How
does an
egg, a tiny squishy blob of a
cell, grow into a fully formed organism — a sinuous worm, a delicate fly, a perfect
human baby?
If you believe, for example, that granulosa
cells and other very early features of ovarian ecology set up the polarities that ultimately determine the quality of a
human egg, as Albertini
does, then certain techniques widely used in IVF may be subtly perturbing the very mechanisms that
eggs use to establish a plan to build an embryo and maximize the chances that it will develop properly.