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tv   Doc Film - Dream Babies  Deutsche Welle  July 30, 2018 5:15am-6:00am CEST

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since the dawn of time humans have reproduced through natural. but might the act of conception through physical intercourse become an outdated concept in the not too distant future. the story began forty years ago in britain with three magical letters i.v.'s in vitro fertilization a revolutionary technique to help sterile couples. the british public was shocked by a science that could substitute for nature when louise brown the first test tube baby was born in the minds of many back then artificial conception would inevitably produce monstrously deformed babies.
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born to healthy crying. forty years on and i v.f. is now practiced daily across the globe today about three hundred fifty thousand children are born every year as a result of assisted reproduction technologies. three percent of all births in western countries three in a thousand in the rest of the world. it's a market projected to be worth twenty billion dollars by the year two thousand and twenty. medically assisted reproduction is increasingly widespread in india it's less expensive than in the west and as such far more widely affordable this is one of the world's top clinics and. its
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founder dr nayana patel renamed the facility meaning desire or wish. here's a video break out of the fed feeding frenzy ok we are back. to reset the laser this is today. technology does lead to the kitchen technology with the biggest freezer that's available to richer find the exit news forms everything everything what one would expect and. this would do have an info to dead victims. dr patel and her team use the technology to perform about a thousand in vitro fertilization is a year to create the embryos we need to do our year and normally she would have one natural lead in our natural cycle yardwork for two ideas we need
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a good cohort of six to seven a. friend. of these is very far exceeded agonist palms. you can see them drop us palms on the edge of the dock where. they are honey. this is. with the help of the stores to slowly into the pond.
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and. since. this is embryo school. this is a tiny lips left and middle system looking at six fish in one forty four five six fish a slight at a time in the school this is a video or they look mental from view. there's this thing you know we can all see so they showed the patient. how they've been the little nothing to do last week and see. each one by one most of all we can judge week in new ways. that we love them but you. too will and we can select may get them to you for us. it takes an average of four attempts at in vitro fertilization to achieve a pregnancy
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a success rate comparable to that in nature. a fertile couple aged twenty five who have regular sex also has a one in four chance in each menstrual cycle of conceiving a baby. dr patel with her state of the art equipment obtains a pregnancy on every second attempt. to libya court bessie. let him sleep let him sleep by a bed that. civil to see no evil and. that. over the years medical techniques have evolved for treatments for female infertility and also male sterility the methods now enjoy widespread acceptance. when a couple can't reproduce with their own gay mates their eggs in sperm they can resort
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to donors. the world's largest sperm bank is in our homes denmark cryo receives a huge number and range of applications and demand is by no means limited to heterosexual couples. single women and lesbian couples can now also have their own child. the proliferation of options has. led to a booming market. cryo is hold sperm from hundreds of donors and has an impressive online catalog. you see of the baby photos of the donor and you can browse through the mole. and then you can go and see. if i screwed up. race cook asian ethnicity danish english french height one ninety one weight nine hundred kilo build elliptic shoe size
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forty five closing size. motion intelligence quotations ninety nine. if you see how they have reading in this the reader might get an. idea about what kind of personality is behind that don't here we even have a mechanic me on a website so you can click them favorites and then you can retrieve your favorites again and then never them to one so small is the same as in real life and then if you found the right one the truth and. this is a donor speaking. we have probably somewhere between sure it is a five thirty thirty five. sample in a tank like this year. but still four thousand children here deep in the cold we could not even minus one hundred ninety six degrees old by logic you attribute
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to stuff so this which it can be kept here for favor. the cheapest one mr anonymous doing a basic profile of the most expensive b.s. pastoral from an anonymous donor with mixed. full far from. ten percent of them don't come to us have a question which can be approved because we need to have the conflict time. people are searching from the. culture and. country it could attract all the ignition.
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we could increase our arm for instance where all nations don't this is a market and those of them on the lawn and if you're too much of something the price goes down to. this nation. in the united states on the other hand almost everything is permitted provided you have the financial means sperm banks are in greater demand than ever and there's a flourishing market for eggs. as the extraction process can be problematic and painful donors can sell their eggs for up to twenty five thousand dollars. i decided to become an examiner. actually with a friend joking around by how fertile i was and said you know you should probably just donate the eggs and make some money to help pay for your bills while you do it and it was a joke and we laughed and later i looked more into it it was almost like the idea
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got inside of my head and wouldn't go away where i was two and a half years ago was a single mom of three heads putting myself through school and juggling a job and trying to figure out how i was going to afford everything how i was going to take care of the kids and there is a an amount that they pay you for doing it and so it ended up being kind and. this interesting situation where i was able to pay off all my student loans and created a pretty good life for make heads. the procedure itself is you go for your initial exam with the doctor and then. you doing all tristan around count your follicles to see how many you have and where you are in your cycle and then after some time you start the injections i had to do
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two per day for think it was seven days and then i had to do three a day for i think it was three days and then on day ten or eleven depending on how your body responds to the medication you give yourself another shot was just called a trigger shot. and then your retrieval is normally twenty four hours after that and there's about two or three days where you're uncomfortable and. just a little bit sore. this is showing. me smith founded the first big bank in the us twenty seven years
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ago the image during sore own sites of three hundred young women are now available in her catalog. it all began when she herself had to turn to a donor after losing a baby. i think my own case you know the sad. i said i felt when i was my child and was seven years i spent trying to get pregnant after that really affected me and to this day i feel wonderful when i can give people hope back in their lives i know from having had my own children what it meant to me to become a mother and how grateful i am to the donor all the time so if someone comes to us from plants or germany they have no options they can't do this at home. so they come to the donor capital tomorrow to california and for the donors there is that
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idea that there's part of your spirit is going out across the world to help someone who's really a stranger and yet that passion for having a child that desire that yearning is the same for every human being on the planet it doesn't matter if what their religion is it doesn't matter what their skin color is doesn't matter what their culture is everybody wants to have. the biggest part is just the the gift that you get to give but then also there's a gift you receive and hearing their story and and being part of that and they let you into a really special almost private part of their life that nobody else really gets besides the doctors and them gets to be a part of so it was a world they never knew existed and once i got to be a part of it i just love being
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a part of it now and it's very well said. i think going into it you really have to mentally prepare for the fact that this is not my child so i never went into it with someone else's having my child or this is. someone out in the world has my children and they have their children and i was just able to help them make that a reality or not. oh oh. technological progress also leads to the temptations of selecting the embryo to be implanted of choosing the gender of the child for example. so where is the borderline between self comfort and medical treatment. canada like strobes the united states is about fifty fifty england likes girls
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a little bit more than boys spain like sports south america largely boys china mostly all boys so every country france is a little bit more for girls than boys. dr jeffrey steinberg was one of the first to see the future importance of the tailor made baby for years he has given couples the possibility of choosing their child's gender and that's just the beginning. we are world leaders in the selection of gender. every single one of these charts has come in with a request for a boy or girl and a request for genetic normalcy so to make things easy we label the boys blue we label the girls pink same prize boy or girl about nineteen thousand dollars total. this is an embryo there were about to perform a biopsy we're going to remove one of the cells each cell in the embryo has the
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same genetics as every other cell so by taking out one cell you can get all the genetic information about the entire brain it's a very delicate process the embryos are very fragile. this is an advancement of the chromosomes that came from one cell and what we've done is we've lit up the x. and y. chromosomes we have x. y. which means this is a male embryo if we had two x.'s two greens that would be if. remember. you know we allow people to add on additional things that they want we're allowing them to start screening for eye color there's an additional cost. i remember when we first announced i color and allowing couples to choose the eye color of their baby we actually got a call from the vatican and they were very very nice there were scientists at that but they expressed their concerns and expressed the fact that perhaps society
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wasn't quite ready for this and asked us to go very slowly and very carefully which of course we always do. there's a huge number of things that we're going after obesity is one of the ones everything else as far as we know is far more complex skin complection very very complex and no one's really identified exactly what causes all of skin what causes white skin what causes black skin and everything in between so we're looking at it but we're not approaching it at this point. i.q. is not going to happen in my lifetime it's tremendously complex and we're not sure exactly where it comes from clearly people with high i.q.'s have been studied for years and years and years including einstein himself and we haven't yet put our finger on where it's at.
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and yet in the one nine hundred eighty s. certain scientists couldn't help playing the sorcerer's apprentice by sorting donors according to their i.q. . more than two hundred children were born with the aid of the so-called genius sperm bank like. today they're in their thirty's. my dad and me. after a show my dad was infertile so what happened was actually my mother's mother. was so my grandmother was watching a talk show and on this talk show was this little boy named door and blake and his mother and they were talking about the genius sperm bank and how this boy was born this way and so my grandmother thought oh my gosh this is a perfect idea so she called my mom and she said i know how you can still have
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a family i found the perfect solution for you so my parents checked it out and it looked great the sperm was like fed exed from california to new york a big tank arrives and i was conceived so he wanted in a nutshell that's what i've. basically my parents picked donor clear from a catalog of different donors that were available and this is all the information i have that he is outstanding intellect with exceptional athletic ability so my parents told me when i was very young that i was born from this they told me when i was maybe one or two years old so it's always been a part of me i've never known any other way of existing. well so for me it's very very normal and it's nothing strange and it's totally who i am and i couldn't even tell you what it feels like because i don't know what it's like to
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feel a different way. i mean i think that nature has its way of giving us the perfect baby genes come into play lists definitely and i think it's just one ingredient in like many things that make up a human being and how their lives plays out. most of our donors have an i.q. over one hundred. one sixty one seventy two if i recall correctly in their present circle health splendid. where you take us all the tour of your laboratory here dr graham and show us he. has me show us how what goes on here person much to show because sperm are not very photogenic but. for two decades dr robert graham used this freezer to store the sperm of three
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nobel prize winners and about twenty other donors with exceptional like use before his establishment closed following his death. we utilized who would be emerging reader and recruit through the book and we mark from zero in each of the we write a letter proposing new be a code. and one or two percent of you would respond if you need them word of. this girl is in search of beautiful child and show gift everybody with. no one has no wife not only becomes a mother which you dearly want to be or she has the very wealthiest brightest try she could care for you and participating in constructive procreation is one of the most meaningful things we conclude the key to human improvement is to add more
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advantageous. she moves to the human gene pool. this is for the sympathy what we're doing. in space in the biomedical company if you know makes offers its clients the possibility of choosing from numerous genetic characteristics before implanting an embryo this includes gender selection which is banned in india for example as well as many other countries. the process is called p.g.d. pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or recipe to create a perfect child in perfect health. the first step involves compatibility testing with the donor.
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this is the model gets a school in our system when analyze and combine the diagnoses performed on patients with those performed on donors to offer an optimal fertilizer. offer a fair or not one must see all of the miami so also to prevent the transmission of any possible anomaly as that could cause deformities in a fetus yes or a important advantage of this thing and then see out of it that assertion is that a mutation it's positive therefore it was. just as a bonus for me then i'll bet this equipment enables us to obtain within the space of about eight hours around four hundred million radius of human genome sequences that well yeah they're kind of almost. never you know number one use normal body. number six to.
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see if that can't be any of this patient has suffered through. three miscarriages none of her pregnancies reached full term if you know anyone in the past that day to me no i'm standing on my study a little bit easier. than he was dancing me on a space on planet earth two embryos visibly normal on the way not us without us i don't know if i'll do anything with it and that's a good result for a thirty nine year old patient with all of that here and the case of this forty three year old patient however we've analyzed two embryos. it is awful to the both of them unfortunately appear abnormal and that's why it's so important to analyze the embryos with mothers over the age of thirty six if we had implanted these two embryos it could have caused a miscarriage or a child with a chromosomal abnormality. the new technologies are huge we can do everything nowadays it's unbelievable how that knowledge has
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revolutionized everything in the eighty's what matters was the patient became pregnant we used to transfer three or four embryos we take their mates where there's the embryo transfer to the mother now the most important things one hopes the baby at home. if you want to have a baby is going to be the second revolution go to the professional and you would have a healthy baby and live to six four. in some cases scientists invent what nature has not allowed. remarkable developments have been made in recent years. it's now possible to conceive a child from more than the traditional two parents. it's a technology that requires the d.n.a. from three different parents. mitochondria which provide energy for the body's cells also possess their own d.n.a.
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. researchers remove the nucleus of a defective ovum from the biological mother and injected into the healthy ovum from a donor already with its own nucleus removed. this extremely difficult operation transferring the nucleus from one over to another is directly inspired by cloning. the next step comprises classic in vitro fertilization the future baby will thus possess three different types of d.n.a. those of its two parents plus that from the mitochondria of the donor. mice a conjurer are the family small fragments in each town are forty that is essential for choosing any gene way people think about and those really are that the power stations are a little batteries that really put you see energy or how cells need to work and we know that this mitochondrial d.n.a. is specifically passed down from mother to daughter and what we want to trying to
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do is to try and prevent not transmission by transferring over the new theatre nothing material from the now which is gone in fact of much closer to nature into a knack which has gone healthy mitochondria. what's really important is that the source of technology can have a major impact on future generations because if we can prevent the disease actually in me and me offspring ten. but could be carried on through the generations. editing the human germline is a hugely controversial issue in genetics and yet in february twenty fifteen the british parliament crossed that line and made the country the first to give the go ahead for three parent babies. for. the audience for the right three hundred eighty two the nose to the left one hundred and twenty
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eight. so the oh is that the oh you savvy imo. babies will soon be born in britain using the technique in the meantime an american team has already helped to produce the world's first three parent baby at a clinic in mexico where the law is more permissive than in the u.s. . criticism before passing such a groundbreaking last the house of lords in britain consulted numerous specialists in the field. among them the philosopher john harris lord alliance professor of bioethics at manchester university. in the case of. science. applying a sort of utilitarian framework you have to ask the question. real polluting this science to develop to the point where we know whether it is safe or not in
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humans. will this benefit humankind or will it be to the detriment of humankind but is the moral question. the three parent label. is misleading. there is a sense in which it's true basically the. d.n.a. the mitochondrial d.n.a. contains less than one percent of the total it does not transmit any of the normal things that we think of in connection with d.n.a. so it doesn't transmit phenotypical traits. that. cetera but they do come from a third party but. i mean i might say to parents good. and it's possible to go even further much further as seen on the other side of the
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atlantic. one american company over science has been working for years on rejuvenating aging eggs to allow women to effectively turn back their biological clocks and extend their childbearing years. over science is a company that's working on cutting edge fertility treatments but we're discovering technologies to make an all. young again. by injecting the. cells that are very supportive. in the future what we want our medicines that you can take just take a pill for a week and suddenly a woman gets back her fertility and even a woman that's been in many theoretically we think that we can bring back total
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fertility and. the really exciting work that seems like science fiction but we're almost there that's called over sure. so what have we got here mike. we have so few men ovarian cells and one foot in the right environment you believe do so have the ability to make human apes. so let's have a look at these under the microscope. they're beautiful. so are these the ones that you're a screening for a genetic defects that's correct and tested these are the stem cells from a woman that we grow in the lab we've been growing these for now a couple of years and well learning to turn these cells into eggs and those will eventually become children.
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that would be a real resolution because we could have hundreds of healthy eggs from a single simple operation. because we could also screen. for genetic errors and even one day correct their genetic heritage before we even develop an egg or an embryo. without mary ellen parar do run is examining a sixty six day old humans from metazoa.
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has this chemist made a breakthrough in the treatment of male sterility. because i will fail to design a design we used hydrogen as materials in a tube uniform and these hydrogen tubes turned out to be excellent bio reactors for ensuring the maturation of spermatozoa it's from sound this is true how much of us feel this damage is really about doing this in general. said the front five team work for twenty three years to attain this result the first spermatozoa we obtained was from a rat. news that we moved on to humans and it was you can do ha. on the back and. now we have to show that the spermatozoa ads are fertile.
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we have to all stay reasonable and understand that there are still lots of work to be done it's not a transgenic mouse that we're setting out to make so little human beings and if he says. we get lots of sterile men contacting us who want to see if we can help them in the fact they want to know how our research is progressing. with going on there. there's no cures over there for some couple send us their photos on a human level that's really touching so if we can help them become parents i personally would be extremely happy and i find the idea extremely moving. there are still some idealists out here at least. for a long time researchers have known how to identify and alter genes in d.n.a. what they have not yet managed however is to obtain the efficiency and speed at low
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cost offered by a natural mechanism called d.n.a. scissors and recently discovered inside bacteria. been able the bacteria to target the d.n.a. of an interesting virus and cut it up. to prevent it from reproducing. these molecular scissors have been given a code named christopher cass not. boasting unrivaled precision they have been used by geneticists to cut and replace any segment of d.n.a. in any living organism. the discovery of the gene scissors saw in the new shop on she instantly catapulted into the elite group of potential nobel prize in ization. what use would be for evolution or insist acknowledges that he does being picked up by. numerous labs around the word to. perform precise genetics in the knowledge number of scientists and albany times and that is
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just when you technologies at the semantics. to we treat disease prior to be used for. publishing. and what if scientists were to cross the line and genetically edit human embryos and that's exactly what a team did at a chinese university. by using crisper managed to correct a d.n.a. mutation responsible for a blood disease the modified embryos were never intended to be reimplanted but the experiment shocked the world because it opens the door to the concept and conception of genetically altered humans. except the question of mistake moment isn't fully developed it better still failure so it won't be usable for humans for a number of years but it will be by twenty twenty five or twenty thirty so we must
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anticipate the ethical questions that will arise because technologies like this will be able to multi find d.n.a. the chromosomes of babies and also their physical and even intellectual counter is sticks. these will be the principal tools for making babies and the world needs to reflect on these issues but for once we have the time to reflect on what we're going to do with the existence of this extraordinary power regarding our genetic and biological nature because. the range of reproduction tools continues to grow from i.d.f. to crisper cast nine the three parent baby and game it's made from stem cells. it seems that the dream of the tailor made baby will soon become reality. i believe that he is a person not to take on a gene to not be used to treat your lunch on lines and i'm sure so first let me quote for strictly it was read out as the usage of the technology for human on
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rails and just because when you start to manipulate ill sarahs across easier line and i was already said to take a machine it's not reiki and it's not specific enough in an old days to be used falsely said type of shares in any case. many are concerned and think that the genetic modification of embryos is a red line that must be crossed. yeah lety is subtle red lines always shift over time the pill abortion i.v.'s the artificial heart all of these were considered unacceptable a few decades ago we no longer see them as i'm crossed red lines as absolutely indispensable innovations. so we can't exclude the possibility of embryonic genetic modification becoming commonplace that they'll no longer be a red line in your eyes.
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this genetic heritage which is a pivotal part of our diversity and uniqueness is the basis of esther fox's work. the artist would most likely not have survived the embryo selection stage. this is a condo it's full. it's a new piece of work i've made to be installed in the science museum looking at genetic testing and thinking about the value of human life and whether we're going down the road that we haven't really thought about the fast implications for society. is not that i'm completely and the progress that's being made within genetics in some cases i think it might be very useful for treatment of cancer for instance when it's a life threatening condition but what concerns me is the idea of saying somebody's
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life is less valuable than somebody else and i think currently the debate which is coming mainly from the medical profession is that they are making judgments about the quality of somebody's life without any experience themselves of actually living with is a genetic condition i feel my own experience is that i have a very full life i'm extremely busy probably too busy really and then i'm very happy i'm married i have a full family life. and i don't see that my quality of life is limits is a tool but i know that the medical side of my condition would be seen as a condition that people wouldn't want to wish on their child but i think that's where i'm trying to rebalance that debate when.
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somebody said to me. you know we could change your life if you could have been be cured and not have your condition but you might not be the person that you are today i wouldn't take that way. law is very difficult but there are still many obvious lead back scientists. and it's not a condition that makes you stop by itself and the surrounding single again be asked to choose that you face. so if we can stop adjusting those while living and let's get back to kate the people who maybe would have a much case didn't vibe in society and i think we need to stop thinking about humanity as.
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took time. to express it and provoked if african our tonight's identity culture and political state it's. a story coming up at least most probably galleries. and. in our special ops twenty one many african off to sleep. in thirty million dollars.
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