Under the microscope
(sz) Fertility expert Orly Lacham-Kaplan knows all about the pros and cons of IVF … as both doctor and patient. She spoke with Katherine Kizilos.
ONE of the ironies of Dr Orly Lacham-Kaplan’s career is that she left medical school after three months to do a science degree instead. She found medicine too emotionally confronting and thought that pure science would be less stressful. The irony is that her interest in reproductive biology placed her at the forefront of IVF research and now, stem-cell technology. Medical ethics, scientific ambition, politics, suffering and human desire - life in the lab has not protected her from any of it.
Lacham-Kaplan is a senior research fellow at the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories where she is attempting to grow human eggs and sperm from stem cells (of which more later). But she was a Masters student at the University of Tel-Aviv and working in an IVF clinic when she first met Alan Trounson, the pioneering Australian scientist who changed her life.
Her work in Australia led her husband Yehuda Kaplan, a journalist and translator, to nominate her for a BrainLink award, celebrating women of achievement. She describes him as her greatest supporter.
Lacham-Kaplan met Alan Trounson in 1985 when he visited Israel to give a series of lectures “about developing new technologies to force fertilisation for men who cannot actually reproduce”. The technique, known as micro-injection, was then in the very early stages of development, she recalls. The Australians were looking for a research assistant; she was offered the position.
But the planned year in Melbourne stretched to 20. She helped develop sperm micro-injection, working with Trounson, Carl Wood and the man who is now Victoria’s Governor, David de Kretser. She met her husband and agreed to work on a PhD on male infertility under Trounson’s supervision (also honouring an agreement to train Israeli scientists in the technology).
“I modified and established the micro-manipulation technologies even more, developing the sperm injections so it is a direct injection of a single sperm into the egg,” she says. “Work in the clinic involved clinicians treating men who could not produce normal sperm. I waited for the doctors to aspirate sperm from the testes and I was sitting there trying to collect the one or two or three (active) sperm that I could find. And (I would) insert them into the eggs for fertilisation. It was nearly 15, 17 hours a day of work.” more…
From: »The Age«