Focus 580; Pandoras Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution

This summer Louise Brown will turn 26. And the main reason that that's worth taking note has to do with the circumstances of her conception. Louise Brown was the world's first test tube baby. Her successful birth and normal development paved the way for a million other births like hers half of these have been here in the United States. This morning in this part of focus 580 we will look back to some of the history of the development of the technique of in-vitro fertilization. And our guest of the program is Robin Moran's Hennig. She writes about science and medicine for many publications. She's written for The New York Times for Scientific American and seed. She is the author of a number of books including a new one that's titled Pandora's baby the subtitle is how the first test two babies sparked the reproductive revolution. It's published by Houghton Mifflin. Now that in-vitro fertilisation has been become something of a routine procedure at least it's much more common. We tend to forget just how controversial it was back in the 1970s. As people raised concerns

about the impact on society and also what it would mean for the children that were born by those means. She says that in her book that perhaps some of the most dire predictions did not pan out. However it's still worth examining this history because it gives us some insight perhaps and some tools to use as we think about the newer reproductive technologies as we talk this morning. Questions and comments are certainly welcome. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line that is good. Anywhere that you can hear us and that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5 certainly questions from listeners are welcome we just ask people to be brief please so that we can keep our program moving and getting as many people as possible. Ms Henning Hello. Good morning David. Well thank you for talking with us. My pleasure. I think one of the things that you point out and it's certainly very striking is that

when you take a look and you look back and you look at some of the things that people were saying about in-vitro fertilization back in the 1980s particularly those people who were very alarmed and were talking about possible negative very negative consequences. It is very much the same things people are saying the very much the same sorts of things about genetic engineering and cloning. Those things that are the controversy of procedures today. Right. Affected so much of this. I know you're about to say that some of it even some of the same people exactly. The same people had some of the same words and some of the same individuals which is remarkable when you think about it. So that obviously points to the fact that we're still conflicted. We're not quite sure how we feel about these things and that there are indeed in unresolved kind of questions about what exactly it means for for humanity. Maybe not you know not all that's putting it too. To boldly Well it's putting it the way it's been put. You know there are people who thought that when if we were to allow in vitro fertilization it would undermine

the nuclear family. And you know on to our sense of continuity in our relationship to ourself and our children and these are many of the same kind of grand the earthen areas that are being painted now about things like genetic engineering. It's much the same thing because you're you're sort of mucking about in the stuff of life. You know this goes back to the ancient with fears about what Promethea was doing when he stole fire from the gods if you're able to manipulate certain essential parts. Life and if you're able to play around with the point at which life begins. These are our issues that people have very very strong feelings about. Before people started to do experimentally to do in-vitro fertilisation people were doing were trying to assist humans to conceive by artificial insemination.

How common a procedure was that before you really really started to get going with in-vitro and was that controversy that that even that was controversial that is something that we now take almost more for granted than we take IVF and we do take IVF for granted now. You know I've heard it said that young women just figure it into their life plan. You know grow up go to college have a career. Get married have IVF. You know it's not it's not something that people are ashamed of anymore. But for a long time for about 50 years artificial insemination was something that really worried people because again it was messing around with the beginnings of life and interfering with natural conception and of the controversial aspect of it in particular concerned using sperm from somebody who wasn't the husband. Usually that's what you needed to do because the reason that you would need artificial insemination was that there was something wrong with the husband's sperm. So artificial insemination by donor became not common but became something that that

people turn to. And there were actually laws on the books saying that the the offspring that would result from that even if the husband had consented to the procedure and understood that another man's sperm was going to be used that the offspring was illegitimate. This was. In the 1950s in and around that time is when people called babies born after artificial insemination called them test tube babies. You know that's what the phrase meant for a very long time. So so that was kind of the the early predecessor to some of the concerns that people then focus on IVF and the same concerns that they're focusing now on other interventions. Well you can certainly see that if something like that was considered to be controversy over where conception was and was still taking place within the body of the of the mother the idea of having that that take place by combining sperm and egg in a dish outside and then letting that develop to a certain point and then

taking that and putting in the body mom I guess you can see how that that certainly would be a leap and people would be that much more exercised about that procedure because it's that much further from what is quote unquote normal. Right but there's another way of looking at it which is that the. The only thing that was different in IVF was where the conception took place because because you did have to return the embryo back to the uterus and you returned it pretty quickly it was only a couple of cells large. You know that the concept of the term test tube baby had a lot of people thinking that the baby was was quite alone outside of the uterus altogether. And you know grown in a test tube. In fact there were there were a lot of jokes about you know Louise Brown said that people would say to her why aren't you long and then you know there was a certain amount of Kuma that that was generated there and you're right that it's a leap to go from accepting artificial insemination to accepting in-vitro

fertilisation but it's not as big a leap as you might think if you had a different way of looking at it if you were just thinking that's all that was changing really was the locus of the. Our guest this morning Robin Moran's Haneke She's a journalist who writes about science. She is the author of a number of books including one about the famous early geneticist Gregor Mendel that book titled The monkey in the garden that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award her most recent that's the book we're talking about here this morning is titled Pandora's baby takes a look at some of the history of in-vitro fertilisation It's published by Houghton Mifflin questions welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. What you have done I think in the book is you've recovered some history that either people have forgotten or that maybe they didn't really know about. And we've been talking here about Louise Brown and she was born in one thousand seventy eight. But before that and back in 1970 three five years before that there was an attempt to do that is to do

and in vitro fertilization in fact if that had gone ahead Louise Brown would not have been the first baby there. There would have been somebody else. Right. And it would have been American and she would have been in America. And you tell the story about about a couple of the Del Zotto who were trying to have a baby and had been trying using different kinds of methods whatever was available and they came across a doctor who was interested in trying this. And in fact did and it went it. It started out but it the procedure wasn't completed. It wasn't completed because especially in 1973 when nothing approaching that had been done anywhere in the world when the scientist's boss found out about it. He thought it was way too premature and dangerous and risky. And so he stopped the experiment. He pulled the petri dish where the the cells were growing out of the incubator and ended up stopping the experiment. He put it in a freezer. And what what ended up happening you know I

I not only recovered this story but I had never heard it before and I was surprised that I had never heard it because I covered weed ground berth as a reporter in 178. So I was very focused on what the news was and reproductive technology but somehow this was kind of obscure at the time unless you were living in New York City where all of this took place. What ended up happening was this couple sued the the administrator of the hospital for stopping the experiment and the case came to trial. By coincidence the same week that Louise Brown was born. So it's kind of been kind. Related everything about the way society's attitude changed in just those five years because five years earlier in one thousand seventy three it was clearly lead to this to a couple of scientists. A very premature procedure that was dangerous and just five years later in 1078 here was that perfectly normal baby born in England.

And what's really interesting again is that the the the man who was the boss of the doctor who had tried this in 1903 the man who when he found out said no we can't do this I'm going to put a stop to it. His attitude certainly has changed. Oh yes it did and that was sort of my favorite part of the story that the boss's name was Raymond Vander wheel and you know in 1973 he he opened up the test tube and stopped the experiment in one thousand seventy eight he was on trial for doing so and actually lied to the Gulf state. They had sued him for a million and a half dollars and they got a lot. But they they won the case because the jury agreed that they had suffered. And then in 1983 10 years after he had stopped his side. Experiment he actually became the co director of the first in-vitro fertilization clinic in New York City. So in just those 10 years in this one man the procedure had turned from something that was a torrent to something that was marketable.

I mean a good you know a good way to practice your medicine. Did that did the case was that widely discussed and covered it did that at the time start a debate going about whether or not it was it was appropriate it was right it was dangerous for this procedure to be used. Well there was that there was a big media circus in New York while this was going on. And I think it's because you know that the case with the post. It started a couple of times before it ultimately did and the few times that it had come before the judge and jury selection was supposed to begin which was earlier in 1078 there was basically no attention paid to it at all. But then in July 1978 when jury selection was to begin suddenly there were hordes of reporters out on the steps of the courthouse because that was the week that there was news about you know the the birth watch in England as what they called it. So it seemed to reporters in this country that it was it a nice

analogy a nice American version of what was happening and went and they were covering Louise Brown so avidly that they also then covered the case pretty avidly. And again the trial a lot of those questions were raised. Is this something that we should do yet is for or was it something we should do yet five years earlier it was hard to sort of recreate the mindset of 1973 in the middle of all this excitement over Louise Brown in. But they tried to do that and they tried to make it to raise those questions is this something that scientists should be allowed to do. Was this the right scientists to have done it. A lot of it seemed to hinge on the reputation of that the doctor who was involved in the experiment. And you know is it something that that this couple was do you know I think it had a lot of those questions get raised also you know should infertile couples be allowed to just sort of do whatever it takes to have their own biological children. And those are still questions that we're asking now about

about manipulating genes or for testing for genetic disease or you know ultimately cloning. There's another part of this that I think is really interesting and worth talking about and it what it demonstrates is that there are unintended consequences of policy. People may think that one thing is the thing to do for a particular reason and then it turns out that things end up going in a in a direction that. He had not imagined and what I'm getting at here is that the notion that there were people back in the early 70s who thought that in-vitro fertilisation should and should not go ahead and that the way to stop that was to say well weren't there is going to be no government funding of this kind of research and that actually happened and I think the point you make in the book is that the result was that it instead of it being those people being put out of business they went and they found other funding

private funding and indeed it resulted in a kind of area of research that that wasn't regulated so it really had a very different kind of result a very different outcome than those people who said well let's stop this and they will stop this is by making sure that it doesn't get any federal money right. What got you. Understand how how they could think that is a first step that you know obviously federal money that the federal government is the biggest supporter of biomedical research. And so the presumption was if we don't offer federal grants for this kind of research then it won't get done but then if it went into the realm of entrepreneurial medical care delivery. And so the people who ended up paying for this research were actually the patients the infertile couple themselves who were charged exorbitant amounts of money and it became something of a sort of rogue science. You know the people who were doing IVF in many cases were not vetted by the government the way they would have been if they had had to apply for federal grants.

They didn't really talk to each other except in an informal volunteer kind of way. Nobody was really asking them to collect data and submit findings and and to do research at all. You know this that it turned out not to be really a research enterprise it was a clinical enterprise. So unfortunately the lesson that I think is being learned from that as people look now at some of the reproductive innovations that are possible is instead of. Realizing that what they should have done all along was sort of guided more carefully and provided some federal funding which also comes along with that federal oversight. Instead of that there they're saying OK I'm not getting research grants wasn't enough to stop it so we're going to just pass some laws to stop it. I don't think that's going to work really either. I think that what what might result is some of what we've seen already that that the the actual scientific development will

just get done in some other country and that's never been good for the United States. You know it always get gets a competitive spirit going when we see for example that the first test tube baby in the world was born in England not in the United States. There is another piece here that that you bring out and in your reporting that I think hasn't been at least I haven't seen reported elsewhere and it's connected with this last point that you were making and that is that because this was done. In the private sector and with that kind of oversight that you might at least expect if this was receiving government funding and government attention there really wasn't very much attention paid to the issue of how healthy the babies are and looking at this concern that some people did did voice before it really got going about whether in fact the babies that would result would be healthy or whether they would be any more likely than babies who were conceived by the traditional means to have any kinds of problems and barely one

of the things that you had found out is that in fact these babies do have an elevated risk. I'm not how much you measure how how elevated but they do in fact have risk of certain a certain. Problems that the babies made the old fashioned way don't have rights I think. Well early on when people were concerned about what kind of hazards might be in town and its procedure they truly believed that monstrous changes would occur. You know they even even pretty forward looking scientists couldn't quite imagine how it was possible to manipulate eggs and sperm in its Petri dish and not to Major chromosomal damage so that you would end up with with some sort of a really bizarre genetic abnormality. So once Louise Brown and the other early test tube babies were obviously so normal we're basically normal. I think the relief was so gigantic that that people didn't start looking for awhile very carefully at all.

What kind of other risks more subtle risks might be entailed. In addition because of the way IVF is done which is to fertilize a couple of ads if you can and replace several of them into the uterus. If you can just in the hope that at least one of them will take into a pregnancy. There have always been significantly more cases in IVF babies twins and triplets and sometimes even more compared to normally conceived children. And people have always known that multiples are at greater risk for certain birth defects or premature births or low birth weight. So that got confused early on that that if there were some higher rates of problems and IVF births It seemed easy to attribute it for a while to the multiples. It's only relatively recently. That somebody really sat down and said let's let's pick out the increased risk of a multiple birth and just see how risky IVF is itself. Even

if you're comparing Singleton births and there are indeed as you suggest some higher rates of certain birth defects they tend not to be severe and they tend not to be common or significant you know hugely increased risk of problems. But there are in fact increased risk of problems. I'm interested in having a chuckle a bit more about the about the case of Louise Brown and particularly I'm interested in what the the reaction was in Britain both on the level of people who make policy and just on the popular level and whether this was whether there was an outcry. What kind of concern greeted it was it particularly controversial. There was an outcry and it was controversial but not to the same extent that it seemed to be here. And I think that the difference is that abortion politics didn't seem to drive the society as as obviously in Great

Britain as it did in this country. The anti-abortion forces were were among the ones who were most vocally opposed to in-vitro fertilization because they because it often meant that that some of the embryos who were created in petri dishes didn't get it. Planted and had to be discarded in one way or another. And abortion opponents thought that that was the same thing as an abortion and they wanted to make sure that that wasn't allowed to happen. In England there was a little can There was a fair amount of concern about. You know treading on territory that was inappropriate for a science to go you know to just sort of general religious sentiment that this was God's work and that people shouldn't be involved in it. But it wasn't quite the same the same accent and the same intensity. And then what. What England and ended up doing was they had a hard time also funding the work that was done by the doctors who created Louise Brown they didn't really want to give them research grants either. But ultimately

they they came up with a mechanism for overseeing this kind of research and providing funding for it so that now there is a you know an advisory board that has to look at every kind of reproductive intervention that's proposed in terms of furthering research to to figure out new ways to do these things and they have to prove it. We don't have any such mechanism in this. Country. It was just a couple of years later than here in the United States that someone opened up the first clinic to do IVF here in the United States and and this was so this was only have been a couple of years after Louise Brown and also then a couple of years after that the trial involving the Dells iOS and the doctor who who the man who stepped in to that attempt back then five years before to have to do IVF for them. So by the time that we get around to 79 and 80 when

the first clinics open up to to try to help people we had babies that way. Well how did people with the atmosphere that much different then from you know and from between 100 how did change between 973 and say 1980. Well it was it was my only occurs. Because opening up the clinic the first American IVF clinic was opened in Norfolk Virginia which is a pretty conservative part of the country and it happened to be opening there almost as a fluke. You know that there were two very respected infertility scientists who had been at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for their entire careers and then they were forced into retirement and brought down to Norfolk where there was a new medical school that was trying to be innovative in trying to sort of make a name for itself and and the head of Obie Gyi hand there thought this was one way to do it but let's get

these two scientists Howard and Georgianna Jones who were highly respected and get them working in infertility. Today Louise Brown was born was also the day that the Joneses were moving down to Norfolk and they were interviewed by the local newspaper and reporter kind of in an offhand way said well can it be done. Can this test tube baby birth be done here. And Howard Jones who's kind of a jokester I guess said Oh sure all we need is money and family money. It is coming and so what with even as though anybody had sort of picked out Norfolk on a map and said This is where the first test tube baby clinic should be in this country. In fact if anybody thought about it they might have worked really hard not to have it be in Norfolk because they were very active anti-abortion organizations there and they were they were kind of really focused on doing anything that they could to keep that clinic from opening to the point of demonstrations and petitions and state

legislature hearings and national legislature hearings trying to you know put out injunctions against opening the clinic trying to accuse the doctors of being in collusion with the people who approved the clinic I mean it it just went on and on for a very long time until like a year later the clinic finally opened up. Then it took another year for them to figure out how to do everything right and make their first patient successfully pregnant. It's not an easy thing to do. IDF and even now the odds are against it that any one attempt will work. But in those days it was it was it even worse. You know like one try and I don't know five to 10. But it was successful when it was in 1981 that they're in Norfolk they're the first America's first test tube baby was born right and she was born. I got prime. You know I think if it's easy for people to object to something

in the abstract but once they see the actual result I think things get a little temper down you know and she was also perfect and beautiful and everybody was excited and and certainly the people who were so worried about how IVF would affect the nuclear family could see that that this was a set of children who were desperately desired. You know this was. Not something that was going to make people question what the parent child bond was going to make it more obvious what a really intense parent happened last month so that this little girl was in the car was you know sort of America's sweetheart for a long time and she was on the cover of Life magazine and believed Brown was on the cover of Life magazine I mean was it a little love fest of these adorable little babies and. And in many ways that sort of made the whole thing seem less scary. So the fact is that people seem to be sympathetic with the idea of people wanting to have

children that badly. And also I suppose it did add as we're talking earlier did help the fact that we were talking about here children that were the biological child of both the parents. We're not talking about anybody else's DNA it's theirs. It's just that it required a little bit of engineering to help the natural process along. Right but of course then the next step were kind of inevitable that once you did that with mother and father who were married and who were using their own sex cells you could also do it with donated eggs that were donated sperm and you could you know implant the mother and father's embryo into a surrogate mother. And you know there were all these other. Twists on straight reproduction that could be introduced because you have the technology and some of that was what people were so worried about. You know there was a lot of concern about what they were calling the slippery slope. You know that if you take one step even if the first step isn't all that objectionable it gets you to the next step which might be objectionable and ultimately do what no Nowadays

people would say was the most objectionable point of all and that would be reproductive cloning. That's right and and the fact is you know I kind of hate to say this because I'm I'm a poet personally to the slippery slope argument because I think it's very regressive. But the fact is you couldn't do reproductive cloning if you hadn't first done IVF and figured out how to perfect all those other steps because the beginning. Reproductive cloning looks just the same as IVF. The only difference being that you're not really mixing and I going to term you or you're doing something to an egg to make it think it's been fertilized. But but the growth in the Petri dish is the same and the placing not growing embryo back into uterus is the same. We're live at best our midpoint here I should introduce Again our guest We're speaking with Robin Branson Hennig. She's author of eight books her previous The monkey in the garden the lost and found genius of Gregor Mendel was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She writes about science and medicine for publications including The New York Times Scientific American and seed

and she's the author of the book that we're talking about here this morning it's titled Pandora's baby how the first test tube babies sparked the reproductive revolution and it is published by Houghton Mifflin. And questions are certainly welcome here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5. We do also have a toll free line that's good anywhere that you can hear us and that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. I mentioned back at the beginning of the program that in the time since Louise Brown was born we've had something like a million other babies that were conceived and born as a result of IVF. You also talked about the fact that it's still while it's a procedure that we understand better how to do now that it's still if it's not foolproof and the rate of six sess is not 100 percent right but didn't you know the rate of success in any attempt at conception is not 100 percent. The difference is. Well the big difference I think is that it's no fun to try and

fail the way it might be when you're trying to conceive the old fashioned way. And nobody. Is really counting the denominator in quite the same way when you're just trying to conceive a child. This you're very focused on the fact that because there's a lot of discomfort sometimes pain and expense involved in every attempt they are very focused on how many attempts you have to go through before you have a success. But when in normal sexual intercourse the odds of actually you know unprotected The odds of actually conceiving a child are about the same as with what we've gotten to with IVF about one chance and that is that it's something like 20 percent chance of actually leading to an actual birth. You know that's an interesting point and I think it's something that we're thinking about and people don't is that even but even as you say as with the old fashioned way there are some times when you think about everything that has to happen for a for a successful conception and then for that to implant and then for the whole thing to get going you

you have to sit back and think you know it's remarkable that it happens at all. That's right. That's right I mean nature has this way of them you know working out but but a lot of a lot of fertilisation just don't implant often because there is something of a genetic cry. That that keeps the embryo from really being viable for a whole series of other things regarding timing or you know people don't quite know yet I mean that that's a big field of research is is why it is that not every attempt at conception actually read through pregnancy. One of the things that I'm sure that once we got into doing IVF and people began to understand that it was it was possible to take the sperm and the egg to get them together in a dish and to have that develop to a certain point and have that then and then take that and implanted in the mom got it more reasonable to start thinking about well not only could you just simply make take the two and put it

together and make that happen. But that at least opens the door to the idea of genetic doing genetic manipulation and which gets us into that and into the whole idea of designer babies that in some people's minds would say well that's maybe something that's interesting to talk about but the technology our ability to do that is so far away that it's almost not worth thinking about. Now we've at least done got the human genome mapped. We still really don't know how it works but that we. But we sort of have a roadmap then now that that starts to feel just a little bit more within reach right and gets you again thinking about those ideas that people have have outlined that at some point in the future people could go into a clinic and sit down with a kind of a checklist and say well OK what kind of baby do you want and you could check off well say I think I'd like to have blonde like a blue eyes I'd like her to be tall and beautiful so she could be a model but I also like her to be able to get a volleyball scholarship to

college and I'd like it to be a concert violinist you know we're already doing that if you look at that Web site for her sperm bank. There are already those checklists for what kind of a sperm donor you're looking for not only the way he looks and what his athletic abilities might be but what his personality characteristics are like I think that they're there is a belief in his culture that a whole lot of things are there in our genes and if we can just find the right ones and this is something involving manipulate. And this is just involving choosing them at this point choosing the ones that are already out there. But if you think about it you know sort of looking for what how this guy has done you know whether you're going to take sperm from a guy who was you know a good guitarist versus a good pianist. I mean that's a little bit extreme to me. But one of the things that is necessary for allowing genetic enhancement to take

place. We're already pretty good at doing which is what's called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. I mean you can take up like a four celled embryo that's been created with IVF so you can take it in its Petri dish and actually take one of those four cells which is a big chunk of the embryo and. I don't live there seen under a microscope and see whether it's come from only normal people are doing that amount to scream for embryos that might have a particular genetic disease. But it's the same exact procedure that you would use to screen for. I know embryo that has the eye color you're looking for. Certainly there has been a lot of coverage in the media of the Human Genome Project and are getting to a better understanding about DNA about what the pieces are what we think that they do and that and certainly among researchers there's been a lot of interest in trying to identify individual genes and say okay this one right here does

this and this does that and and to take it beyond the fact that there are some genes that seem to be linked to disease. Take it to what some people would argue to be sort of unreasonable places where you start talking about genes for criminal behavior or genes for risk taking or you know what have you. And certainly has been a lot of coverage of that and it's there are interesting questions and interesting stories but I guess I wonder whether you think that something about the coverage has led to in a lot of people's minds to that kind of genetic determinism that says when you look at this balance of gene genes and environment and experience and what makes people what makes us who we are. But the pendulum has swung too much over to the to the gene side and that has to do with the way that these stories have been have been written. Well you've got article that that. Announce the gene for anything the gene for homosexuality the gene for shyness. It's inevitable that people will think that that means that there is such a thing as one particular gene leading to one particular kind of behavior or even one particular disease. You know the

gene for breast cancer but even the things that seem pretty straightforward pretty pretty much related to one gene even those don't always express themselves in a clearly predictable way. You know one of the things that the human genome project showed us and I I don't know if this has been conveyed adequately in the press is that there are many fewer genes in the human genome than we originally thought. You know it when they went into it they thought that they had to sequence 100000 genes and then ultimately they found that there are more like 30000. That means that because. That means that each of those genes have to do basically three times as much work as originally conceived and the only way that it could do that is that there are other conditions that must be set also that turn certain genes on and off or that make them behave in one way in the presence of another gene versus a

different way in the presence of a different gene and there's a lot more about genetic interactions that must be going on in order for only 30000 genes to accomplish to accomplish all of the variety that we see in the human species. So what the Human Genome Project did was yes it laid out you know sort of the order in which the DNA base pairs are arrayed on the human genome. But it didn't really help us understand yet how each of those genes expresses itself. And until we do understand that the concept that we can somehow pull out a bad gene and put in a good one that we're not going to be able to. That we might eventually. But that's still way down the road. Our guest in this part of focus 580 Robin rants Hennig. She's a journalist who writes about science and medicine. Her most recent book The one here we're talking about this morning is titled subtle Pandora's baby how the first test tube baby spark the reproductive revolution

and it's published by Houghton Mifflin. We have about 15 minutes left and we have a caller here we'll get right to online number one in urban Oh well you know I have two questions. One is does your guest know anything about this. Dr. Norbert quite sure I believe his name is who. I wrote an article last year and and in the Daily Telegraph that mentioned that he had created kind merit human kind of merit. I do you know anything about him. I don't know about him in particular but I have heard reports of humankind marriage which is thread of a bizarre. It twists what can be done. That's what some scientists are doing and they're doing it for research purposes and they're they're not like us trying to create animal humans that will be you know born is them. They're

mixing sometimes some cells from one species with some cells from another species sometimes involving humans and growing up embryos that seem to be relatively normal. There's been a lot of instances of cross species fertilization you know some scientists actually use towel eggs and insert human DNA into that an attempt to see whether nuclear transfer which is the first step in cloning can be accomplished not to create a cow that has human genes but just it to do it is an experimental manipulation. And so maybe Dr. Gleiser did did it for that same reason I'm not familiar with his work in particular. Yeah actually the article says that what he was creating were our own. After that yeah but this email five. I've seen some reports about that too that they they take some film now selves and some male thousand is different from

taking egg and sperm like you're supposed to next and make sure that they're taking some female body south and female body cells and and merging them together so that you get an embryo that has a little. Yeah well I really don't recall the details but my big question was something you kind of touched on earlier and that is that you didn't actually get into it. You just kind of said that's a big area of research but I was just curious to get into it a little bit more and that is you know it's seems that the you're there a layman point of view would be that the sperm the selection of which sperm would will be fertilized egg has kind of a you know our contest. You know characteristic to him. And in fact you could. There's even a way to select gender based on you know sort of

based on the acidity of the birth canal and all that stuff and I was just wondering how are scientists approaching this whole question of whether this is a process that it skipped over is going going to hurt us because there can't be a hell of a lot of data that work with there. Well you're you're right and that's that is one of the things that Concerned Scientists a great deal they've they've always known that for example the way the way conception occurs in the body is that the sperm travel up the fallopian tube in the woman's body and find the egg somewhere along the way up there and you know and encircle it. Try to fertilize it. They've always known that the sperm that make their way up to the top of the fallopian tube most quickly are the hardiest sperm. You know it it's kind of a little survival of the fittest competition right there. Before fertilization even occurred. So there has been a concern that if what you're doing is taking relatively weak

swimmers and putting them in a petri dish and giving them this unfair advantage that you might in fact allow the less hearty sperm to succeed in a way that they wouldn't in nature this hasn't been a big big problem until a more recent development an idea that's called excede stance or interest sayto plasma experiment Jeff Sessions. And basically you're taking sperm that are too weak even to get inside of an egg in the petri dish. You know even when they're delivered right there to the egg. And so you you take a very very fine needle and. Put a single sperm into it and inject it into the egg and allow it to fertilize the egg in that way. Now to keep the babies who were born after excede do seem to have a higher rate of birth defects than babies born after just straight IVF because Exene sort of takes that concern one step further and not

only takes some possibly weeks sperm and allows them to compete with other sperm that might not be all that strong either. But take a really weak sperm and and does all the work for it. So you're right to raise that question about whether we're in the laboratory sort of going over the step that that happens in nature that allows for the heartiest to to win in the competition. And they don't really know for a fact but. But it's not a problem because it's not widespread enough I suppose. He hasn't used a whole lot but. But it is a field of research that people are starting to look at. You know they are they are starting to get concerned about especially some of these variations are the AF that might actually exacerbate the unfairness of the situation. So if you if you were going to have to write some science fiction say you would like to include

an answer to the question there are some some some approach that would that would still select the sperm based on hard enough or something like that. Right. I don't know how that would happen because if they were hardy then you wouldn't come to an end to a fertility clinic to begin with. OK thanks. The question is welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 0 9 4 5. I want to go back to you know we're talking earlier about the fact that early on when IVF was just beginning to get going and there were people who were concerned about it on either ethical moral grounds or otherwise who said we don't think this should go ahead. Their way of trying to stop it was to say no federal funding for the research. And what happened was that private research money came along and funded and the work went ahead and there were certain consequences that we discussed. Can you do can you take that on apply it to the way that people now are thinking about cloning. Because there seems to be taking the same kind of approach that say we don't think this should happen so we're going to

say that there should be no federal money for this. But that still opens up the possibility that there will be private money and again that they research and its applications because it's privately funded will essentially go on regulated. Well that's one way of it. It could happen in the other way that it could happen is something that that a lot of people are trying for which is to outlaw cloning altogether you know to pass a law in Congress that says reproductive cloning cannot occur. And there is even attempt to pass a law that says not only reproductive cloning but the research kind of cloning that's known as therapeutic cloning can't occur either you know therapeutic cloning is what you need to do if you're going to create a source of embryonic stem cells for an individual. And there is some fear that if you allow therapeutic cloning to happen in a laboratory it will be no big deal to take some of those quanta embryos and implant some of them into somebody's uterus and grow up an actual human clone.

So I I think people are taking a little less of a laissez faire attitude now than they did 30 years ago with IVF. I think that they're there seeing that there is still this entrepreneurial possibility. You know there's still market forces that are going to maybe ask for this to happen. And so they're thinking of just banning it outright getting fat out of it. How is that. I don't personally think that cloning is going to be something that's in huge demand the way Id have turned out to be. I think it's too difficult and too strange and you know I think that that people are only going to turn to cloning in very rare instances where there's really no other way to figure out how to create one's own biological child. So you don't see that as being just another another tool in the in the toolkit of helping infertile couples. Well I think I think that it will be a tool but it'll do different things. I mean there's a way to use chronic technology to actually

create and add you know sort of the genetic equivalent of an egg for a woman who doesn't make her own eggs so that you can you can begin by cloning her but then you can reduce the the number of genes in the the cell to only half of the full human complement which is what's in eggs and sperm and then allow it to. Mix with with the gene from a sperm and do what ordinarily done you know this random mixing up mother and father so that what you would end up with is not a clone of this woman but you would have used cloning technology to allow her to make her own genetic egg if that's also something that's a long way off. But I think that if people are given that option they would probably tend to prefer creating a child who is a little bit more like what you'd expect once a

child could be which is a mixture of you and somebody else. And if that would I guess I'm thinking about the you know the fact that when it came to in-vitro fertilization that people started feeling better about it when they actually saw that the result whether in fact if if that we got to the point that would happen then people would maybe feel a little bit more comfortable with the idea of reproductive cloning again for the same reason because they'd see the result. Here it was. Here is this baby and it looks like these two people and genetically it's the product of those two people and you know so what's the big deal right. I think that I also think though that if there were actual literal Cuomo who were born people might feel better about. That too because you're not going to get a baby who's the exact replica of its crown donor you know and a lot of other things are going to have been different. Beginning with the ad in which that clone was were grown up and the uterus commits that crime with grown up and as I said before with with knowing how few genes there are in the human genome we now suspect that there are a

lot of environmental influences that are going to affect the way the genes actually behave and those environmental influences include things like. You know in utero condition. Well we'll have to leave it at that because we've come to the end of the time for people who are interested in reading this story I want to again mention the book. We have talked about it's titled Pandora's baby and the subtitle How the first test tube babies spark the reproductive revolution published by Hoden Mifflin by our guest Robin Brandt's Haneke She's the author of eight others. If you're interested in reading some of the history of genetics you might look at her previous book The monkey in the garden it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and I'm ascending thanks very much for talking with us today. Thank you for having me.