantage of them. Thirteen years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in England, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has not only reset the biological clock for thousands of patients -- and produced some 10,000 babies in the U.S. alone -- but spawned a host of new procedures, like GIFT, ZIFT, microinjection and zona drilling, that offer even greater promise. Today, using the new technology, an infertile couple in their mid-30s has as good...
...dizzyingly complex that researchers say the more they know, the more they wonder that it works as often as it does. The actual merger of egg and sperm turns out to be one of the most straightforward steps in the process -- and the easiest to duplicate in a test tube. The events that occur before and after that union, scientists say, are where the real troubles...
...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 as well -- at a much higher rate than he expected...
...U.S.S.R. and manned by personnel trained by Soviet advisers. Yet the coalition's fighter-bombers and cruise missiles achieved perfect surprise, then set about to clobber Iraq with near impunity for six weeks. There was much cursing and gnashing of teeth among the Soviet officers glued to the tube in Moscow...