Are embryos made from skin cells the future of fertility treatment?

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Speaker 3 You have downloaded the podcast of BBC Inside Science first broadcast on the 2nd of October 2025. I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Speaker 1 Hello.

Speaker 3 This week we pay tribute to pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall.

Speaker 3 Ask what is a drone wall and how scared should we be of the army of eyes in the sky and science broadcaster Caroline Steele joins me with the choicest cuts from the freshest science papers.

Speaker 3 But I want to start with huge news from the world of fertility. What we learned during school biology lessons is to make a human you need an egg and a sperm.

Speaker 3 But is science on the cusp of finding other roots using skin cells? Maybe. This week, a team at Oregon Health and Science University say they have made human embryos from skin cells.

Speaker 3 The authors say it's a step closer to overcoming infertility, but not all scientists agree on their approach. Dr.

Speaker 3 Geraldine Jowett studies how mammalian sperm and eggs develop at the University of Cambridge in the lab where pioneering work on IVF was first done. Welcome Geraldine.

Speaker 6 Hello, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 3 And with me in the studio is Emily Jackson, Professor of Law at London School of Economics. Welcome.

Speaker 7 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Geraldine, I'm going to start with you first. Can you help us understand what this team of scientists have actually done?

Speaker 6 What they've done is they've taken the approach that was used for cloning, where they had an oocyte.

Speaker 6 So an egg took out all of the DNA and in cloning, they put all of the DNA of a full skin cell into the egg. And then that gave rise to, you know, Dolly the sheep or a clone.

Speaker 6 Whereas here, before taking the DNA of the donor skin cell out, they forced it through this new process, which they're calling mitomiosis, which basically makes the cell divide, mitosis, but makes it divide in a meiotic way.

Speaker 6 So, where you get only half of the genome. And then they took that, put it in, so it's more like an oocyte, and then they fertilized that.

Speaker 6 And then, in a few instances, that was then able to develop to the blastocyst stage. So, go through the first five days of development.

Speaker 3 Okay, so there's going to be a lot of GCSE biology here. So, mitosis and meiosis.

Speaker 3 Mitosis is cell division. Meiosis is different and it's done with gametes, so sperm and egg.
Can you tell us what that is?

Speaker 6 Of course. So meiosis is essentially the key to genetic diversity.
So the first step of meiosis is where you get this recombination of like maternal and paternal genes.

Speaker 6 This is why you might have some bits from your mum, some bits from your dad. And then the second step is actually dividing so you get like half the chromosome.

Speaker 6 So it's an unlike in mitosis, where the DNA duplicates and then divides, so that at the end you have the same amount of DNA.

Speaker 6 In meiosis, the second division, you're actually splitting up half, and then the other half will then come from the sperm. So, once you have an actual embryo, you're back with two sets of chromosomes.

Speaker 6 Normally, this meiosis is like very long and complicated. And part of the reason that they've taken this approach is that we scientists really, really, really struggle to do meiosis in a dish.

Speaker 6 So, instead of trying to go through the germ cell route, taking a stem cell and then having that go develop into a gamete and do meiosis in a dish, they've just taken an adult cell and tried to force it to divide half of the chromosomes.

Speaker 6 So that's called haploid. Haploid is when it only has half of the genetic information.

Speaker 3 Okay, and that half is necessary so that you can introduce a sperm and create the correct number of chromosomes at the end.

Speaker 6 From a chromosomal perspective, that is correct.

Speaker 6 So their interest was attempting to have 46 chromosomes at the end, and they will say themselves that the issue with their approach for mitomiosis is most of the time they do not actually get half and half.

Speaker 6 So, you're familiar with things like Down syndrome, where you have trisomy 21. If you have an incorrect number of chromosomes, that's usually lethal or extremely detrimental to health.

Speaker 6 And the vast majority of the cells that went through mitomiosis

Speaker 6 actually had chromosomal abnormalities. Some even had three chromosomes in one, like 43 in the other.
And so that's probably one of the first issues with this approach.

Speaker 3 Let me get this straight.

Speaker 3 They just have to hope if they do enough of these eggs that this process, this mitomyosis, will create the right number of chromosomes, the half that they want.

Speaker 1 Yes. Okay.

Speaker 3 What percentage were successful?

Speaker 6 I could look it up in the paper, but it was very, very low. But even if they had the correct amount, my next concern comes from what state the DNA in those chromosomes actually is.

Speaker 3 Okay, so it's sounding like you don't think this is the technique that will lead to viable embryos.

Speaker 6 I think it's a really exciting approach. Like, we're always excited to have new tools in our belt.

Speaker 6 But I think out of safety concerns and for like health of any like future child being born and that child also being fertile, probably this exact approach is not anywhere near being translational for the clinic.

Speaker 3 But even so, Emily, Emily Jackson, professor of law at London School of Economics, this does feel like an exciting leap forward. And so I want to talk about the ethical and legal obstacles to this.

Speaker 3 Even if Geraldine's saying these embryos are unlikely to be viable, could they legally be implanted anytime soon?

Speaker 7 Not anytime soon.

Speaker 7 So, actually, the law in the UK is very clear that you can only do fertility treatment with what are described as permitted sperm and permitted eggs, and they have to come directly from ovaries or testes.

Speaker 7 So, I think we actually have a red line here legally, and that doesn't mean that that can't change, but it would need Parliament to make a decision that the law should be changed to allow in vitro-derived gametes, whether it's this way or just using stem cells, to be used in treatment.

Speaker 7 And obviously the major consideration if Parliament were to consider this in the future would be safety.

Speaker 7 So legally you couldn't do this in treatment without a change in the law and that change of the law will only come when we're a long way forward from where we are now.

Speaker 7 But that doesn't mean that this isn't an incredibly exciting piece of research.

Speaker 3 What would need to happen for these embryos to be used?

Speaker 7 Obviously a lot more information about safety and efficacy.

Speaker 7 But I think just the fact that this this technique uses donor eggs does distinguish it from other ways in which people are thinking about deriving gametes from stem cells.

Speaker 7 And in a way, those other techniques would have a more dramatic impact because they wouldn't need donor eggs.

Speaker 7 So if scientists were able to perfect in vitro gametogenesis, which is basically making eggs from stem cells, then eggs could become a bit more like sperm in the sense that they would be potentially plentiful.

Speaker 3 So you're talking about sort of potentially swabbing someone's cheek and then sort of dialing those cells back?

Speaker 7 Creating an induced pluripotent stem cell line and then from that making gametes in the laboratory.

Speaker 7 Now that's not safe enough also for use in humans yet, but that would be a different technique, but also a way of bypassing using sperm and eggs.

Speaker 3 I'm going to ask you both, Geraldine and Emily,

Speaker 3 how soon do you think one of these techniques will make a viable human embryo?

Speaker 6 There are a lot of groups working on it. I mean, I work on something similar to this.

Speaker 6 There are biotech companies in the US, some of which claim are quite close to being able to make oocytes from IPS cells, from these stem cells. However, the process is extremely long.

Speaker 6 Like it seems to take about nine months or so to actually just make the oocyte itself. But I still think we're quite a long way off.
Like there would have to be a lot of quality testing.

Speaker 6 There's work in Japan trying to do this in primates where you'd be able to see whether the offspring would actually be fertile because you can't really just test that in humans.

Speaker 6 So I'd say we're a long way off and we're much, much farther away for making sperm in a dish.

Speaker 3 Emily, a timeframe from, I guess, from a legal point of view?

Speaker 7 Not any time soon. I mean, I think this research is incredibly exciting and has potentially dramatic impacts.

Speaker 7 I think one issue we have to be careful about is that as soon as any clinic clinic anywhere in the world offers this, it will be tremendously popular and people will travel to receive it.

Speaker 7 We're somewhere away from that yet, but I think we do have to be careful about making sure that people who are attracted to travel overseas for this know about all of the safety concerns.

Speaker 3 Can I push you both? Are we talking decades or years?

Speaker 6 I don't know. It really depends because there can always be some massive leap.
Like at this point, I would say decades.

Speaker 6 I'd say perhaps like within the next decade for Oa sites, but it wouldn't necessarily be A legal or B accessible.

Speaker 6 I think at the beginning, there's a risk that it would just be very, very wealthy people with a lot of time and patience being able to do this.

Speaker 7 Absolutely. And I think, as Geraldine said, there are biotech startups in the US which claim to be quite close.
They're commercial organizations.

Speaker 7 So obviously, they're not publishing their research, so we don't know how close they actually are.

Speaker 7 But I think as soon as they they make this available there will be a lot of very wealthy people who will want to travel to receive it.

Speaker 3 I guess I wanted to ask both of you, Emily you first, why do you do this work?

Speaker 7 I'm fascinated in advances that increase reproductive options for people going all the way back to the birth of Louise Brown in 1978 which changed the lives of millions of people worldwide and that's not by any means the end of the story of fertility improvements.

Speaker 7 We're on a journey towards making fertility treatment available for even more people. And I think that's incredibly exciting.

Speaker 3 And Geraldine?

Speaker 6 I think the precursors for sperm and egg, the germ cells, are just fundamentally a very exciting and cool cell type. And studying them has taught us a lot of things about epigenetics and genetics.

Speaker 6 But on a personal level, I'm very interested in the queer reproduction angle. I think the capacity for

Speaker 6 same-sex couples to be able to have children through IVF and IVG would completely change the fabric of society and would make being queer simply a form of infertility and more tolerated.

Speaker 6 So that's one of my driving forces.

Speaker 3 Professor Emily Jackson, Dr. Geraldine Jowett, thank you both very much.

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Speaker 3 Now you may have heard it in the news today, but pioneering primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall has died.

Speaker 3 She's been described as tireless, and yes, she she died in California while on a speaking tour at the age of 91. She leaves behind her a huge legacy.

Speaker 3 Her work reframed how we see our close cousins, the chimpanzees, and by extension, how we see ourselves.

Speaker 3 Her working life also spans multiple decades when women's access to studying science changed dramatically. So, Inside Science wanted to take a moment to talk about Jane and the trail she blazed.

Speaker 3 Joining me is biologist and co-founder of Elephant Voices, Joyce Poole. Welcome to Inside Science, Joyce.

Speaker 9 Thank you so much, mommy.

Speaker 3 So first off, how long have you known Jane Goodall and her work? When did you first meet?

Speaker 9 When I was 11 years old and growing up in Kenya, I was taken to one of her, must have been one of her first lectures at the National Museums of Kenya, introduced by Louis Leakey.

Speaker 9 I was just so fascinated by her stories of chimpanzees and what she had learned.

Speaker 9 that was back in 1967 that I turned to my mum then and said that's what I want to do when I grow up wow she was that inspiring to you as an 11 year old yeah she was and you know I did go on to study elephants as an undergraduate and got my PhD

Speaker 9 and studied in fact at the same sub-department of animal behavior and had the same supervisor as Jane did did, Professor Robert Hind.

Speaker 9 And when I was writing up my PhD, I

Speaker 9 had all these photographs I'd taken of elephants. And at the sub-department was a man who developed all the photographs.

Speaker 9 And he used to tell me that he had also developed all of Jane's pictures of chimpanzees. So she's kind of followed me through life.

Speaker 9 And in recent years, of course, I've reached out to her for help in various things.

Speaker 9 The most recently was last year when the elephants that we study in Ambaselli, the males, were being shot by trophy hunters across the border in Tanzania.

Speaker 9 And we reached out to Jane to ask if she would reach out to the president of Tanzania to try and stop it. And she did.
You know, she just is so tireless, you know. Incredible woman.

Speaker 3 Why would you know instinctively to reach out to Jane? What was she like?

Speaker 9 Jane was such a trailblazer in the things that I care about so much. We think the same way.
Jane was the one who sort of pioneered naming the animals that she studied, not just giving them numbers.

Speaker 9 They had names, they had personalities, they belonged to their families and, you know, within a social structure.

Speaker 9 She showed that chimpanzees had emotions, that they were intelligent planners, and

Speaker 9 her way of looking at animals, chimpanzees in her case, really influenced how I carried out my own studies of elephants.

Speaker 3 I was hearing when she first went out to study chimpanzees, she wasn't allowed to go on her own, she had to take her mother with her.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 9 I remember that.

Speaker 3 And I believe she's inspired not just you, but the next generation down?

Speaker 9 Yes, my daughter Selenge, who was born in Africa and, you know, very early went to the field with me.

Speaker 9 She now works as our communications manager for Elephant Voices, but she also worked for the Jane Goodall Institute and is very fond of Jane, as am I.

Speaker 3 Well thank you so much for giving us your insights on Jane Goodall and commiserations I guess on your loss. Thank you Joyce Paul.

Speaker 9 Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 You're listening to Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

Speaker 3 And if you've been listening over the last few weeks, you'll know that we've been telling stories from the writers in the running for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Book Prize.

Speaker 3 And the winner was announced last night.

Speaker 1 And the winner is

Speaker 1 our brains ourselves, Mas'ud Hussain.

Speaker 3 Congratulations to Masud Hussain, Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford.

Speaker 3 And you can listen to Victoria Gill's interview with Masoud, first broadcast on Inside Science on the 15th of September on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 3 Something unsettling has been buzzing in the skies over various European countries.

Speaker 3 Ukraine is used to regular drone attacks from Russia, but last month a wave of Russian drones flew into Poland and days later a similar wave of mysterious drones appeared over Norway's capital and shut down Denmark's main airport.

Speaker 3 The EU are fighting drone with drone with suggestions that drones form a drone wall to protect NATO countries.

Speaker 3 Joining us to find out how to build a drone wall and more is David Hambling, a journalist and author of the book Swarm Troopers, How Small Drones Will Conquer the World.

Speaker 3 Welcome to Inside Science, David.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Can we start with some basics? I want to know about the range of gadgets that make up drones being used in warfare today.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there are lots of different types of drones, from the sort that can land in the palm of your hand to ones that are the size of an airliner.

Speaker 1 But the ones we're really concerned about here are a type that are known as Shahad. These are Russian-made Iranian-designed drones.

Speaker 1 It's got a wingspan of a couple of meters and it putters along with a two-stroke engine, has a range of something in excess of a thousand miles, and it lands with a 50-kilo high-explosive warhead.

Speaker 1 It's not an enormously high-tech piece of kit. The only advanced thing in it is the electronics, which are not that much more sophisticated than what you'd have in your phone.

Speaker 1 It's got a control unit and it's got satellite navigation. So these are really basic bits of hardware, but they are very cheap and they can be produced in very large numbers.

Speaker 3 It feels like, though, that this is a type of warfare, it's this cat and mouse warfare that seems to be evolving incredibly rapidly.

Speaker 3 And do you think the fact that there's some quite basic technologies involved is part of that?

Speaker 1 That is very much part of that.

Speaker 1 The fact that Russia is able to produce these in such large numbers, last month, something over five and a half thousand Shahads and Shahad-type drones were fired at Ukraine.

Speaker 1 You can only do that with something that is very simple and very easy to make. And as a result, they are very easy to modify.
And we've seen a lot of modifications to them as we go along.

Speaker 1 And on the other side, we've seen a lot of development of drones as well. So this is really garage-scale technology.
This is not something that requires a major aviation company.

Speaker 1 If you've got something like a jet aircraft, like the F-35, it takes something like 20 years to get that from the drawing board to first flight.

Speaker 1 These are drones that are designed, built, fielded and used within a matter of weeks. So we're really seeing evolution in fast forward here.

Speaker 3 And the people operating them. I mean, if you buy a little drone for your kid for Christmas, you need a line of sight when you're operating it.
Is that true for drones used in warfare?

Speaker 3 Or can you just be in a room playing essentially a computer game?

Speaker 1 Well you don't need a line of sight but you're legally required to have a line of sight.

Speaker 1 And you talk about the sort of drones you'd buy for Christmas. Those are exactly the same drones that Ukraine and Russia are using.

Speaker 3 Okay, so drone against drone, what can you do to stop the drones? I mean let's talk about drone walls.

Speaker 1 So the drone wall needs to have three components. Firstly, you need to have sensors.
You need to be able to detect the incoming drones.

Speaker 1 The first line of that is going to be radar, but normal radar is not terribly effective against drones, partly because they tend to be much smaller than what it's designed to detect, and partly because they're very slow moving.

Speaker 1 So you tend to need specialist radar to detect drones. But then there's also things like acoustic detection.

Speaker 1 Ukraine has a system called Sky Fortress, which consists of several thousand basically smartphone microphones mounted on poles around the country.

Speaker 1 And those listen out for that distinctive putt-putt noise made by the Shahhead engines. And then the data from those is fused together to work out how many drones there are and where.

Speaker 3 So they've wait, wait, they've got a network of microphones across the country. So

Speaker 1 microphones on poles.

Speaker 3 Wow, so they can they can tell the direction that these drones are going, presumably.

Speaker 1 Exactly. You triangulate, you if you've uh you're picking up on multiple microphones and you can then triangulate from that and figure out where the sound is coming from.

Speaker 1 And then on top of that there's also things like visual and thermal imaging stuff to detect drones. So that's the sensor element.

Speaker 1 Then once you've figured out what's coming in you need a command and control system to be able to make sense of that, put it on a map and then give the details to commanders on the ground to tell them what they're dealing with.

Speaker 1 And then the third element is what they call effectors, which is ways of bringing down incoming drones.

Speaker 1 Now the first line tends to be electronic warfare, which are systems normally to jam or confuse the drone's navigation if they're using satellite navigation systems.

Speaker 1 And then you might be scrambling fighters to deal with them with air-to-air missiles, but the problem is the sheer volume of these drones, because you can have several hundred coming over in one night.

Speaker 1 That's just too many to deal with.

Speaker 3 So can I ask how confident you are that the drone wall is going to work to keep NATO countries safe?

Speaker 1 When you look at the war in Ukraine, you do see the limitations of drone drone wall, because both sides have had three years to build up their defences, and both sides have real problems with the number of drones that are getting through.

Speaker 1 Even perhaps surprisingly, the Russians, who arguably have the best air defense in the world. And anyone else who is trying to deal with incoming drones is going to have very much the same problem.

Speaker 1 And at the moment, Europe hasn't devoted a lot of resources to it. That's something they're going to have to seriously look at.

Speaker 3 Thank you, David Hambling, very much.

Speaker 3 And finally, Caroline Caroline Steele is here with us. And Caroline, you've been poring over the week's most intriguing new scientific discoveries.
Tell us, what are we missing?

Speaker 3 What's caught your eye? Something that's a cool 40 light years away?

Speaker 10 Yes, the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1E, which is my favourite exoplanet. I'll tell you why.

Speaker 3 I love that you have one. This is good.

Speaker 10 So it's very Earth-like. It's Earth-ish-sized.
It's rocky.

Speaker 10 It's in the habitable zone around its star, its sun, which basically means it's the perfect distance away from the sun, where if there's water, it could be liquid form, which is, you know, good news for life.

Speaker 10 And basically, scientists have been looking at TRAPPIST-1E using the James Webb Space Telescope to see if it has an atmosphere, what the atmosphere is made of, all as kind of part of the story of trying to work out, does TRAPPIST-1E have life?

Speaker 3 I love that they can do that from 40 light years away.

Speaker 10 I know, it's unbelievable. It would take 430 million years to drive there.
And yet we can study it with a telescope that we've made, which I think is just... it's so cool.

Speaker 10 And basically what they've found is they've ruled out a hydrogen dominated atmosphere or a carbon dioxide dominated atmosphere and that's good news because they're both greenhouse gases and would make the planet really hot, probably too hot for life.

Speaker 3 Okay, what do they think is in the atmosphere then?

Speaker 10 Well there are clues that it could be nitrogen dominated, which is exciting because even though we think of our atmosphere maybe as being oxygen dominated because we really need oxygen, it's actually 78% nitrogen.

Speaker 10 Nitrogen makes up our DNA, our proteins. It's a good clue that life could be there.
But it's still not confirmed.

Speaker 3 But it is sounding like it's quite similar to Earth and therefore paint me a picture. What would life be like on TRAPPIST-1E?

Speaker 10 Well, it could be really simple and microbial. If it's really complex, it might sort of move in a similar way to life on Earth because gravity is the same strength.

Speaker 10 Interestingly, life might be kind of distributed differently because TRAPPIST-1E is probably tidally locked, which means one side of the planet always faces the sun and the other side always faces away from the sun.

Speaker 10 So you kind of have to pick to either live in constant darkness or constant daylight. I don't know which one's better for life.
I feel like I would pick constant darkness, but...

Speaker 3 Well, there's a point in the middle, right?

Speaker 1 Where

Speaker 3 you just leap from one metre daylight to one metre dark.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so there's sort of a ring around the edge where it's constant sunrise or sunset. So like a constantly maybe red sky, it would be beautiful.
So maybe there's a ring of life there.

Speaker 10 Interestingly, if there's photosynthesis, that light from the sun, TRAPPIST-1, isn't as bright and intense as our sun. So plants or the equivalent would be darker.

Speaker 10 So they're less likely likely to look green, more likely to look black. We basically can't confirm now that it definitely has nitrogen, but we're getting a step closer.

Speaker 10 If further results go on to confirm that there is nitrogen in TRAPPIST-1E's atmosphere, this will be the first exoplanet where we've found a nitrogen atmosphere.

Speaker 10 So it would be a really exciting step towards finding life on other planets. But we sort of have to sit tight for a bit because these are still very preliminary results.

Speaker 3 Moving to life on this planet, down under Antipodean animal science. Tell me more.

Speaker 10 So a vaccine for koala chlamydia has been approved for the very first time.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, I'm not, I don't know why I'm laughing. That's not funny.
I'm that's great.

Speaker 10 Koala chlamydia is much more serious than I realise.

Speaker 10 So basically it can cause UTIs, conjunctivitis, blindness and infertility in koalas and it's often fatal, which is especially bad news because koalas are endangered.

Speaker 10 And the only way you can treat koala chlamydia is to give them antibiotics,

Speaker 10 which destroys their gut bacteria and makes it harder for them to digest eucalyptus and often leads to starvation.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's brutal. Okay.

Speaker 10 Chlamydia accounts for 50% of koala deaths.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 10 It's such a problem. If we can fix it, you know, this could be the thing that saves this endangered species, right?

Speaker 3 Okay, so who developed the vaccine? I mean, is it effective? How do you vaccinate a bunch of koalas?

Speaker 10 So a group of scientists in Australia have developed the vaccine. It decreases mortality from the disease by at least 65%.
So it's huge. The issue is it's expensive.

Speaker 10 A, the vaccine itself is quite expensive. B, you've got to catch and deliver the vaccine to koalas.
That's the thing, isn't it? Which is going to be hard, right? But they're hoping basically to get...

Speaker 10 major funding. If they do get the funding, it's basically ready to be rolled out.
It could be rolled out as early as January next year.

Speaker 10 And they think the best way to do it is to start with wildlife hospitals where essentially you already have the captive koalas and then focus on the most at-risk populations.

Speaker 3 The low-hanging koalas.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Caroline, that's all we've got time for, but thank you so much.

Speaker 3 And that's it for this edition of Inside Science because I want to play out with a clip from Jane Goodall on a close encounter with a near neighbour, genetically speaking.

Speaker 11 There was a wonderful moment when the first chimpanzee who lost his fear,

Speaker 11 I was following him and he sat down. I sat down near him and lying on the ground is the ripe red fruit of an oil palm and I held it out towards him on my hand and he turned his head away.

Speaker 11 Then I put my hand closer.

Speaker 11 He turned, he looked into my eyes, he reached out, he took and dropped the nut with one movement and then very gently squeezed my fingers, which is how chimpanzees reassure each other.

Speaker 11 So we understood each other perfectly with a gestural language that obviously predates human speech.

Speaker 3 You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton. The producers were Claire Salisbury, Dan Welsh, Jonathan Blackwell, Tim Dodd and Ella Hubber.

Speaker 3 Technical production was by Matt Chamberlain and Giles Aspen. The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

Speaker 3 To discover more fascinating science content head to bbc.co.uk and search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University.

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