JULY marked the 25th birthday of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby. For those of us who can't remember a world without IVF, it is astonishing to read about the intense controversy her birth caused. Nowadays, reproductive researchers have to work rather harder to shock.
Plenty succeeded this year, though. A picture of a bunny-eared man-rabbit was how one British tabloid reported a Chinese team's claim to have grown embryos created by transferring the genomes of human cells to rabbit eggs. Outrage also greeted the news that a Chinese woman had been pregnant with embryos created by transferring the nucleus of her fertilised eggs to the eggs of a donor, the same method used for cloning, while Israeli researchers tried to mature eggs taken from aborted fetuses.
But for me, all this controversy overshadowed what could turn out to be the most significant development in assisted reproduction since Brown's birth. ...
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