The Science of Baby Making

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox, and I'm Robin Ints, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now today we are asking how are babies made? We really are. We've been given that responsibility. We know that obviously a lot of the tabloid newspapers will be furious going children as young as seventeen told by Radio Four how babies are made. Um 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. Instead of the Bible and the works of Charles Sh uh William Shakespeare, you get I think it's Lady Chatterley's Lover and a Littlewood's catalogue from nineteen seventy six.

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 mouthsemic stem cells. And some of the species when we can get 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 quadruplates 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 nineteen eighty seven. And some of you may know the world's first IV 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 p 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 twenty years ago. He said he had two women pregnant and he said

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