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Hello and welcome to Technically Speaking, where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests, share knowledge, and satisfy some curiosity. I'm Laura, and I'm joined by Ellie to talk about the recent news of babies being born via in vitro fertilization who have three parents, and it's a way of circumventing a fairly challenging genetic disease. So, Ellie, you work in science journalism. Why is
this in the news right now? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure because this isn't as new as the Guardian is making it out to be. Um, they've done this since 2003. I think the first baby was born um that had this procedure with three, they're calling it three parents. I don't know if that's even technically the right term. Three contributing factors. Maybe we should call it that. But this recent research is eight babies now have been born alive and well with no sign of this
sort of genetic condition. So maybe it's just a good news story that's being shared around. I guess so. I mean, they've proved it can be done multiple times, which is what you want in science, repetition. Yeah. So true. But I also wonder if like maybe there was a press officer somewhere that just got proactive with sharing the news. So was that just out there sending it to loads of different news outlets who thought, "Yeah, why not? It's a good, as you say, it's a good news story."
Yeah. I mean, being on like I write a lot of animal stories for work and I'm on like lists for like flora and fauna. Can never say that. and like Chester Zoo and like uh Pantherra and like animal organizations that know that I'm looking for nice animal stories or interesting
animal research or new studies. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if there's someone uh I'm not sure if this is like associated with a particular university or anything that's like emailing the Guardian or like a really highprofile pro press officer that's like got ins with different news outlets. There's also the thing, and this may be my cynicism speaking, that anything to do with IVF, with sort of genetic manipulation is going to get clicks.
It's always just on a little bit of that side of controversial that people will have opinions about it, will want to read about it, will be perhaps not on the science side of it as much as you or I would be. Yeah, I find it a little bit odd that it's still seen by some as unethical given that it's been around for like decades now. And I can see why it was controversial when it was being developed back in like the 50s and 60s and 70s. But now I think times have
changed. Science has come forward. And the headlines I saw when you mentioned they seemed a little bit clickbaity. They did seem to suggest that there were eight babies from three people as if one woman was carrying all of these eight babies inside of her at once. It does sound a bit racy, but I don't think that's what they actually mean. Is it from what you were saying? No, this see this is what I mean about like sort of clickbaity headlines and like perhaps people not fully grasping
what has been going on. This is not one woman. This is, as I understand it, seven different women because one person had twins. But what they do is pretty cool. So, it's a special type of IVF. Normally in IVF, you take sperm and you take an egg. you fertilize them outside of the womb and then you transplant them back into a uterus. However, with this, you take the sperm and then you take genetic material from the nucleus of an egg and then you put it into a second egg that's had the
nucleus removed. So then you get the three. So you get Yeah. The reason that they want to do that is because of mitochondrial disease which is passed always through a female line. And if you have genetic markers or if you have the disease yourself and you don't want to pass it on to your offspring, then you need an egg cell without any mitochondria in or with healthy mitochondria in rather to make this
happen. And this is because the mitochondria aren't in the nucleus of the egg cell, which is where the mother's main genetic material, the stuff that dictates what you look like and what other diseases you might have. Yeah. So, it's not really three parents and it's basically like a instead of a sperm donor, it's an empty egg don vessel. Yeah. It's just a healthy egg with some healthy mitochondria. But there is such a thing as mitochondrial DNA which would be unique to that
person. So that's where they're getting the three DNA strands from. So you got dad's DNA in the sperm, mom's DNA in the nucleus, and then this mitochondrial DNA that will come from the third person. And your mitochondria, I remember from school, they're the powerhouse of the cell. The powerhouse of the cell. I don't think anything has been driven into the mindset of millennials more than that. So that's basically what's responsible for helping produce energy so that your
body can function, right? It's the whole ATP cycle. ATP. Yeah. Oh god. Going back to those days. That was a time. But yes, essentially it makes ATP, which is basically energy for cells to do whatever they need to do. Lovely adenosine triphosphate. I found a bit, this seems really obvious, but depending on how you phrase it, it seems a bit weird that the cytoplasm is the equivalent of the yolk in a bird's egg. Oh, is that true? That's fun. I never
thought of it like that. I guess it's a bit different to Is it a bit different to a bird? Because like mamalian uh what you call it embryionic development you end up with a placenta and then you get nutrients fed into that whereas a bird has like a weird egg yolk thing. Yeah. All the nutrients already in there. So there must be some differences but then I guess evolutionary divergence means there must be some similarities as well. Yeah. I mean it's all like pretty
similar. Just add a few extra calcium carbonate shells in there. And I got the impression that this placenta doesn't form straight away. So it has a period where the fertilized egg has to survive in the womb on its own. So the cytoplasm produces is um or provides nutrients and energy in those early stages which might explain some of the similarity between us and birds. Yeah, I suppose that's true cuz it's at the start it's just cell division,
right? For ages you go from one fertilized egg and then it splits and then it splits and it splits. So it doesn't have anything to provide nutrients to it initially. Yeah. So maybe you're right. is all in the cytoplasm when it's like a I don't know 16 stage cell and that makes me think that what's going on to actually have a successful pregnancy and a healthy baby must be really complicated all the different
biochemistry that's happening. Your description at the start sounded reasonably simple albeit slightly complicated by having three donuts involved. Yeah, I think writing it down or saying it out loud, it is relatively simple, but getting to that point is relatively difficult, I think. Yeah. And it sounds like success rates are still fairly low for IVF as a whole, not this very specific threebody contribution.
Yes. I'm not sure what they're at now. I think initially they were very low, but nowadays I guess it really depends on why you choosing to go to IVF in the first place, like what sort of fertility issues you might be dealing with. This is what I started to wonder cuz um one thing that's important for in vitro fertilization is before they put it back in the body they have a growth medium that sounds like there was a lot of
development involved for that. So it's not just as simple as taking some chemicals and sticking them together. You need the right chemicals put together in the right way to make the biochemistry happen. Is this growth medium is for you've taken the egg and the sperm and mixed it together and then it's growing before it goes back into the person. Yes. Right. So essentially giving it a bit more of a boost than just having the egg with the cytoplasm that provides the
nutrients. There must be some exchange between the cytoplasm and the surrounding environment I guess. Yeah, I guess so. I mean it's so it is quite complicated what's happening in that early stage I guess because a lot of times as well they test what do they call them embryos I guess before they get implanted back in. And sometimes there can be like genetic issues or the embryo doesn't develop well or whatever.
So then you potentially wouldn't then transfer that embryo back into the person you wanted to be pregnant. There must be a lot of challenges cuz IVF research it's really started in earnest in the 1960s as the Netflix film
has told us. So there must be a lot more to it if success rates are I think I read somewhere that IVF as a whole is between 30 and 50% for women that are under 35 which as a scientist wanting to reproduce something they're not great reproducibility stats in terms of reproducing data I should say not human reproduction but honestly I thought it would be higher but then I guess people do rounds
as well don't they? you can have multiple embryo transfers and stuff like that if it doesn't necessarily work the first time because um it's what you see in movies. I mean, not necessarily in Joy, though that was a very good film on Netflix about the like fundamental start of IVF, but like people taking hormone injections for a long time and films and stuff like that to like prepare themselves for having an embryo
transfer. I also got the impression that there are different ways of doing the threebody reproduction. The threebody problem. I'm trying not to call it three parent and three body is the immediate thing that pops into my head.
Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? It's all these you sort of trip over yourself a lot as well because I'm also trying to be conscious and not always say woman either which is like a whole other separate issue because you can be born with male reproductive systems and whatever else but then still be woman. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It is challenging.
Um, but I'd read there was a couple a long long time ago that rather than doing the technique you suggested where they take two eggs from women and mess with them a little bit and fertilize one of them, they fertilize both of them with the same father's sperm before replacing the nucleus. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And because there were two fertilized eggs, the couple thought that this was unethical because that was a chance for two children, not just one.
Oh, yeah. This is this is I mean the ethics of this then get very complicated because what happens if you do IVF and you fertilize multiple embryos which is what people usually do and you end up with I don't know eight healthy embryos most people don't want eight children. So then say you have two children or three children out of those eight what
do you do with the remaining five? But then some of what they do for IVF as a whole, again, not necessarily the three body reproduction was they'll do genetic testing to select the ones that are most likely to survive. So the ones that are least likely to get, you know, halfway through the pregnancy and then just stopped growing.
Yeah. So in that respect, it's kind of maximizing the chances of getting the outcome you wanted, which is a healthy child, which as a scientist, to me, that seems straightforward, but then I'm not the one looking to have a child through
this technique. Yeah, I think it's easy as a scientist to be like, well, obviously you should have the one that is, you know, the most genetically suitable, which I think a lot of people do, but then we're taking out the emotion about it that, you know, years of trying, the toll of all of this process takes on someone physically and emotionally. So, it is very difficult.
And what I find weird about how eggs as a whole have developed, I guess, is that the nucleus doesn't contain any of the genetic information that relates to these important mitochondrial cells, as far as I can tell, anyway. And to me that just seems almost like a little bit of a design flaw. If they're so important, why only have it from one parent? Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I think there's a thing as well that we are we xx women xx is that the thing and men are xy.
I can't remember. It's another school level science fact and I haven't been to school in decades. That is true. Um I think women are XX. And I think that because of that, because we then have multiple copies, we're less likely to get certain genetic disorders because we've got like backups essentially, which I think is quite fun. Uh, but then it sucks if you're a man because you don't have that extra part. And there's something about mitochondria evolve from bacteria or something like that.
Mitochondria are so weird. It's like they're on their own separate thing. I think there was an idea that mitochondria were once like a living entity like a bacteria that got swallowed up but that is again going back way further. Yes. Long time ago I imagine but does make an interesting point that at least part of our genetic material is derived from germs essentially. Yeah. Which is why they have their own thing because they were once separate entities to being inside a human being.
So they would have had their own DNA as a living organism and then they got absorbed by evolution I guess or but they retain their own genetic information which is so cool. Something else that interests me is that there does seem to be some sort of interaction between the mitochondria and the nucleus. So the mitochondria sitting in the cytoplasm is just doing its own thing regardless of what the nucleus
does. The nucleus can control what the mitochondria are doing and sort of help determine the development of this individual usite I think it's called when it's just one cell. Ah, I mean, yeah, that makes sense, right? Like nucleus is the is the brain of the cell.
So, it's sending messages all the time to different parts of the cell to do stuff, which is cool when you think in the the three donor example that then is completely different nucleus and mitochondria from different people and it still works. Exactly. Yeah. You would think there must be some way of trying to define like, you know, when people do organ donation, you see this on TV programs all the time where your body rejects the organ.
Yeah. You'd think that the mitochondria would be like, "Well, that's that's not the nucleus we were talking to yesterday. Why do we take orders from this one now?" Yeah, this one's sending different chemicals. I don't get it. I guess cuz it's just chemistry, though, right? It's not actually sitting there thinking, "What's going on? It just responds to the chemicals it's given." Yeah, I suppose. So, maybe we're we're anthropomorphicizing it too much. In my head, that seems like why wouldn't the
mitochondria reject the new nucleus? But then I guess maybe it's it's similar enough that it's doing enough of the same things. Yeah, it's just chemistry. Chemicals don't necessarily care about what's going on. I've given them too much credit. Yeah. Weird segue going from ethics to chemistry in a few minutes. But hey, this always happens when it's me and you, Laura. We like to bounce around. I wonder if that makes it challenging for people to keep up with what we're saying.
Yeah, if it is challenging, please let us know cuz we'll try and be more linear in the future. But if you like our semi chaotic style, then also let us know that. Yeah, definitely. And we can keep doing these how we do it now. So, we've already discussed briefly that there's a Netflix film that sort of documents the first success of IVF back in uh 68. No, 78, wasn't it? The first IVF baby was born. Yeah. 78, which is quite late. But then
I remember that we're now 2025. So, it's actually a long time ago. A fair while ago. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the research started in ' 68, which is roughly the time that um the pill was made available to women who were married. So they they had bit more control about their own ability to conceive. So at least in the UK, the 60s were a big thing for women's rights, I suppose. Yeah, I guess so. This is like taking back control of your reproductive health.
Yeah. But I think the film the film is really good. It's pretty heartwarming, but then also being like sad at the same time. I quite like the way it tracked the highs and lows of the research and brought across the scientist's disappointment and frustration at things when they
weren't working. There was a bit where they were trying to figure out why one of them couldn't conceive and they traced it back to some chemicals that had become toxic and had to throw everything out and start again and they were really angry about this. Yes, I remember that. She like has a light bulb moment and then yeah, they have to get rid of it all and start all over again. And it seemed to capture quite well some of the main improvements like harvesting
the eggs laparoscopically. They're using like a tiny torch essentially and tiny tools to make a small incision rather than just opening up your belly and fishing some stuff out. Yeah. I mean that must be like an egg retrieval is is it considered major surgery? I'm not sure. But at the time it would have been if they definitely were putting people under and opening up them to get the eggs out. It seemed to it briefly mentioned you know I said the growth medium needed
some work. It briefly mentioned it but it just said it was the wrong pH essentially and it sounds like there's there's a bit more to it than that. Um, so I found a research paper or a peer-reviewed journal article that kind of summarized some of the advancements and uh they do things like add different growth factors and different amino acids to this substrate they put the cells in.
Yeah. And different labs used to produce their own which makes sense when you're doing the research, but now it's standard and you can just buy it commercially. Well, as I could buy growth medium potentially if you go into a medical supplies company, they might ask why you'd want it as an individual. Yeah, probably if I'm doing elicit experiments in my back garden. But no, I think I don't
know. Should it be standardized or should we be pushing people to develop different ones for different reasons as like a sort of healthy scientific growth? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bit of both that maybe there are different ones for slightly different purposes. Like there must be different reasons why you can't conceive and some of it might be I think I've heard the phrase you have a hostile womb before. Oh yeah, that just seems rude. Frankly,
this is true. So is the term geriatric pregnancy, but hey, it's a medical term apparently. Yeah, they could be kinder. They could. Being over 35 doesn't mean a geriatric, does it? No. Exactly. Maybe we should just scrap the term geriatric altogether. I feel like it's not just even if you're 85. I don't think it's kind to call anyone geriatric. No. There was also something they picked
up on in the Netflix film. They'd started off trying to force the mother's hormone cycle by effectively giving them different hormones to try and help them conceive, which didn't seem to be working. So, they switched to going with the natural hormone cycle, which again, I guess depending on the type of infertility you have, that wouldn't be possible.
Yeah. I'm not sure what the like standard sort of thing is now, but to my understanding, they try and like pump you full of hormones to the point where you're like would have sort of ovulated maybe or like your lining would be thick enough to then support a pregnancy and then they put the embryo in. Like the timing of it is very important in like modern IVF as well as what they were trying to do in the movie. Yeah. And apparently that's how the first IVF baby in the United States was
conceived. They injected the with um human menopausal gonadotroofen. So hormones for your reproductive organs. Um but apparently it breaks down quite quickly. So you have to have injections quite often. I think that is a big thing of like IVF in general is a lot of injections and pills and hormones that you have to take to a you have to stimulate your ovaries to produce eggs in the first place to do an egg collection and then you have to do another round to like prepare your
uterus for the embryo transfer. But it's funny what you said about American because the first US baby was significantly later than the first baby born from IVF which was in British soil.
Just making that point. Louise Brown 1978 world's first IVF baby and the embryologist Jeene Perie who seemed to be instrumental in making this happen as the Netflix film shows us and it starts off with the a voice over of one of the characters saying it wouldn't have happened without her she drove it forward and she talked to the women and put them at ease as well so she could do both I'm a scientist I do the science and I'm going to talk to you like you're a human being which is quite nice
yeah I'm also a nice person and I care about you rather than you're a statistic in my experiment that I'm running. And I'm slightly disappointed. Was this won prizes? Didn't they win a Nobel Prize that went to the two men who were involved in the research and didn't go to Gene? Oh, what a classic. I know. Again, it was the ' 70s. Times have changed. It's giving um Watson and Crick all over again. That's how I feel about that.
Yeah. From discovering the structure of G DNA, which wouldn't have happened without Roslin Franklin. Yeah. Yeah. However, one of those um doctors did develop the laparoscopic technique for harvesting eggs, which was a big innovation. So, it couldn't have happened without any one of them, I guess. Yeah, I mean, they were a team, right? The three of them were were all working together to achieve the same thing. So, yeah, we should credit Gene, but fair
dues to the other two as well. There's something else that I find slightly phenomenal about this as well is that because you can have donor eggs as well as donor sperm if you want, you can give birth without having ovaries. Yeah, it's incredible. To me, that just sounds like science fiction essentially, but it's not. It's science fact. Well, it's often with like samesex couples, they do what's called reciprocal IVF, so that one partner will have the egg from the other partner
inside them. So they like feel like they're more part of the I don't know journey of the pregnancy, the experience, which I think is quite interesting. Obviously they if they were a female female couple, they still have to get a sperm donor, but then you're taking genetics from one partner, putting it in the other partner with a sperm donor and then coming out with a healthy baby, which I think is quite
cool. And again, it makes me wonder going back to point about why don't the mitochondria in the three body fertilization sit there thinking, I don't know this nucleus. I don't like these chemicals. How come the mother's body doesn't think I don't recognize that egg? Yeah, it's wild, isn't it? How that could possibly be a thing? And also, like I was saying before with some people create, you know, eight embryos and only use three of them. There's also
like complete embryo donation. So, you could donate your embryo to a, you know, couple that can't produce eggs or whatever and then your body's never seen any part of that and yet it still can lead to pregnancy and and child birth, which is just mind-blowing. Yeah, that's such a great thing to do. Yeah, I'm sure lots of people would be incredibly grateful with what you call
embryo donation. But then obviously there's like the ethical considerations of the fact that you have willingly, you know, like your genetic offspring are walking around calling another couple their parents. But if you've done that, then I mean I guess you're fine with it or you like recognize that that's going to happen. Yeah. And then what if your children and their children meet and sparks fly? At some point they have to find out, right, that they're basically just incestuous.
Yeah. This isn't like theoretically possible that you could meet your brother and not know or your sister if if your parents never told you that they've done this. Yeah. I guess that's where some of the ethics about this kick in. Does that child have a right to know who his parents are and what the siblings are
out there? And there's also the that hugely controversial story I can't I think it was Australia where loads of couples went to the same Australian IVF clinic and it turned out the doctor was using his sperm the whole time and had like over 100 children born all with different parents but they were all like genetically related to him. That was
absolutely wild. Yeah, I've heard of a few instances of this and it did raise the question, well, what's that doing to the gene pool if it's decreasing genetic diversity? How many men would have to do this for it to be a definite problem?
Because without genetic diversity, you end up with lots of um what are usually recessive traits coming through, which then leads to all sorts of diseases that you wouldn't normally get because if you've got recessive genes from one parent and dominant genes from another parent, the dominant genes win out. Yeah. But I guess I mean now probably the gene pool is big enough that it
would be okay. But then if all those children stayed in that area and met people from the same age or you know a few years either way then I guess they could be very closely genetically related. So with all this talk of genetics and uh some of the research does do genetic testing to decide which groups of cells that have started off from that egg from those eggs I should say are most likely to be successful when they're implanted.
There's obviously an element of genetic testing and it makes me think about designer babies and is that a concern here and how far do you take the genetic testing? Oh, I mean without this three donor method and without genetic testing we wouldn't have healthy children without this lifelimiting mitochondrial disease. I think they were saying that the people that have this disease have like developmental delays, might require wheelchairs, die young, are not thriving
necessarily. However, other diseases you could wipe out certain things like, you know, now they test already embryos and children for Down syndrome and you might as a pregnant person get the, you know, diagnosis of Down syndrome and have the option to continue the pregnancy or not because of that. And then it goes a step further when you're actively looking for like a genetic embryo with blue eyes or blonde hair or, you know, going to be 6
feet tall. I don't know what sort of thing they can tell with designer babies. I know. I feel like there should be a limit on designing what a person looks like cuz that seems totally unnecessary to me. And also, everyone looks completely different, right? Like it's no, we're not all aiming to look like one person. Well, I hope we're not or the parents who are considering designer babies are trying this. I don't know. No, the world would be really boring if
everyone looked the same. There have been creepy sci-fi movies about this. It seems very bad. But then could we introduce like more fun stuff? Oh, are you thinking about our animal traits episode where you wanted um Did you want a tail? I wanted a tail. But then I don't know if you could do that because genetically we don't have Maybe we do have the code for a tail. I mean, we used to have tails allegedly. So, at what point does it become unhelpful genetic material?
Yeah. Can we turn it back on? Switch on all those what do they call it? Like dead spots of DNA that are just like filler code that aren't activated. There junk DNA. Junk DNA. That's it. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. I mean, probably having a tail is not everything I've made it out to be, but it would be quite fun. You've got to wonder what the experiments look like for that as well.
Yeah. Yeah, like you have to find the right genetic material and find the right place to insert it presumably. Yeah, I don't want a tail coming out of my elbow, do I? That would just be rubbish. [Laughter] Oh, I think for eradication of disease, it's pretty incredible that you could like especially with these really severe sort of lifelimiting horrible diseases. But then it does get murky cuz there a
spectra, aren't they? Like you mentioned downs and as far as I'm aware there are different levels of having Down syndrome and some people cope really well and get on with life and that's part of having diversity in society. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like um I don't know something like deafness. Again, lots of people are very proud of their deaf culture and sign language and
everything like that. And yet if you could produce a healthy baby that you knew wouldn't have a hearing loss versus would you would have a hearing loss. It's so that is such a quagmire of different ethical considerations. And I suppose it depends on how much you willing to adapt to accommodate that difference because so few people need help with hearing. Like I wouldn't know what to do.
Yeah. You'd have to commit to learning sign language and accepting that your child won't be able to respond to threats like alarms going off. A threat if there's like an imminent because it's a fire I should say. Not just your your clock going off is not an alarm. That's an imminent threat. No, I know what you mean though. like a fire or like you know not hearing a car come speeding around the corner and that sort of danger rather than not being at work at exactly 9:00 p.m.
Yeah, it's just something to get used to, isn't it? I suppose it depends on the individual whether they're willing to adapt. But I still think that that sort of diversity in society is helpful because it helps you understand how to work differently with different people. Yeah. And think of the technology like cocular implants wouldn't exist if there
weren't deaf children and adults. people wouldn't have been looking into how to help people and like things like uh what you call it screen readers for the blind and things like that. All this technology that we've created to make the world more accessible wouldn't have been developed. Yeah. And it's not just um going back to the IVF as a general thing. It's not just humans that this is helping to save or giving them the joy of having
children. Uh it's being done with rhinos to save the species as well. Yeah, this is something I'm a little bit obsessed with. I'll be honest. I did have the opportunity to speak to one of the lead researchers and members of the team that is actually carrying this out, which is just incredible. Um, yeah, there's only two northern white rhinos left in the world and they're both female and neither of them are healthy
enough to carry a pregnancy. So what they're doing is taking eggs from them while they're still alive and then basically doing rhino IVF and they've got sperm from a now deceased male
rhino. So then they're making embryos and what they plan to do and what they have done I think but without live birth success is place the embryos inside a southern white rhino and then that would be like effectively the surrogate and then they could get a new northern white rhino on the ground which would be absolutely incredible. I'd quite like to know how they're doing the harvesting of the eggs because these
are big creatures. Yeah. So, it's it's not like performing laparoscopy on a human being with our relatively tiny stomachs. I think I believe Susanna said they do it maybe once a month or maybe every other month. I can't remember, but if anyone wants to listen to the podcast episode that I did with Susanna, you're more than welcome. She was incredible. Um, but yeah, they they literally do egg harvesting on these rhinos, which is so cool.
Wow. And I guess working with their hormone cycles and then getting it back in there is also not necessarily straightforward as well. Yeah. I mean this is the thing like a person can tell you you know yes you can do an ultrasound on me or yes you can inject me with this. A rhino can't say yes or no or I consent. But at the same time if we don't do this then northern white rhinos will die out very soon. Yeah. And fewer animal species in the
world is not what we want. Because going back to my point about diversity in society, you also want diversity in nature to keep it resilient. Yeah, absolutely. And we did this. We're the reason that we are doing IVF on northern white rhinos is because we basically wiped them all out. So, we as a species, human beings. Yes. Yeah. Not me and you. Yeah. But I do have an interesting fact for you
which I think you'll enjoy. More than 13 million babies, and this is human babies, not other species, have been born via IVF since 1978. Wow. I feel like that's a lot. But then my immediate question is, what's that as a fraction of the world population? Of the world population? What's the world population? It's like 8 billion, isn't it? So small in that respect, but still an awful lot of successful scientific endeavors. Yeah, I was going to work it out per year. That's what I thought you were
going to ask me. It's been 47 years. 13 million over 47. I can't do that mental math, but someone can work it out and tell us. And I see your 50 on how many people have been born. And I raise you the oldest experiments for IVF data from the 1800s. Wow. So this it's not necessarily new science. It's well over a hundred years old. Well over. That is impressive that people in the 1800s were like caring about this and
trying to do something about it. And again, it was um tests with animals, not necessarily to save a species, just cuz it probably would have been wrong and weird to do it on humans. Yeah. I mean, you see in the movie that there's still a lot of protests and people are like, you're playing God and you're taking things that you shouldn't be messing about with, but obviously if they hadn't done it, we wouldn't have 13 million children. So clearly, it was a pretty incredible breakthrough.
And I think all of this is a good thing overall. It's helping people to do something that they really want that they can't do otherwise. Yeah, absolutely. Is remarkable. I mean, the fact that we can a help people that want a child have a child who can't have one naturally, great. B, the fact that we can now take out horrible lifelimiting diseases from this equation and help people have healthy children that wouldn't have otherwise had healthy
children. Also great. I mean, another 50 years of IVF research, who knows where we'll be. Yeah. And we're also helping to save species that we're making go extinct. So, a win all round. Many positives. Yeah, a triple threat of excitement. It is fun that you can apply it to other species. You'd think they started it in mice. Maybe they did start in mice. Usually everything starts in mice. But the fact that we've got IVF that we can now do it on rhinos and presumably other stuff is just cool.
Yeah. I Yeah, it was hamsters were mentioned in the Netflix film, weren't they? Which I thought was because I used to have pet hamsters was quite amusing. Yeah, normally it's always mice. Mice getting the credit for this and that, but why not hamsters? Maybe there was a scientific reason. Maybe we should do some digging and try and find out why they were immunable to doing IVF research on hamsters. There could be some genetic reason why
hamsters are not mice. And yeah, maybe maybe they've just got bigger like they're slightly bigger, aren't they? Probably. Maybe it's just a bit easier to get tiny cells from slightly bigger creature. And then I guess rats just weren't suitable either cuz they're bigger again.
Maybe they're too big. Maybe hamsters is like the golden the Goldilocks porridge of the of the medical research animal, which I could definitely not do cuz they're just cute to me and I'd want to take them home and that's not what happens in science at all. Unfortunately not. But on that note, I think that's a good place to leave it before I get really mlin again. Yeah, I was trying to bring it up. The Goldilocks porridge of animal research and Laura's like and then they all die.
Yeah, they turned it down again. I know. So, we've talked about recent news that it involves having three parents to create babies that don't have a very serious disease, and the press is maybe slightly inflating some of the claims to make it seem more exciting. So, eight babies have been born by this method currently to different parents for the most part. We've also talked about the history of invitro fertilization in general and looked at how it's being used now to save species from
extinction. So, if you enjoyed this episode, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Bye. The views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them. They do not represent any industry or organization. If you enjoyed listening to these views, it would really help us out if you could rate us, leave a
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