Medicine: The Glass Womb

The “glass womb” is made from two glass slides, one with a scarcely visible depression containing a ripe ovum. The slides are sealed together and attached to a heater that maintains a constant temperature of 97.7° F. Fluid containing male sperm is then dripped into a tiny fissure in the incubator slide and drawn into the “love chamber” by capillary action. Once fertilization occurs, the embryo is kept alive with regular feedings of oxygenated amniotic fluid, drawn from a pregnant woman. With “cold light” and highly sensitive film, color and black and white movies are made of the process of insemination and embryo development. Thus has Italy’s Dr. Daniele Petrucci successfully fertilized a human ovum outside the womb “more than 40 times.”

The act of insemination outside the human body is not new; Harvard’s Dr. John Rock first achieved it in 1944. What is remarkable is that Dr. Petrucci kept one fertilized egg alive for 29 days, and had to kill it because it was growing “monstrous.” U.S. scientists have managed a test-tube life span of six days.

For bearded Surgeon Petrucci, 38, and his coworkers, Drs. Laura de Pauli and Raffaele Bernabeo, artificial insemination started as a sideline. They began growing test-tube human embryos three years ago, in a tiny lab behind Petrucci’s Bologna office, to get newborn cells for experiments in antibody response to transplanted tissue. “We had no intention of creating a ‘man in the box,’ ” says Dr. Petrucci. “Far from it. The problem today is to limit births, not increase them.” The doctors collected live ova from Petrucci’s female patients during hysterectomy or after sudden death. Since the ova had to be ripe for fertilization, Petrucci scheduled his female patients’ uterine operations to coincide with the egg’s maturation. Sperm was obtained from male patients who brought Petrucci semen for fertility analysis.

Could the embryos have developed further—into human beings? “It is technically possible,” answered Dr. Petrucci. ‘”We have overcome three obstacles that were held to be insurmountable: temperature, gas exchange and metabolism.” Petrucci’s suggestion stunned the Roman Catholic Church. Its plain reply: the experiments should be stopped. At week’s end, bowing to pressure, Catholic Petrucci announced that he was leaving for a vacation in Switzerland.