Discusses artificial and in vitro fertilization, egg and embryo donation, surrogate mothers, the storage of human semen, eggs, and embryos, and scientific and ethical issues in fertility.

Carl Edward Sagan's (1934-1996) one of the famous quotation was "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." From past to date, well-known molecules, enzymes, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates are studied in the pathogenesis of several diseases both as a diagnostic/prognostic biomarker and therapeutic agent. The underlying mechanism of unexplained diseases and failure of therapies are frequently studied with well-known biomarkers, but remain unclear in many cases. As Dr. Sagan said other keys are still waiting to be known in some forgotten corner of a body universe, we find strength to propose that one of them can be the growth factor with cytokine activity named "Midkine" This book summarizes the extensive up-to-date literature overeview with the lastest work of experts about midkine in a detailed format that conveys its role as both a pathologic factor and therapeutic agent.

Embryology at a Glance is a highly illustrated and innovative introduction to key embryological concepts, with concise, memorable descriptions of major embryological developments. This new edition covers the basic principles of human development, from mitosis and meiosis, before exploring the primary formation of each body system, including the development of the musculoskeletal, circulatory, digestive, reproductive, and nervous systems during the foetal and neonatal periods. Key features include: New chapters on cell signalling genes, stem cells, and antenatal screening for common congenital and genetic defects Full colour photographs and illustrations Links to clinical practice highlighted throughout Timelines of each developmental stage MCQs and EMQs for revision and review A companion website at www.ataglanceseries.com/embryology featuring 15 brand new animations, and podcasts to help clearly explain the processes that occur during development. An additional instructor resource contains an image bank of all the figures from the book to aid teaching this fascinating area Embryology at a Glance provides the perfect alternative to the overwhelming detail seen in conventional embryology texts. It provides just the right level of detail on embryology and congenital abnormalities for all medical students and health professionals to develop a thorough understanding of human development and its implications for clinical practice.

Life Before Birth provides a coherent framework for addressing bioethical issues in which the moral status of embryos and fetuses is relevant. It is based on the "interest view" which ascribes moral standing to beings with interests, and connects the possession of interests with the capacity for conscious awareness or sentience. The theoretical framework is applied to ethical and legal topics, including abortion, prenatal torts, wrongful life, the crime of feticide, substance abuse by pregnant women, compulsory cesareans, assisted reproduction, and stem cell research. Along the way, difficult philosophical problems, such as identity and the non-identity problem are thoroughly explored. The book will be of interest not only to philosophers, but also physicians, lawyers, policy makers, and anyone perplexed by the many difficulties surrounding the unborn.
"Bonnie Steinbock's excellent book is . . . consistent, thoroughgoing, and intelligible." --Nature
"Steinbock's book is valuable for all interested in the ethical/legal issues surrounding abortion, prenatal injury and liability, maternal-fetal conflict, and fetal/embryo research. The author provides an excellent historical overview of these issues, but she also addresses the issues from the stance of a particular theory of moral status, namely, interest theory. This gives coherence to her discussion as well as allowing testing of the viability of interest theory."
--Choice
"A focused, lucid, analytically fine-grained discussion of a wide variety of problems. . . extremely useful as a survey of the current state of the debate." --Religious Studies Review
"Merits serious consideration by physicians. Steinbock's interests-based approach treats all questions as open -- another and most welcome breath of fresh air." -New England Journal of Medicine
"An extremely valuable contribution to the literature. The author carefully identifies the many bioethical issues to which the status of embryos and fetuses is relevant....She thoroughly reviews the extensive medical, bioethical, and legal literature on all of these issues, offering well-developed critiques of many standard positions. She articulates and thoughtfully defends interesting positions on all of theses topics. Anyone with an interest in these issues will learn a great deal from her knowledgeable and judicious treatment of them." -- The Journal of Clinical Ethics

Leading gender and science scholar Sarah S. Richardson charts the untold history of the idea that a woman's health and behavior during pregnancy can have long-term effects on her descendants' health and welfare. The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother-except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury-could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing. Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman's experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development. Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, this book offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues-in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy-provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.

This thoroughly revised second edition is an up-to-date overview of the current knowledge of Notch and Notch signaling in embryology and cancer. It discusses this topic from Notch's role in the development of the embryo to the Notch signaling pathway's role in the development of a number of cancers, including breast cancer, malignant melanoma, Non-melanoma skin cancer, intestinal cancer and others. In the years since the previous edition, there have been numerous developments and insights within this rapidly moving field, making this new edition urgently needed. This volume also features discussions of current insights on Notch's role in senescence, the regulation of Notch signaling by microRNAs, Notch's role in the microbiome, diet and its influence on Notch signaling and more. Taken as a whole, with its companion books - Molecular Biology of Notch Signaling and Notch Signaling in Cancer - this is a definitive discussion of the topic, presented by internationally-recognized contributors. Presented in a coherent and accessible structure, this revised and updated second edition is an essential and up-to-date guide for oncologists, embryologists, researchers and advanced students.

Founded in 1914, the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has made an unparalleled contribution to the biological understanding of embryos and their development. Originally much of the research was carried out through experimental embryology, but by the second half of the twentieth century, tissue and cell cultures were providing histological information about development, and biochemistry and molecular genetics have taken center stage. This final volume in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provides a history of embryology and reproductive biology spanning a hundred years. It provides important insights into the evolution of both scientific ideas and the public perception of embryo research, concluding with a reflection on current debates.

The fetus occupies a critical phase during human development. It is at this stage when the body systems that will support us throughout our lives begin to face up to the challenge of life outside the womb. While the fetus can demonstrate a remarkably robust response to challenges in the uterus, it is also an exquisitely sensitive phase of development. It is now well recognized that disturbances to the materno-fetal environment can influence and even undermine our state of health well into adulthood. This exciting new publication provides a valuable insight into fetal growth and development across all the main body systems, and examines the influence of the materno-fetal environment on adult-onset diseases. This text contains additional chapters on the embryo, placenta, and parturition, to insure that this is a fully self-contained introduction. This book is written by world-renowned experts from leading centers of excellence and will be an invaluable introduction for students of medicine, reproductive biology, and human biology.

The possibility that human beings may soon be cloned has generated enormous anxiety and fueled a vigorous debate about the ethics of contemporary science. Unfortunately, much of this debate about cloning has treated cloning as singular and revolutionary. The essays in Cloning and the Future of Human Embryo Research place debates about cloning in the context of reproductive technology and human embryo research. Although novel, cloning is really just the next step in a series of reproductive interventions that began with in vitro fertilization in 1978. Cloning, embryo research, and reproductive technology must therefore be discussed together in order to be understood. The authors of this volume bring these topics together by examining the status of preimplantation embryos, debates about cloning and embryo research, and the formulation of public policy. The book is distinctive in framing cloning as inextricably tied to embryo research and in offering both secular and religious perspectives on cloning and embryo research.

Investigations on anatomical specimens have demonstrated that the subchondral mineralization does indeed show regular distribution patterns from which conclusions about the mechanical situation within an individual joint may be drawn. Since radiographical densitometry and histological methods are only available for determining the adaptive reaction of the bone to the mechanical situation in a joint after death, the information obtained applies only to an end situation and tells us nothing about the development of the changes with time. Furthermore, investigations carried out on human specimens by radiographical densitometry mostly apply to samples of a particular age, since such specimens can be acquired only from departments of pathology, forensic medicine or anatomy.

Since the first fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory in 1968, scientific and technological breakthroughs have raised ethical dilemmas and generated policy controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. Embryo, stem cell, and cloning research have provoked impassioned political debate about their religious, moral, legal, and practical implications. National governments make rules that govern the creation, destruction, and use of embryos in the laboratory but they do so in profoundly different ways.

In Embryo Politics, Thomas Banchoff provides a comprehensive overview of political struggles aboutembryo research during four decades in four countries the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Banchoff's book, the first of its kind, demonstrates the impact of particular national histories and institutions on very different patterns of national governance. Over time, he argues, partisan debate and religious-secular polarization have come to overshadow ethical reflection and political deliberation on the moral status of the embryo and the promise of biomedical research. Only by recovering a robust and public ethical debate will we be able to govern revolutionary life-science technologies effectively and responsibly into the future."

This work attempts to sketch a coherent picture of the amniotic fluid com partment, its borders, and the interactions occurring between fetus and amniotic fluid, for it is this compartment which for 10 months provides the habitat in which the fetus and its functions develop. As a matter of course, our mor phological studies had to be limited to the situation prevailing at the full term of pregnancy. This portrayal purposely neglects the placenta, which is already the subject of an extraordinary profusion of literature. The other aspects of the embryonic sac have been overshadowed to date by the preeminent role 2 of the placenta, although they represent around 1200cm of contact surface in the maternal compartment. From our point of view, the fetal membranes not only act as a seal or simply a diffusion barrier, but actively participate in the exchange processes between compartments. The author also took pains to compile (albeit incompletely) the widely scattered findings reported in clinical journals in order to present them as a well-rounded summary of the mor phological picture and the functional happenings involved in fetal develop ment. The author's own studies of a specifically histomorphological nature provided the groundwork for this synopsis. A special branch of embryology, embryonal physiology, is treated only incidentally in today's embryology textbooks. This work offers several encounters with this field, which should help make it the focus of greater interest. 2 Definition of Terms Fig. 1.

1. 1 The Cytokeratins as a Member of the Intermediate Filament Protein Family Intermediate filaments together with microtubules and actin microfilaments make up the filamentous cytoskeleton found in the cytoplasm of vertebrate cells. Recently, intermediate filament proteins have also been described in invertebrates, but their chemistry is not yet known (for review see Biessmann and Walter 1989). These filaments (about 10 nm in diameter) used to be categorized into five classes - cytokeratin, vimentin, desmin, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), and neurofilaments (NFs). The expression of these proteins follows differentiation-dependent rules: cytokeratins occur in epi- thelial cells, NF proteins are expressed in neurons, GFAP in astrocytes and some nonglial cells, desmin in smooth muscle cells and in striated myocytes, and vimentin in mesenchymal cells (for review see Lazarides 1980; Osborn and Weber 1983). Recent investigations including deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and protein sequencing and peptide mapping have redefined the intermediate filaments into five types or subfamilies (type I, acidic cytokeratins; type II, basic cytokeratins; type III, vimentin, desmin, peripherin, and GFAP; type IV, the three NF proteins; and type V, the nuclear lamins (for review see Nagle 1988). A new type VI intermediate filament protein, nestin, has been described in the developing nervous system (Lendahl et al. 1990), and is initially co- expressed with vimentin in neuroepithelial stem cells (Steinert and Liem 1990). The cytokeratins are the most complex subgroup of intermediate filament proteins.

The advent of ultrasound scans has made it possible to observe the fetus undisturbed in its natural surroundings. In this remarkable book, Dr Alessandra Piontelli describes in moving detail her observations of the behaviour of several children from very early stages in the womb, through birth, to infancy and childhood. By drawing on her experiences as a child psychotherapist and psychoanalyst as well as on her observational research, she is able to investigate issues relating to individuality, psychological birth and the influence of maternal emotions during pregnancy.
The first study of its kind, From Fetus to Child shows how observational and psychoanalytic data can offer different but complementary insights in attempting to answer fundamental questions about human development.

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In 1953, at the grand age of 92, Ferdinand Hochstetter submitted his famous collection of photographs of human embryos entitled: "Uber die Entwicklung der Formverhaltnisse des menschlichen Antlitzes." Together with others papers, this contribution was published in 1955, a year after Hochstetter's death. In unbroken combativeness, Hochstetter discussed his results with regard to those of earlier embryologists and to those of his own lifetime. Thus, in an obituary, Elze (1956) reported about one of Hochstetter's letters from the year of his death (1954): "nur einige blodsinnige Behauptungen, die Fischel in seiner Ent- wicklung des Menschen verzapft hat, mochte ich vielleicht noch annageln," which may be translated as: "I would just like to pin down a few silly assertions that Fischel made in his Entwicklung des Menschen." In the first two paragraphs of his paper Hochstetter stated (in German, here translated freely): When I decided to write a detailed paper about the development of the morphology of the human face, too [in addition to a paper about morphology of the extremities in human embryos], I was especially moved by the fact that in none of the German manuals and textbooks on embryology known to me is there to be found a presentation of the development of the human face which could be considered - eveJ;l to a limited extent - rich in details, true, sufficiently illustrated, easy to understand by students as well as by scien-

Replacing and superseding all other works in this area, Dr. Lucinda L. Veeck's An Atlas of Human Gametes and Conceptuses is the only book now in print that shows the typical and atypical morphology of human oocytes, sperm, and preembryos collected and cultured during the course of in vitro fertilization treatment. Brilliantly illustrated with hundreds of original photographs in color as well as black and white, the book also details and fully illustrates specific new reproductive technologies and provides the reader with both a glossary and a concise history of in vitro fertilization. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Human Embryos and Preimplantation Genetic Technologies: Ethical, Social, and Public Policy Aspects presents the first holistic analysis of PGD and PGS as it is practiced and regulated worldwide. In addition to scientific and technical aspects, the book provides perspectives on the ethical, legal, religious, policy and social implications of global assisted reproduction technologies, including in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Chapters cover history, ethics, feminism, family dynamics, psychological and interpersonal factors, the current state of PGD and PGS in 20 different sovereign nations and religious communities, and provide an analysis of public policy concerns and future directions.

This textbook presents essential and accessible information about human embryology including practical information on human health issues and recent advances in human reproductive technology. Starting with biological basics of cell anatomy and fertilization, the author moves through the development of specific organs and systems, before addressing social issues associated with embryology. Each chapter includes specific objectives, general background, study questions, and questions to inspire critical thinking. Human Life Before Birth also contains two appendices and a full glossary of terms covered in the text. Clinicians and researchers in this field will find this volume indispensable. Key selling features: Explores all the developmental and embryological events that occur in human emryonic and fetal life Reviews basic cell biology, genetics, and reproduction focusing entirely on humans Summarizes the development of various anatomical systems Examines common birth defects and sexually transmitted diseases including emerging concerns such as Zika Documents assisted fertilization technologies and various cultural aspects of reproduction

With 3000 new references added since the first edition, this book gives the information necessary to produce embryos totally through in vitro techniques. It shows the commercial applications of embryo and oocyte research. Cattle remain at the forefront of many new developments in reproductive technology and what can be done for the cow today will later be applicable to other farm livestock and perhaps humans. This new edition reviews the considerable advances and issues in embryo production technology, based on reports since the first edition in 1994. This is a must have volume for those who own the first edition, and in itself an incredibly informative text.

Embryology has evolved from myth in early cultures, who knew little about the details of conception and pregnancy, to the height of modern scientific knowledge. Thomas Weihs argues persuasively that new scientific understanding of embryology could engender a new mythology, and that, in fact, science and myth are complementary aspects of the study of new life. He explores the correspondence between the creation story in Genesis, and other creation myths, with the development of the human embryo, and also discusses how the intuitive heart-felt values we associate with pregnancy and birth can be reconciled with the science of our age.

Relevant to students, academics and practitioners across the globe, this original volume highlights contemporary issues associated with assisted reproduction and embryology and critically analyzes the law surrounding human reproduction in the light of case law and technological developments since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFE Act) Act was passed in 1990.

Tackling issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors identify and evaluate areas that have provoked intense public and academic debate as well as those where further or renewed regulation is needed. Focusing primarily on the legal and ethical issues involved in regulating this area in the UK, which is at the forefront of developing legislation in this area, this book has international relevance as many countries have used the UK as a model for their own legislation.

This text is suitable for a broad range of readers, including legal academics, law students and practitioners interested in the areas of medical/healthcare law and ethics, bioethics and moral philosophy, family law, sociology and reproductive medicine and genetics.

Leading gender and science scholar Sarah S. Richardson charts the untold history of the idea that a woman's health and behavior during pregnancy can have long-term effects on her descendants' health and welfare. The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother-except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury-could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing. Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman's experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development. Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, this book offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues-in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy-provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.

The investigation and management of infertility has progressed radically since the advent of in vitro fertilization. It has ceased to be the province of the gynecologist alone, and often requires the co-operation of gynecologists, andrologists, endocrinologists, embryologists, geneticists, general scientists, psychologists, radiologists, nurses, ultrasonographers, social workers, medical administrators, and lawyers. Many of these do not have a medical background and fewer still have knowledge of the gynecological terms which are still in predominant use. Furthermore, scientific advances have led to the introduction of techniques and terms unfamiliar to the non-scientist, including the gynecologist. This dictionary of reproductive medicine, the first of its kind, has been conceived to address the concerns of all of these groups.

Obtaining good quality oocytes and preparing them for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a key stage in assisted reproduction. This is a complex process with many pitfalls, making good clinical preparation and laboratory technique essential for success. Illustrated throughout, this book will be valuable to clinical embryologists, laboratory personnel wishing to redefine or develop technique and improve outcomes, IVF quality managers, and gynecologists performing oocyte retrieval. Featuring descriptions of the underlying science along with practical advice on methods and trouble-shooting, this comprehensive manual will aid all those involved in this complex process of oocyte retrieval and preparation in navigating towards optimal outcomes.