Beauty Contest for Embryos Goes Hollywood to Boost Births
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Nikica Zaninovic used to take embryos out of an incubator each day and photograph them under a microscope to determine which were most likely to produce a baby. He’d inspect the number of cells, the extent to which they’d fragmented, the shell’s thickness and any defects.
Now the embryologist and his colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York also watch movies of the embryos’ first few days. New equipment takes snapshots inside their incubators every 10 minutes, and replays the frames as a time-lapse film.