The Science of Baby Making

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox, and I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Today we are asking, how are babies made?

We really are.

We've been given that responsibility.

And we know that obviously a lot of the tabloid newspapers will be furious.

Children as young as 17 told by Radio 4 how babies are made.

But we're not actually, we're not going to do the first bit of how babies are made.

We're going to skip that bit.

And if you want to know how they're made, apparently you can watch like Love Island or something like that, which was a reference we decided to use, even though neither of us have ever seen Love Island.

All I know is you get eight records, and

instead of the Bible and the works of Charles William Shakespeare, you get, I think, it's Lady Chatterley's Lover and a Littlewoods catalogue from 1976.

Today we're exploring one of the great biological mysteries.

How does a human embryo develop into a baby or how does an embryo become an embryologist?

How do cells know what to become and how to arrange themselves into human form?

So to help us unravel this mystery of life we have a professor of reproductive science, a professor of genetics and the author of an autobiography of the female body and they are.

Hi yeah, I'm Ben Steventon.

I'm an assistant professor in Department of Genetics from the University of Cambridge.

So our lab works on early development using zebrafish, chicken embryos, and mouse embryonic stem cells and some of the species when we can get a hold of them.

And the weirdest thing that anybody's ever told me about how babies are made relates to armadillos.

So apparently armadillos generate identical quadriberts every time they reproduce.

So I'm Professor Joyce Harper.

I work at the Institute for Women's Health at University College London.

And I started my career as an embryologist.

And this was back in 1987.

And some of you may know the world's first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978.

So it's quite a new field.

And then I worked for about 25 years on genetic testing of embryos.

I used to take some cells out of an embryo and do various genetic tests on them, which I think we'll come on to.

So the weirdest thing that someone's told me about how they wanted to actually make a baby was an Italian professor who was very notorious.

And he said that he had actually cloned some humans about 20 years ago.

He said he had two women pregnant, and he said, Don't worry, we don't need to clone women, we only need to clone men because men are very concerned about their DNA, but women don't worry about their DNA.

So he was taking men with faulty DNA, taking their partner's very healthy egg with lovely DNA, throwing the healthy female DNA away, and cloning the men.

Now, he said he'd done it, but he disappeared.

I don't know where they are.

I don't think he did do it.

My name's Sarah Pascoe.

I'm a comedian.

And the strangest thing I ever got told about how babies are made is that you can get one from a toilet seat.

And this is our panel.

Can I ask you, before we get started, I wanted to ask you actually, Ben, when you said other animals when we can find them, there was kind of that sense of...

It was sinister.

Yeah, it sounded like you go to the pond with a big net and see what you can capture.

There was a level of kind of Robert Helpman's child capture in chitty chitty bang bang.

I mean, we'd love to do that.

I mean, but generally.

That was not the response I was inventing to, right?

Is there any way you incriminated yourself there in instantaneous

regulations?

I think it's a solid point, right?

I mean, actually, you know, often now in the field, we tend to focus on what we call model organisms, so a small set of organisms that many people use.

Like, clearly, there's advantages in that, right?

Because people are working with the same species every time, so we build up information.

But a lot of interesting biology is out there that we tend not to access because we don't do enough of this.

We don't do enough of going out into the wild and seeing what we can find and putting under a microscope.

I think, you know, frogs are interesting, newts, yeah.

So, you want a school trip?

I want my lab to be, yeah, just sort of

school trip, be brilliant.

Coach St.

Albans.

Yeah.

So, Joyce, the first bit we want to deal with then, so, as I said, we're skipping over the actual sex bit.

So, immediately afterwards, you can listen to a show with Robert Winston if you want to know about that.

So, that first moment when the sperm and the egg have met, what are we seeing?

So, the egg's quite a big structure compared to the sperm.

Women always have the advantage.

We're the biggest cell in the body, isn't it?

Yeah, we're bigger and better.

Come on, we've got these lovely, big, juicy eggs.

So, the sperm is just tiny, it's just a bullet of DNA, and the sperm has to go on this swim, swim, swim journey, and it fertilises the egg.

And then the egg is going to, but it's what we call a zygote, it's the very first stage of development, and it's a very early embryo.

And the cells will then keep dividing and dividing and dividing and dividing until we make a baby.

I thought there'd be more to it than that.

We're in the problem.

That's been done.

Now, some music.

What about the bit?

So, anyone sort of my age, we all watched this film called Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too.

So, actually, the imagery at the beginning of that film, which was sperms on their way to meet an egg, and something that we all kind of knew was that the egg stops all of the sperms getting in.

So, there's like a decision-making process.

How does the egg decide?

So the egg, the egg, when it's first ovulated from the woman's ovary, it's actually got quite a squidgy frame around it, it's a cytoplasmic shell, we call the zona pellucida.

Once one sperm's got through, it hardens.

And then what you can see, if you look at a human egg that's had a few sperm around it,

all the others got stuck, all the ones that lost, they just stick to the outside and they can't get in.

So there's that one winner that gets it.

Sometimes there are two that get through or more, and those are abnormal embryos and they won't, they'll develop a little bit, but they won't go very far.

Now, we're using films as a reference point, and I'm older than you, so I'll use Woody Allen's Everything You Always Want to Know About Sex, but afraid to ask.

So, in that, some of the sperm have existential anxiety.

Do we see that at all in the model?

Oh, I think we do.

It's a race.

You can remember them all lined up, waiting to go,

ready to go on their journey.

They've got a long way to go from the testicle, you know.

But some of them don't make, some of them end up all sorts of places, but some of them them are swimming.

Yeah, they're supposed to end up in the female genital tract and then go swimming through the cervix, swimming through the womb, down the fallopian tubes, where this wonderful, big, gorgeous eggs waiting for it.

This is a really fascinating thing.

When we were talking about this beforehand, both of us were like going, oh my god, there is so little that we know about this incredible process.

So, things like just on terminology, can you take a syblastasis, embryo, fetus?

How do we see the different terminology and what does that represent in terms of the development?

Sure.

And as soon as you have a fertilized egg, you have the zygote, and then you go through these cleavage stages, so early cell divisions that give you the blastocyst stage.

So then you have individual blastomeres that make up the embryo.

So you're going from a single cell through to several hundred cells.

So the first stages of cell division, what is the process by which that cell starts to divide and then what are the processes by which those cells start to become different from each other?

So, every cell has the same DNA, so it has essentially the same blueprint as often it's described, have the same sort of instruction manual, right?

All the information is the same between all of these cells.

What's different between all of the cells in your body is the genes that are turned on.

And so, it all comes down to that.

You know, what parts of the DNA are going to be transcribed into these messengers to then make proteins.

So, these proteins that are made in cells can do many different things.

They might come back on and change the way that the cell expresses other genes, turns them on, or turns them off.

So, you have almost like a circuit diagram-type regulatory logic that can happen over time.

That is, one cell turns on one gene, it represses other genes and then switches on another gene.

So, that can create a dynamic, right, a changing in cell state over time.

The other thing that cells can do is make proteins that will be released from the cell and maybe diffuse across a field of cells and then instruct them to say you become this fate or you become that fate.

And then you go through this process called gastrulation, which it kind of sounds a bit like the name, right?

Gastro, gastro, gastro, you know, gastropub, whatever.

So

you've got to form the gut tube essentially down the central cavity of the embryo, and this is really what it's about.

It's taking a ball of cells into a multi-layered structure that has an inside and an outside, and that's when you really start to generate something that looks like an organism, right?

So, you set up the main body axes, like head and tail, dorsal ventral, left and right, happens during this quite amazing process of gastrulation.

And because of what it looked like, for a while, scientists, when they first had microscopes, thought that human beings went through the whole stages of evolution in utero.

So, they thought that was our fish stage, that we were sort of going through everything.

They thought we had a little tail and stuff, didn't they?

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

So, that's the idea of recapitulation, so

based on Ernst Haeckel's drawings, which were slightly accurate.

But we do look like a fish at the beginning.

I mean, there's a lot of truth in that general description, and I mean, what it's really telling you is that there's a lot of conservation, so the processes that build the embryo are very similar across different species.

And so, it's kind of like thinking evolution can't play with these early changes too much.

So, if you have a very complicated process like embryogenesis, if you make a change early on, it's going to have many secondary and tertiary effects, right?

A little bit like chaos theory, right?

The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings this side of the world can create a hurricane on the other side of the world because a small change in a complex process can have lots of after effects.

And is that true of sex as well?

Because the young fetuses look, I mean, you couldn't sort of sex them with the naked eye for quite a long time as well.

So, in development for human, even when you have your 12-week scan, we wouldn't be able to tell the sex, and the external genitalia that's starting to form at that time look exactly the same.

So, it's only around sort of 16 to 18 weeks that they start actually looking different.

So, on a scan, you might be able to pick that up.

And is that why men have nipples?

That's a good question, why men have, yeah, there's a controversy about whether we are all actually starting off as females, yeah, and that, but it's there's some truth, there's some controversy, some truth in that, because there's certain genes and hormones that need to kick in to change that sort of default female anatomy to become a male.

So, yeah,

that's why men have nipples.

Those nipples are formed before those sex hormones and genes involved with differentiating male and female kick in.

A lot of people, I think, probably might have initially thought once we sequence the human genome, it's like, ah, we've got the answer.

And then lots of people have used wonderful metaphors.

You know, some people are saying it's basically you, it's as if you've got now a whole bucket of letters of the alphabet, and you go, so now we know how brothers Karamatsov is made.

Just have to put all the letters in the order.

And I think you said Philip Ball talked about this lovely thing.

It's like having a dictionary going, here we are, the complete works of Shakespeare.

You go, oh no, we've got all the words.

So how true is that in terms of what we're understanding from embryology and what we're understanding about why we end up in the shape and form with, you know, what we are?

What is the gap that we're dealing with in terms of understanding?

It's a big gap.

And one of the reasons I became a scientist, because I wanted to figure out how life was made and how...

humans formed.

It was always one of my questions.

And then I started teaching organogenesis, which is what this whole process is.

And it's a black box in the human.

So I used to give my students books at the beginning of the term, and they were called human embryology.

The bit in the middle was science fiction.

It was almost all extrapolated from the chick embryo, because when you're growing the chick embryo, you can see that, you can see in the lab what's going on.

And we know, obviously, in rodents and things, we can do experiments to do that.

But in the human, once the embryo is implanted, in IVF, we get that embryo up till implantation, so we know quite a lot about what's going on through fertility treatment.

But once it's implanted, there is a black box in human development.

That when you look at the books, it says this happens on day 26, this happens on day 30.

It is a bit science fiction.

We've really got to take that with a pinch of salt, and we just don't know.

I read something about lambs, that they can keep lambs alive for quite a long time in a sort of synthetic womb environment.

Like it's much further than it was, you know, 10 years ago, and that there's some sort of hope to be able to gestate a mammal all the way to, I don't know how long a lamb's gestation is to becoming a sheep, but that's something that, because that's science fiction, but that's happening.

I've been in a conference today called Decode about the future of women's health innovation.

And we had a talk today about the artificial womb, and it brings up a lot of ethical discussions about motherhood, womanhood, you know, something that we have always done that men can't do.

And it will absolutely happen.

You know, Brave New World, Aldos Huxley, with his amazing book 100 years ago, he said that his main character was an embryologist.

They'd be the person who would decide whether we're getting an alpha, beta, gamma, and then everything would be done in the lab.

And that will happen.

But that's not what they want the synthetic wombs for, just to know.

But it will happen.

But it would enable people who currently can't be parents or can't maybe biologically be parents or to give people the full choices.

It would give those people that opportunity.

Because there's lots of reasons that someone doesn't have a uterus or the uterus isn't working.

And so there's positives as well as ethical difficulties.

But there's a lot of celebrities now that are using surrogacy.

They're not carrying their children.

And I think there will be people who don't want to carry, women that don't want to carry a baby and will choose this not possible.

Well, I didn't enjoy it particularly.

Mine are in the audience.

I didn't enjoy it.

It's not, it's not enormous.

That's why I didn't enjoy it.

But I want to talk, because it's interesting when you talk about, you know, something that women can do and men can't, because I always felt that when Freud used to talk about penis envy,

and I think, well, I think it's far more likely that men have creation envy.

Yeah.

Because it seems, and I wanted to ask you, so, because your first books, wonderful book, Animal, which is that autobiography of the female body.

And how much further do you think we'd be with understanding embryology if it was men that gave birth?

Well, firstly, I'm going to have to be really boring and say, obviously, trans men can have children and give birth.

So just

so that we make sure, I know we're talking about something that is such a gendered thing, so we end up saying men and women.

But

I think maybe the actual act of giving birth would be,

even in terms of like the pain relief and the comfort and those kind of things, I think that's where the fact that it biologically does feel unfair.

When I had my first child, you know, it had been a lot, the infertility, the IVF, the pregnancy, the C-section.

And then to find out if we wanted to have another one, I was going to have to do it again.

It's so unfair.

Yeah, I've had two pregnancies and I didn't enjoy it particularly either.

But I think we have to think about when we take this away totally and it could all be done in a lab.

Oh, yeah.

I think there's a lot of ethical issues.

And people are discussing this.

The artificial wombs is getting on the agenda, really, of a lot of agencies now.

So, it's been in the press a lot, even in the last couple of months, even though it's n years away.

I'll never say how long.

But I've said to my students, I'm sure this technology is going to be used, if not for you to have children, then your children definitely to have children.

Well, you also mentioned older Suxley there, and I think quite often if people hear the word embryology, they make an immediate, a bit like with AI, there's an immediate leap to HAL in 2001, And with embryology, there's an immediate leap to the hatcheries, a brave new world, you know, talking about Frankenstein and those kind of things.

So, do you still find there's an ethical battle before you've even reached a point anywhere near those ethics?

Oh, yes, we are discussing the ethics of everything.

So, the three-parent babies that we might discuss in a minute, and genome editing.

I was part of the Nuffield Council group discussing genome editing.

All of these things before they come in, we want to sit and discuss them.

Not that we come to a conclusion, because I don't think we can, and things move, but I think that in the next N years, we are going to totally change, or have the possibility of totally changing the way we have children, for sure.

How much do we know about these very basic processes?

So, you tell us about genome editing, for example.

So, if you said, well, I'd like to convert this

baby from brown eyes to blue eyes, for example.

Maybe that's a complex thing or a simple thing, but how much do we know about how to do that?

For certain things, we know quite a lot.

So, I said that I used to test embryos for genetic disease, so it's called pre-implantation genetic testing.

And there are companies now that will offer this for eye colour.

It's complex because it depends on the genes of the parents.

And things like perfect pitch, perfect pitch is one gene.

Things like sport and intelligence and other characteristics are much more complex and much more affected by the environment.

But with genome editing, if the parents aren't carrying those genes,

we will be able to edit the embryo to have those genes.

Absolutely for sure.

I think in my lifetime, that's going to happen.

I mean, for the large part, the sheer complexity of development means that it's not going to be that simple for many traits to be able to say, okay, let's make this CRISPR mutation to get this particular phenotype in the end.

But it is true that, I mean, so I was at a talk the other day, and somebody was saying how, oh, yeah, so in the developmental biology textbook, you only have one page on human development, but there's four pages on armadillo development.

So, maybe armadillos are pretty interesting, as I've described.

So, there's a real reason for that.

But, of course, we do want to know about our own development.

And a lot of what's going on in that realm at the moment is to think about how you can sort of build aspects of human development from stem cells in vitro.

And so, you know, clearly, if you were to then build an entire human embryo, well, then there's the same ethical difficulties as you have, I think, with an actual embryo, right?

So, but in terms of trying to build models of certain aspects of embryo development, maybe at early stages of development, are potential windows into this black box, I think, to understand a little bit about sort of developmental defects.

For example,

what are their cause?

Are there potential therapies for this?

So, that's an emerging field as well.

Sarah, I know that

you've been talking in your most recent live show about IVF.

Yeah.

And knowing you as an autodidactor, someone who's curious about so many things, I imagine, you know, before you actually had IVF, that you were someone who spent a lot of time researching and a lot of, and I wondered just what, in terms of your changing of understanding of ideas around embryology during that process?

Well, beforehand, I would have just said that they were clumps of cells, especially because of you know, people's right to choose and knowing lots of people who, throughout my life, had had unwanted pregnancies rather than very much wanting them.

I'd spent so much more time thinking about that.

And then, when I'd had infertility and miscarriage, to then suddenly think about the potential of a human being in something that wasn't yet a human being, and I'm not saying that it has rights, but it has this magical potential.

That's the thing that's really changed for me, actually.

Like when you go through implantation, which is quite a clinical procedure, but it also is incredibly romantic.

Not in a, it's not sex, but it's not, it's not,

you know, you're watching on an ultrasound, and the people who do it for you understand that for you, it is an incredibly important moment because this might be the moment that your child is conceived.

And usually, for people, that would be, if they are, you you know, planning, it would be with a person that they care about, hopefully, or it might not be.

But

you know what I mean?

It's still, there still is a human interaction going on, but you're doing it, it's scientists giving you the potential to have children.

And this might be the second that you meet them for the first time, and they're

five days old as a blastocyst.

So, that for me, those moments, and of course, there's the other side if you know you don't have a pregnancy that implants,

but there's so much human emotion still in it.

And then, now I have an odd thing where my two children were conceived on the same day.

They were both five days old.

The first one was chosen because he was a strong embryo.

And then, when we had another around,

so my second son was frozen for 10 months, which I just find so baffling now that he's alive

and he's just learning to crawl and pull himself up and sort of going, dada, dad.

I'm like, what happened in the freezer?

What's it like?

How are you here?

Like,

When you say science fiction, it's something that my brain can't create a narrative to make it make sense.

And then I'm.

Is he drawn to the fridge at all, though?

Get away!

Why do you keep going back to the fridge?

Leave the peas alone.

He's all sweaty.

And now I have frozen embryos, which I don't think I'm going to use.

I'm 43.

I'm so lucky IVF worked for me twice.

And it's odd because before I'd started this whole process, I would have said they're cells, you know, chuck them in the bin, let them thaw out, feed them to a dog.

But now what they are is, you know, frozen siblings.

It's so odd because this level of science is everything and nothing.

It's like the building blocks of life and the potential for life and it's so important and the ethics is so tricky.

And the other side of it, you know, there's no

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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

I think we will see a Twitch stream or president maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

I wanted to ask you, just talking about that frozen embryo.

I mean,

10 months of being frozen.

What is going on?

And how is it possible to preserve and then that to become life?

They are totally in suspended animation, just as when we freeze anything.

They're just on hold.

So

it is quite amazing.

I've been through seven years of fertility treatment.

I've got twins from frozen embryo transfer as well.

And

I had four in the freezer.

But yeah, so it's a miracle.

And when I started being an embryologist, when you're an embryologist, you know, you're doing these things in the lab and you do think about it as life.

But then, being the other side of the table, when it was my embryos, it does bring a totally different perspective to the whole thing.

But they're just in suspended animation until we warm them and then you watch them grow again.

And as a scientist, that is amazing.

And then, when the babies, when people bring their babies in, before I had my own, I used to be like, wow, especially when I'd done the embryo biopsy, you know, I'd taken some cells, I'd ripped this embryo apart.

I was like, show me the babies and make

it look okay, you know.

Yeah, so

it's amazing about that then because at the cells at that stage, they will just replace themselves.

So they will understand that something's missing, or at that point, it's so gelatinous that it's not specifically like you wouldn't bring a baby and go,

where's its leg?

I'm worried.

So there are different views of thinking about the eight-cell embryo.

So the eight cells, just before it goes to the blastocyst, once it's gone to the blastocyst, it started what we call differentiation.

So it started to get those changes.

So it's eight.

Yeah, eight cells.

But eight cells, eight cells, in the old days, in the 80s and 90s, we used to biopsy eight cell embryos.

Now we biopsy and freeze blastocyst, but we used to biopsy and freeze eight cell embryos.

And we knew that we could take two cells from there and we wouldn't affect development.

But with the frozen embryos, we froze eight, but sometimes they didn't all survive, so sometimes they just degenerated.

We knew then that as long as we had half the embryo, as long as we had four cells, that could make a viable baby.

So, we know at eight cells, the cells are still totipotent.

They could still make any part.

We know this from cattle and things, they've taken an eight-cell embryo and made eight animals from it.

So, that way you said totipotent, so that's the cell can become any

cell.

Totipotent, totipotent.

Aren't you all glad you came to this conclusion?

Isn't it great now to be armed with the word totipotent?

Can I ask a question about these cells and age?

Because something that we all know commonly is that the older you get, the more difficult it it might be to have children.

But that's because the reproductive cells are affected by aging in terms of sort of the sperm cells and the egg cells.

It's mainly the chromosomes, actually.

So, the chromosomes in the egg, we, I think, I hope everyone knows that we're all women are all born with the eggs they're going to have.

So, women, while we're sitting here, we're getting more infertile, and the men are producing sperm forever.

So, they're all happy producing sperm, and our eggs are dying.

So, that's pretty rubbish.

But a lot of female infertility, so what we call age-related female infertility, is because of those chromosomes.

So when we're born, we've got about 2 million eggs.

By puberty, we've lost most of them.

We're down to about 300,000 to 400,000.

By the menopause, all the viable eggs have gone.

And as we age from puberty closer to the menopause, those chromosomes in the egg

just get more and more confused.

They're in the middle of the process called meiosis, which you don't want to think about.

It's very complex, but it's quite a multi-stage process, meiosis, and it's used in the formation of an egg and sperm.

And those chromosomes get more and more confused.

So it leads to a decreased chance of getting pregnant, increased chance of miscarrying, and increased chance of having chromosome abnormality in your child, such as Down syndrome.

You can't leave it at that.

Meiosis, gone.

One minute.

One minute without hesitation.

Oh, my goodness, me.

It used to give me a headache.

I think it would give me a headache now.

Do you want to do meiosis?

No, you can do meiosis.

Sarah, do you want to give it a go?

It's being passed around at the moment.

Something I heard,

this might just be gossip on the female comedian, WhatsApp.

So I heard that in terms of, you know, that they used to have these old stats about a woman's chance to conceive after 25 because of the age of her eggs.

And actually, what they discovered was that in terms of chromosomal abnormalities, if you have a younger male partner, you have a higher chance of conceiving.

And that

the egg and the sperm are quite good sometimes at correcting each other's abnormalities.

So if there are abnormal cells, they can sort of balance each other out, or cells can be corrected.

Is this not?

It's a good idea to have a younger boyfriend.

I can see where the convenience is coming from on that.

It's more of a psychological question than a biological information.

I will not be deflected.

Meiosis.

Oh, God, I totally forgot.

Well done, though, Shara.

That was a really beautiful gesture to try and save the scientists really.

So, meiosis, so we start, our eggs and sperms start off as all our other cells.

They're diploid, they've got two copies of each of our chromosomes.

But what we've got to get in the egg and the sperm is we've got to get half the number of chromosomes because when the egg and the sperm meet, they need to give half the number of chromosomes each.

So then we get a diploid person again.

So you get your mum, your chromosomes from your mum, the chromosomes from the dad.

So there's a two-stage process in meiosis where a diploid cell, the stem cell from, or the primordial germ cell, will divide and it will half.

During that two-pro stage process, it halves the number of chromosomes and it does all these lovely little things with little chromatids and things, and that gives us genetic diversity.

But in women, it's a bit rubbish, and as we get older, it becomes more and more inefficient, and that leads to lots of problems.

That wasn't bad.

That was very good.

Yeah,

Ben,

we've kind of skirted around some of these things, but to talk about the pragmatic things that we're hoping to learn from embryology in terms of changing the hopes and fortunes of human beings.

What are the kind of main things that we're looking at at the moment?

I mean, I think it's important to recognise that developmental biology is a study of embryo development, is really the study of cells in action, right?

And because we can use model organisms and we have great techniques to really look and follow what cells are doing, we get to understand how critical processes of cell biology are controlled.

You know, these questions are very important, right?

Because if you think about cancer, that's essentially they're forgetting that programming, right?

All of a sudden, they're not doing the job of the cells that they're supposed to be doing, and they revert into this cell state where they can divide a lot, become many different cell types again.

So, and we know from studying embryo development that the same signals and genes involved in that process are what cancer cells are reverting to when they become a tumor.

Similarly, in the embryo, you know, cells have to move and migrate to different places.

And there again, the same genes and signals involved in controlling cell migration and motility in development are also being used by cancer cells in metastasis, for example, right?

So, it's just some examples of how understanding the real critical functions of cell biology during development has quite a, you know, a lot of implications.

So, that's one aspect of this.

And the other aspect, of course, is understanding developmental defects.

You know, what are the genetic underpinnings?

Are the potential therapies that we could come up with to fix some of these problems?

I was watching a lecture about the Habsburgs the other day, which is the kind of way I spend a lot of my time.

And that fast, I just wondered what we can also learn using embryology when we do see a family tree that doesn't have enough branches.

Because there you see, again, talking about child development and you know, each generation you've seen has an increasing number of limitations in many different ways.

And has embryology helped us understand why it is that it's important to kind of you know cast the net widely and not marry your sister?

You can marry her, but don't have children with her.

Yeah, I mean, it is.

I mean, this is

a bit smart.

You people are so free in academia, aren't you?

It's like the sixes all over again.

So, it's all about generating genetic diversity.

So, it is important for healthy individuals, healthy populations, to constantly increase diversity.

Diversity is positive in many ways, as we know.

You know, if we want to generate offspring, typically we want to generate offsprings with different genetic traits.

In a way, we're sort of maximizing the ability of our genome to propagate into future generations by giving it more chances.

You roll the dice more times by creating more genetic diversity.

Which brings me back to armadillos.

So armadillos are very strange, right?

Because why, why, why are they making embryos exactly for embryos the same with the same genetic basis, right?

So this doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Usually you'd want to create four maybe four embryos but with different genetics because you want to roll the dice more times, essentially.

So, that's why it's important.

But what's the answer?

I don't know.

I mean, I read those.

Yeah, I don't know.

I felt like you were going to say that's why, you know, do they all survive?

Do they have high infant mortality?

I think that's probably why it's, you know, I mean, if you look at different reproductive strategies, right, in evolution, then there's many different ways you might play this.

And it all depends on how your embryo and your children are going to be brought up and what kind of environment.

So, if it's a particularly adverse early stages of development, then perhaps it does make sense to just generate four embryos at a time because there's probably a high chance that only a couple of them will make it or one of them will make it.

I'm just still thinking about the conception because armoured-plated creatures trying to conceive that must be

talking about that aspect.

No, I know we're not, but I'm

saying exactly you've jumped ahead, but that's unfortunately.

You've got to invite you back onto the infinite monkey cage.

Robin, stay on.

Well, it's him who can.

Right, a man keeps going on.

Let me tell you about armadillos.

Let me tell you.

Then I ask a question at armadillos.

He goes, no more time for armadillos.

Because we define this as post-sex.

No, but by the time this goes out, it's going to be an armadillo special.

You know what?

Sorry, Josh, you were going to say.

No, I was just going to say that, following on, it is strange that in so many cultures, we encourage people to marry people within their family or within their caste and within their their community, which genetically is a really bad idea.

But we've done it since the Egyptians, and it's very strange because, as you said, the ideal thing is to have children with someone who's as different genetically from you as possible to get that genetic diversity and to get healthy genes.

You know, Darwin's evolution, you know, that's what we want.

We want genetic diversity, not keeping everything in the family.

But isn't that a financial decision rather than the biological decision that you go, oh no, if we marry into them, they'll get all our crowns.

Isn't that meditative?

Yeah, that's why, because attraction doesn't work that way.

People are very, very attracted to people who have different backgrounds and look very different to them.

So, obviously, we know what we're doing.

Joyce, we're quite near the end of the show now.

And I just wondered what, in terms of in your career so far, what now do you look forward to?

What are you thinking, you know, are you hoping we're quite near to in terms of breakthroughs in embryology?

I just finished our module with my students about new technology in reproductive science.

So, we literally were discussing this in detail on Friday.

Friday.

Hope is not quite the word I'd use.

Fear is the word I'd use, because all these things are going to happen and they're getting close.

So, getting very close to making an egg and a sperm from a stem cell.

So, say for example, if I needed to have an egg or a sperm, we could maybe take some of my skin and we could, we will be able to zap that in the lab now.

And we've done it in other species, done in rodents.

And I know lots of people working on this, it's going to be very, very close.

When When that happens, I talked about age-related infertility earlier.

When that happens, there will be no age-related infertility because we could make a new egg for a woman or for a man at any age.

So, that's going to totally change how we have children.

So, that brave new world, I think, is really knocking on the door.

Do you have a baby with yourself?

Theoretically, I think you might be able to.

It's a little bit scary.

So, I'm nervous, and it's not going to be cheap.

So, there's going to be a big class divide about, I I mean, IVF is not cheap anyway, it's a big problem, and this is going to really accentuate that.

And then we've got genetic testing, that will increase.

We've got genome editing, and then we've got the artificial wombs.

This is all happening really, really soon.

You should really be saying that a 90-year-old could, if you had artificial womb technology as well, you could just routinely have babies of any age at all.

Or live

or legislate, I guess, to stop that.

Or legislate within the next 20 years.

And the the worrying thing is that I've left lots of my cells here.

We all have.

Oh, so we're going to be able to.

So, all of you, we could take bits from the atmosphere from everywhere and we could theoretically make your child.

I'm being asked.

That's a good idea.

I have to admit, right, I'm going to populate the nightmares.

Our producer specifically wanted me to ask:

could Robin and Brian have a child together?

I wondered what we were miming at them.

But They could definitely have a child together at some point in the future.

I'll get my hat ready for the christening.

With luck, it'll have Brian's looks and Brian's brains.

There must be a legislation that's going to stop this.

There is legislation.

So in the UK, we're the most regulated country in the world with regarding to fertility treatment.

And listen, there will always be somewhere around the world where crazy things happen always and there are crazy things there are lots of crazy things happening already so yeah when i said one thing i meant the the artificial eggs and sperm being one and then the genetic testing of them all being two genome editing of them all three artificial womb four so our just hutsley brave new world is here right now so this is essentially designer babies as you said you sit down and you specify what properties you would like your child to have and and that's essentially doable now essentially, give or take.

We are very, very close.

Oh, thank God, climate change is going to wipe out us.

You always give us a happy dystopian teacher.

Ben, was there anything left off that list you'd like to include?

Yeah, I mean, well, I think an exciting thing at the moment is organoids.

I don't know whether people have come across this term, but essentially it's a switch from, you know, so stem cells you can then take and differentiate into different cell types.

And maybe you want to build a steak out of it, for example, or maybe you want to build some specific tissues from a disease patient and then test drugs on it to see whether it's going to work with the patient or not.

And now people are moving away from sort of 2D differentiation of cells to generating organoids, which essentially are 3D structures.

Are we starting to think about growing

a new heart, for example, for someone who's had a heart sack or liver and so on?

Yeah, potentially, so you know, replacement organs, or even just sort of trying to scale this up so that you could potentially do more sort of personalized medicine, for example.

So, if you know that if you have a drug that you know doesn't, it's not going to work in a third of patients, then obviously that drug's not used.

But if you could actually just test whether it's going to have side effects in those patients or not, then potentially it could be used, you see.

So, there's ways in which that could have huge impact, you know, in sort of replacement organs, but also directly drug testing.

It's really fascinating just to finish because it's obviously that there's the, as you said, the brave new world kind of horror stories that these technologies can lead to.

And so, then the instinctive reaction is,

stop doing this research.

But as you said,

there are tremendous benefits as well.

It comes down ultimately, it's not the science as such, the acquisition of knowledge, but the way that we regulate this knowledge and deploy it that matters.

Because there's no way in which we should stop trying to understand these processes.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's why it's important to have these discussions and debates so that people can really understand what the potential benefits are.

And it's never really the case that scientists are trying to get to this point and have brave new world type scenarios.

I think that most people are wanting to do something that's going to be a benefit to humankind and guided through conversations with the public about where should limits be.

So I think that's really important.

So, Sarah, apart from an increased level of optimism now in terms of how good it's going to be, the extinction of the human race on the planet Earth.

I think it's going to be like a da-da, we could make humans from nothing.

That's going to be the timing.

And then God will be like, ha ha.

You brought God into it quite a late state.

That's the final twist for a bit.

I always forgot your final reveal.

Bibles are available in the foyer.

But yeah, I just wondered anything else that you take from this show, just listening to the...

Because these ideas are.

Huge.

This is the cleverest conversation I've ever been part of, yet, like everyone else here, I just want to get my phone and Google how do armadillos have sex.

So we also asked the audience a question.

I knew this was a dangerous question to ask.

What would be the best way to make a baby?

My heart goes out to Liz, who says, ask my mother-in-law.

She has a lot of opinions and wants a grandchild soon.

One that hasn't left me unable to use a trampoline without wetting myself.

So Floyd said, with a 3D printer to emerge already aged 18 and with a salary.

What's he got there, Brian?

Paul says, Lego.

Because you can always change it into a spaceship.

Oh, transformatory.

To ask Brian Cox very, very nicely.

It doesn't work, Cecilia.

We made him human only as far as that bit of the neck.

The rest of him, all smooth.

Martin said, no idea, but I wish I'd known before my teenagers were born.

Lock of Brian's hair and a test tube.

We're seeing a pattern here now.

We've just said that that technology is on the horizon.

In a dual ninja air fryer for twins while listening to twins can only get better.

For Brian Cox's, of course, with Brian Cox.

With Kylie Minot.

So there we go, Brian.

What a busy week for you.

The boys from Brazil, isn't it?

Look at all the children, all of the children, all of the same.

All looking at the sky in wonder.

Look at the children.

Anyway, Anyway,

well, with that,

thank you very much to our panel.

Professor Joyce Harper, Professor Ben Stevenson, and Sarah Pascoe.

So thank you very much for listening.

And

next week, we're actually going to see how much we've learned from this week's episode because what we're going to be doing is joined by a panel of people that we've made using Petri dishes and apoptosis.

If that doesn't work, three armadillos and if we can't get hold of those, just a couple of scientists and comedians.

See you next time.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hey friend, I'm Randy Feldface, the world's most entertaining non-human comedian.

And if you like stand-up, sit-com and sketch comedy, you're my kind of person.

For a different episode every single week from a vast range of your favorite comedians and freshest comedy talent, then listen to Comedy of the Week on BBC Sounds from BBC Radio 4.

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