Word: egges
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...homes, sold their cars or borrowed from relatives to scrape together the $3,510 fee for foreign visitors to be treated at Bourn Hall (British citizens pay $2,340). All are brimming over with hope that their prayers will be answered by in-vitro fertilization (IVF), the mating of egg and sperm in a laboratory dish. "They depend on Mr. Steptoe utterly," observes the husband of one patient. "Knowing him is like dying and being a friend of St. Peter...
...variations on the original technique are multiplying almost as fast as the test-tube population. Already it is possible for Reproductive Endocrinologist Martin Quigley of the Cleveland Clinic to speak of "oldfashioned IVF" (in which a woman's eggs are removed, fertilized with her husband's sperm and then placed in her uterus). "The modern way," he notes, "mixes and matches donors and recipients" (see chart page 49). Thus a woman's egg may be fertilized with a donor's sperm, or a donor's egg may be fertilized with the husband's sperm, or, in yet another scenario...
...women, the most common reason for infertility is a blockage or abnormality of the fallopian tubes. These thin, flexible structures, which convey the egg from the ovaries to the uterus, are where fertilization normally occurs. If they are blocked or damaged or frozen in place by scar tissue, the egg will be unable to complete its journey. To examine the tubes, a doctor uses X rays or a telescope-like instrument called a laparoscope, which is inserted directly into the pelvic area through a small, abdominal incision. Delicate microsurgery, and, more recently, laser surgery, sometimes can repair the damage successfully...
Much has been learned about the technique since the pioneering days of Steptoe and Edwards. When the two Englishmen first started out, they assumed that the entire process must be carried out at breakneck speed: harvesting the egg the minute it is ripe and immediately adding the sperm. This was quite a challenge, given that the collaborators spent most of their time 155 miles apart, with Edwards teaching physiology at Cambridge and Steptoe practicing obstetrics in the northwestern mill town of Oldham. Sometimes, when one of Steptoe's patients was about to ovulate, the doctor would have to summon...
...happens, they were wrong. Says Gynecologist Howard Jones, who, together with his wife, Endocrinologist Georgeanna Seegar Jones, founded the first American in-vitro program at Norfolk in 1978: "It turns out that if you get the sperm to the egg quickly, most often you inhibit the process." According to Jones, the pioneers of IVF made so many wrong assumptions that "the birth of Louise Brown now seems like a fortunate coincidence...