Los Angeles

To view this content you must have Adobe Flash Player installed and JavaScript enabled.

0:00:00.000,0:00:03.000 (text on screen): Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source 0:00:03.000,0:00:05.000 Ask the Experts 0:00:05.000,0:00:10.000 What is PGD for Gender Selection? 0:00:10.000,0:00:14.000 Dr. Daniel Potter, HRC Fertility: The primary method of gender selection is in vitro fertilization 0:00:14.000,0:00:18.000 with pre-implantation genetic screening of the embryos. 0:00:18.000,0:00:26.000 And when we do this, we can check the embryos for all 24 chromosomes and also know the gender of the embryo, 0:00:26.000,0:00:34.000 and we can select just a single embryo of the desired gender, and place that embryo back, and have a very high pregnancy rate. 0:00:34.000,0:00:44.000 So, you know, when we look at all 24 chromosomes with the PGD, we can tell for sure that the embryo is normal or not, 0:00:44.000,0:00:48.000 and it turns out that when in vitro fertilization doesn't work, one of the primary reasons it doesn't work 0:00:48.000,0:00:52.000 is because the embryos that are being transferred are not normal. 0:00:52.000,0:00:56.000 So, knowing that they're normal is very helpful. 0:00:56.000,0:01:02.000 There are other PGD techniques, FISH being the chief among them, where you can look at the X and the Y chromosome, 0:01:02.000,0:01:05.000 and they are very accurate for selecting gender. 0:01:05.000,0:01:11.000 However, they do not do any good at all in terms of embryo screening. 0:01:11.000,0:01:17.000 If we use the 24-chromosome technology, we can put back, you know, as I said, a single embryo. 0:01:17.000,0:01:26.000 The gender, you know, specificity with that technique in our hands has been 100 percent. 0:01:26.000,0:01:32.000 So, what we do with this technology is we give the female medicine so that she makes multiple eggs 0:01:32.000,0:01:36.000 rather than the single egg that she makes in a normal cycle. 0:01:36.000,0:01:43.000 And then we remove those eggs, and that's done through the vagina using a needle guided by ultrasound. 0:01:43.000,0:01:48.000 The patient's asleep for this, so they don't feel anything or remember anything. 0:01:48.000,0:01:53.000 Once we have the eggs out, we take them to the laboratory and we fertilize them with sperm, 0:01:53.000,0:01:58.000 and at that point the fertilized eggs are; you know, we call them embryos. 0:01:58.000,0:02:01.000 Technically, they're actually pre-embryos. But we call them embryos. 0:02:01.000,0:02:07.000 And so they start off at a single cell and they will divide to the eight-cell stage, 0:02:07.000,0:02:14.000 and at that point we can remove one of the cells and, you know, using various technologies, 0:02:14.000,0:02:21.000 analyze the cell to determine what the chromosomal content is of that cell and then, you know, 0:02:21.000,0:02:26.000 use that information to transfer just the embryos that are healthy and that are normal. 0:02:26.000,0:02:28.000 (text on screen): Fertility Authority. Your Most Trusted Source