Name: How IVF Works | The Story of Fertility | BBC Earth Science
Uploaded: 2025-02-15T23:48:58.000Z
Duration: 4 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The important thing is that we're helping the sperm and these eggs get together when they wouldn't naturally be able to do that.

Essentially, this is where life is created in this room.

In the early 80s, IVF success rates averaged 10%.

Today, it's well over 30% for women under 35.

Although rates fall as you get older, to about 1 in 10 for women in their early 40s.

IVF success rates have been rising constantly as new techniques have been introduced and improved.

With ICSI, Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, sperm can now be injected straight into the egg using a tube the thickness of a hair.

This helps when sperm quality is poor and they don't easily penetrate the egg.

And the egg still needs to go through the process of accepting the sperm inside, but we have improved the odds of it happening by putting them together in the same place.

If the egg is fertilised, the cells will begin to divide and the egg becomes an embryo.

However, not every embryo created in the lab will lead on to a successful pregnancy.

There may be faults in the embryo's genes, problems with the way it develops, or it may fail at the next stage, which is implanting into the woman's womb.

But a recent breakthrough has helped increase chances of picking a healthy embryo to transfer into the womb.

A time-lapse camera inside the incubator monitors the embryo while it's growing.

Because it takes pictures every ten minutes, you can put a video together and you can see the embryo going on from one to two, to three cells, to four cells, and it continues the embryo development.

This allows the team to check constantly whether the embryos are developing correctly and which ones look like the best bet.

But in this lab, it's also possible to see some of the reasons it's more difficult to become pregnant as you get older.

As you age, it's not just the egg quantity that drops, it's also the egg quality.

Some eggs collapse as soon as the sperm is injected because their membrane is too soft.

While others develop a tougher membrane over time, making it difficult to be fertilised as it's harder for the sperm to get in.

It's not bursting, so this membrane on the top and the bottom is not letting go.

This one comes from a woman about my age.

So would this egg then be unlikely to fertilise?

This one's less likely to fertilise and less likely to lead on to a baby.

Today, it's hit home how fragile our little eggs are and how they do age.

But inside, we're all still the same as we were 100 years ago.

The trend to have babies later means more women are leaving it too late.

Their eggs are just unable to be fertilised.

And for some, their eggs have virtually run out.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How IVF Works | The Story of Fertility | BBC Earth Science

constantly

essentially

process

tough