One baby mouse has been born from a primordial follicle grown into an embryo in a lab. Growing eggs could revolutionise traditional IVF, says Professor Gosden, bringing costs to a fraction, removing the need for uncomfortable and sometimes risky hormone treatments, and solving the scarcity of donors problem.What of Huxley’s babies in bottles – the wombs that could be the logical extension of growing eggs? Still science fiction, thanks to the complexity of the placenta Thank goodness some might add.But not Juliet Tizzard. She says to ensure real benefit, society has to stop being appalled, and start thinking clearly. “We’re often horrified by the idea of things that when we really think about them often have quite significant benefits. Artificial wombs are a good example – everyone recoils from the image of baby in a bottle without thinking at all about how the technology might be used. The most obvious benefit would be for people whose only option right now is surrogacy with all its emotional physical and logistical problems. For women without a womb or who can’t take a baby to term – an artificial womb could be a wonderful advance.

We’ve got to stop being so horrified and sit down and think things through.”! Next week our series concludes with the science of delaying death. Infertility is fast becoming a major health concern. The statistics speak for themselves: one in six couples have difficulty conceiving, one in 10 need professional help, and more than a third of couples unable to conceive have unexplained infertility. If standard treatments fail – and IVF currently has only a 14 per cent success rate in producing a “take-home” baby – many couples will try anything in their quest for a child.

Search the Internet on infertility and there’s plenty of “anything” to try. Rainforest herbs, “Libido” pills made from fertilised chicken eggs , an “energiser ring” inlaid with small zinc and copper plates which when clipped onto the base of the penis causes, “mild and steady electrical current which prolongs erection and results in larger numbers of stronger, more vigorous spermatozoa” – or so the manufacturers say.
Not to mention the world’s “sexiest” hormone – Dehydroepiandrosterone or DHEA – the precursor chemical of both male and female sex hormones, and the talk of the town in the US, though unlicensed in Britain. Not only does DHEA makes rats breed at double the rate, say its proponents, but it combats cancer, promotes weight loss, improves memory, reverses ageing and boosts libido, though there’s no evidence that DHEA actually improves fertility as opposed to just feeling more sexy. True or not, people desperate to have a child are vulnerable to experiments whether offered by mail-order catalogue or reputable research units.What, for example, constitutes enough proof of safety when you’re dabbing in the mysteries of life? How many happy and healthy animals should be born before you try something out in humans? Should you wait for your experiments to grow up before claiming success?Defining risks and crossing the line between experiment and accepted technique is a fine call, fraught with conflicting interests, says Juliet Tizzard, director of the Progress Educational Trust. And though professional pride might exert pressure to hurry prematurely across, patients too can turn the screw. “You’ve got to be very sensitive, you can’t be too paternalistic yet you’ve also got to be very mindful not to trade on the desperation.

But you’ve also got to allow people to understand the risks and make their own decisions too.”The trouble is anguish shrouds risk in hope.. At the heart of the confidential files of the National Transplant Database is a list containing 159 names. Each of the men, women and children named on this list kept on a computer disk at the headquarters of the UK Transplant Support Services Authority in Bristol is awaiting a liver transplant. Each is hoping that a suitable organ will be found soon, but some of them will have died because of the huge shortage of donor organs. Addenbrooke’s, Britain’s first and premier liver transplant unit, last year carried out 95 operations, but many more are needed and nine people there died waiting for a suitable organs to become available. In the US, 30,000 people have died of liver failure during the last 12 months, 10 times the number of donor organs that become available for transplant.
Similar shortages of organs face patients waiting for hearts and kidneys, and despite dozens of high profile campaigns, supply has never met demand, and is unlikely ever to do so as the numbers of patients and conditions that could benefit from a transplant continues to increase.

Total waiting lists currently top 6,000 in the UK.And even when they are available, transplanted organs, like cannibalised spare parts for cars, are often not as good as the original, and come with a Pandora’s Box of new problems that have to be tackled, ranging from rejection and infection to outright failure.There has been some progress with mechanical substitutes, like a mechanical liver that can keep people alive for one to five days until a donor is found, and artificial heart pumps, but, with the exception of kidney dialysis machines, much of the technology is in its infancy, untried and unproven.With the gap between supply and demand widening, researchers are now looking at a radically new approach to producing organs which has, at least in theory, the potential to satisfy all demands.A new breed of scientists, who mix medicine with engineering and molecular cell biology, argue that donor transplants and mechanical replacements are simply stop gaps, that the real solution for the future lies in tissue engineering, which literally means growing replacement parts for the body.Dr Linda Griffith-Cima, a professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is at the forefront of the burgeoning new science, is growing livers in her laboratory. The living tissue created in her trials is made from liver cells that have been encouraged to grow into mini livers each about the size of a 5p piece.It has long been known that cells will multiply and grow in the right conditions, Scatter a few skin cells around in the lab, for instance, and a patch of skin will eventually result. But to create specific shapes and organs, and more sophisticated skin and other tissue, the cells really need a scaffolding to show them the way.The biggest breakthrough so far for the tissue engineers has been artificial skin for use with, for instance, severely burnt patients who have usually lost their dermis, the inner, thicker layer of skin beneath the epidermis which contains the blood vessels and sensory organs. Unlike the surface skin, the dermis does not regenerate itself when it is damaged. And although the cells are there, they need some kind of scaffolding to encourage growth. Without it they form thinner and much weaker scar tissue.Professor Ionannis Yannas, also of the MIT, and Professor John Burke from the Harvard Medical School, have developed their artificial skin from a two layer membrane, one made of collagen, a fibrous material from an animal’s tendons, and the second from silicone rubber.When this artificial skin is placed on a burn, it acts as a scaffolding for fibroblasts, the skin cells, to grow through and around.