Word: vitro
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...fact that made his little experiment -- in which he started with 17 microscopic embryos and multiplied them like the Bible's loaves and fishes into 48 -- different from anything that had preceded it. Hall flew back to George Washington University, where he is director of the in-vitro lab and where Stillman heads the entire in-vitro fertilization program, reassured that people would view his work as he saw it: a modest scientific advance that might someday prove useful for treating certain types of infertility...
What brought the research into the human arena was the rapidly developing field of in-vitro fertilization. In clinics popping up around the world, couples who have trouble conceiving can have their sperm and eggs mixed in a Petri dish -- and the resulting embryos transferred to the mother's womb. The process is distressingly hit-or-miss, though, and the odds of a successful pregnancy go up with the number of embryos used. In a typical in-vitro procedure, doctors will insert three to five embryos in hopes that, at most, one or two will implant...
...experiment reported last week involved an English husband and wife who already had a child with cystic fibrosis and were worried about having another. Doctors followed the standard in vitro fertilization protocol, using hormones to stimulate the production of extra eggs, which were then mixed with sperm in a Petri dish. Two of the resulting embryos tested positive for cystic fibrosis. The rest were O.K., and two of them were implanted in the mother's womb. One became Chloe O'Brien, a healthy child who will neither get cystic fibrosis nor pass it on to her offspring...
...diseases that could, in theory, be spotted in young embryos, including Huntington's disease and sickle-cell anemia. But gene screening to catch these disorders is not likely to be widely available anytime soon -- at least in the U.S. For one thing, it requires couples to go through in vitro fertilization, a costly ($5,000 to $13,000) procedure with a success rate hovering around 10%. The gene-screening test adds an additional $2,000 for each in vitro cycle, a bill the U.S. insurance industry has already indicated it has little interest in footing. Moreover, there is still deep...
This is more than a philosophical debate. Under pressure from the powerful right-to-life lobby, the U.S. government quietly cut federal support for in vitro research in 1979 and later backed away from several related fields, including fetal-cell research. Although the U.S. is still a world leader in molecular genetics, a report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment recently concluded that the country is now "less than well prepared" to put its scientific findings into clinical practice. "The U.S. government has withdrawn funding from this field," says Britain's Handyside, who is understandably proud of helping produce...