Word: vitro
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...July 25, 1978, as hundreds of reporters descended on the sleepy English mill town of Oldham, the 65-year-old obstetrician delivered the world's first "test-tube baby," a healthy, 5-lb. 12-oz. girl aptly named Louise Joy Brown. Conceived in a lab dish, or in vitro, from the egg and sperm of a working-class couple who had tried for years to have a child, she seemed as miraculous as any baby in 2,000 years...
Edwards had worked only with eggs obtained from ovaries removed for medical reasons. Steptoe realized that with a laparoscope he could siphon eggs directly from infertile women. If the eggs were retrieved at just the right time and then fertilized in vitro, they could be transferred into the uterus, thereby circumventing the sometimes perilous journey down the Fallopian tubes...
...write from the vantage point of long experience both as a hematologist--who while doing routine clinical work often administers radioactive isotopes to patients for diagnostic purposes--and as a biochemist, who has been using radioactive tracers for in vitro experiments since 1950 when I began as a young investigator in the regional Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) laboratory at the new UCLA Medical School...
This unequal access won't bring a rigid caste system a la Brave New World. The interplay between genes and environment is too complex to permit the easy fine-tuning of mind and spirit. Besides, in vitro fertilization is nobody's idea of a good time; even many affluent parents will forgo painful invasive procedures unless horrible hereditary defects are at stake. But the technology will become more powerful and user friendly. Sooner or later, as the most glaring genetic liabilities drift toward the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, we will see a biological stratification vivid enough to mock American...
...everyone is convinced. Leonard Guarente, a specialist on aging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observes that "telomeres seem to be important in getting cells to divide in vitro, but the onus is to show that short telomeres affect aging in vivo. I don't think we know that yet." --By Clare Thompson...