Word: vitro
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...couples who are concerned about passing on defective genes may be spared that agonizing dilemma, thanks to a remarkable new procedure that allows doctors to test days-old embryos for genetic abnormalities outside the womb. The technique -- which begins with in vitro, or "test-tube," fertilization and then involves plucking a single cell from an embryo the size of a grain of sand -- has already produced a healthy baby girl for a British couple with a 1 in 4 chance of having a child with cystic fibrosis, according to a report in last week's New England Journal of Medicine...
Applying this knowledge to human embryos created by in vitro fertilization, doctors at London's Hammersmith Hospital, led by Alan Handyside and Robert Winston, perfected a technique for drawing cells into hair-thin pipettes one at a time. Then they teamed up with a group from Houston's Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital who had developed a procedure for rapidly spotting the cystic fibrosis defect in a single strand of DNA, using the gene- cloning technique called polymerase chain reaction. "It's like finding one typographical error in a book 180 times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...media anchor-goddess and wiseguy and now a defiantly unmarried madonna. In last week's episode she delivered a baby boy -- the boy being played by a seven-week-old girl named Danica Fascella. (A perfect Murphy Brown, post-Quayle touch: Danica and her twin Cynthia were conceived in vitro and carried to term by a surrogate mother.) In triumphant autonomy, Murphy will raise the child as a single parent...
...woman and artificial insemination with sperm from Mitchell's husband Donnie, Sauer was able to establish the pregnancy. Mitchell is not even Sauer's oldest patient. He is also helping a 55-year-old woman, who has a 30-year history of infertility and was too old for in vitro fertilization when it was introduced in 1978. "She had given up hope of ever having a child, and came to me hoping for a miracle," says the sympathetic doctor...
...delay pregnancy. "There is a time and place for everything," says Dr. Georgeanna Jones of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Va. "Women should know that their eggs age. They need to plan for their families and careers so they can have children earlier." Most in vitro clinics are reluctant to accept patients over age 40. The reason is primarily practical: the success rate for such women is minimal, though donor eggs can certainly improve the odds. Natural childbearing is also rare in this age group. Only 1% of the 4 million U.S. babies born...