Word: vitro
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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...
...more than a decade, Steptoe and Edwards performed dozens of in-vitro experiments--paid for in part by Steptoe's earnings from legal abortions--but none of the 30 or so pregnancies lasted more than 10 weeks. Finally, the pair decided that instead of waiting four or more days while the fertilized egg underwent about 100 divisions, they would implant it after just 2 1/2 days, at the eight-cell stage. The daring strategy worked--and just short of nine months later, while all the world seemed to be watching, Steptoe delivered Baby Brown by caesarean section...
...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...
...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...