NARRATOR: People do all sorts of things to get attention. And why?

It may be the last thing

on his mind, but this man's body is working toward this.
Whether we're thinking about it or not, our bodies want to make babies. And our bodies are very
good at it. Around the world about 365,000 new babies get made every day.
But as ordinary as it seems, creating a new human being is no simple feat. Just think of it. No
matter who you are, once upon a time you looked like this. From a single cell you built a body
that has one hundred trillion cells. You made hundreds of different kinds of tissues and dozens of
organs, including a brain that allows you to do remarkable things.
How did you do it?
Today, we can look closer than ever before: into the womb, into a cell, into the essence of life
itself. Not only can we see what's happening, but now we're beginning to see how it happens
the forces that build the embryo, the molecules that drive this remarkable change. We're
uncovering the most intimate details of how life is created, the secrets behind life's greatest
miracle.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality
television.
This program is funded in part by the Northwestern Mutual Foundation. Some people already
know Northwestern Mutual can help plan for your children's education. Are you there yet?
Northwestern Mutual Financial Network.
Scientific achievement is fueled by the simple desire to make things clear. Sprint PCS is proud to
support NOVA.
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from
viewers like you. Thank you.
NARRATOR: You might think all the people on this beach are just working on their suntans.
But beneath all that sunscreen, under the skin, there's a frenzy of activity. Without even thinking
about it, almost all the adults here are busy trying to reproduce. They can't help themselves. The
urge to procreate is a fundamental part of life, not just for us but for all life.
Why is this urge so universal? At least some blame can probably go to this: DNAthe molecule
that carries our genes, the chemical instructions for building our bodies and keeping us alive, all
wrapped up in a tiny winding staircase.
DNA has run the show for more than four billion years for one main reason: it's very good at
making copies of itself. The copies can get passed to a new generation in a couple of ways.

If you're a bacterium, you might be into cloningmaking exact replicas of yourself. All your
descendents have the same DNA and, except for an occasional mutant, are just like you. It's
simple. It works. And genetically it's extremely boring.
It can also be dangerous.
If humans were all clones, everyone would have the exact same immune system, and one
successful parasite could wipe us all out.
Fortunately, there's sex, the method of choice for 99.9 percent of the organisms on Earth more
complex than bacteria. With sexual reproduction, two individuals each provide some DNA. Most
animals put it into sperm or eggs. If the two can get together, a new being will be created, one
that's different from its parents and everybody else.
Where there's sex, there's variety. And when it comes to survival of the fittest, variety has a
definite advantage.
All this comes at a price. Sexual reproduction may be popular, but it's also quite tricky. To get an
idea of how tricky, just take a peek inside a man's testicle.
It's packed with tiny tubes coiled into bundles. Stretched out they could cover half a mile. Inside
all this tubing, the average man is churning out a thousand new sperm every second. That's about
a hundred million new sperm every day and more than two trillion over a lifetime. And here's the
tricky part: each and every sperm is one of a kind, carrying a unique genetic package.
How is this possible? How can one person produce so many different combinations of genes?
The answer lies in the very special way we make sperm and eggs, a process called "meiosis."
In almost every cell of your body you have thirty thousand or more different genes, spread out on
very long strands of DNA called "chromosomes." Most cells have two versions of every gene on
a total of 46 chromosomes. Exactly half of those, 23, came from your mom, and 23 came from
your dad. They come in pairs where the partners are very similar but not quite the same. The
only time they get together is during meiosis.
Here's how it works inside a testicle that's making sperm. First, each chromosome makes an
exact copy of itself, keeping it attached at one point. They condense, creating an X-shape. Now
the chromosome partners get together and the two, or actually four, will embrace. They cling so
closely, big chunks carrying whole bunches of genes get exchanged between the partners. The
cell then divides twice, each time pulling the pairs apart. The final result is a sperm or an egg cell
with 23 chromosomes, half the normal number.
By itself, the cell is incomplete. But it still holds incredible promise, because every chromosome
now carries a combination of genes that has never existed before.

All this gene shuffling means that within a single species, there can be an enormous amount of
diversity. And the more diversity, the better the odds are that someone will survive to create a
new generation.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: This is my mom and dad and your mom and dad.
SERGIO IRUEGUS: And my mom and dad on their wedding day. You definitely have your
mom's eyes. And you can see I definitely have my dad's eyebrows.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: You do have your dad's eyebrows.
NARRATOR: Melinda Tate Iruegas and her husband, Sergio, are expecting their first baby.
SERGIO IRUEGUS: Here's Mom and Dad with me and my brother.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: Yeah.
SERGIO IRUEGUS: My sister hadn't come along yet. But this is what our little boy might look
like. That's me.
NARRATOR: Their unborn child carries a mixture of genes not just from them, but from all
their ancestors.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: That's like the spitting image. You look so much like your mother here.
NARRATOR: But which genes got passed on from whom right now is anybody's guess.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: Because here you are and this is what our little girl might look like. I
wonder if the baby will have the characteristic eyebrows that come from my father's side of the
family. We call them the Iruegas eyebrows.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: Or that it won't have my dad's nose.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: Your nose.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: We talked about having children a lot. He would say, "Five,
six." I was like, "Well, let's start with one. Two, maybe three."
NARRATOR: In their efforts to pass on their genes, Melinda and Sergio pursued dramatically
different strategies. Like most men, Sergio has been constantly producing sperm since puberty.
But Melinda created all her eggs when she looked like this, a fetus in her mother's womb. Within
a couple of months, she created several million eggs. And then, the eggs began to die. At the age
of 31, Melinda may only have a few thousand left. But that's okay, because inside an ovary, as
opposed to a testicle, it's quality, not quantity, that counts.

Every month, one of a woman's two ovaries selects an immature egg cell to lavish with attention.
Hundreds of support cells tend the egg, feeding it until it grows fat. When it's ready, the whole
entouragethe egg along with its helpersoozes out of the ovary.
Waiting for them is the open end of the Fallopian tube, which leads to the uterus. Its tentacles
capture the egg and pull it inside. The egg is swept along by muscular contractions of the tube, as
well as the constant swaying of tiny cilia. The egg has everything it needs to start a new life,
except for one thing: DNA from a sperm. And it has to get it fast. If the egg is not fertilized
within a few hours it will die.
With sex, there will always be pressure to meet and impress a mate. When it comes to actually
choosing a partner, there's a lot to consider. For us, it might be somewhat more complicated than
picking the one that smells best, but there's no doubt that the process can be heavily influenced
by chemistry, natural drugs that flood the brain.
When love is in the air, the body can undergo some dramatic changes. Signals from the brain
speed up the metabolism of glucose. As a result, body temperature rises, skin sweats, heartbeat
and breathing get faster. In a man, hormones cue blood vessels to relax, allowing the spongy
tissue in the penis to fill with blood. At the height of sexual excitement, millions of sperm are
squeezed out of storage and swept up by fluid gushing from several glands, including the
prostate. The flood carries them into a fifteen-inch-long tube looping into the abdomen and then
out through the penis. It's only about a teaspoon of liquid, but it typically contains about three
hundred million sperm.
They are immediately in peril. The vagina is acidic, so the sperm must escape or die. They start
to swim, at least some of them. Even in a healthy man, 60 percent of the sperm can be less than
perfect. Like this one with two tails. For these guys, the journey is over.
But what about the rest? What are the chances that one tiny sperm will reach and fertilize an
egg? Sperm are often portrayed as brave little warriors forging their way through hostile terrain
to conquer the egg. Nothing could be further from the truth.
For every challenge the sperm face, success is, to a great extent, controlled by the woman's body
and even the egg itself.
Take the sperm's first obstacle, the cervix, passageway to the uterus. Most of the time, it's locked
shut, plugged with mucous that keeps bacteria and sperm out. But for just a few days a month,
around ovulation, the mucous becomes watery and forms tiny channels that guide the sperm
through.
Arriving inside the uterus, the sperm are still about six inches away from their goalat least a
two-day swim.But undulations of the uterine muscles propel the sperm into the fallopian tube
within 30 minutes.
Even a sperm that reaches the tube in record time has no guarantee of fertilizing an egg. There
may be no egg there. Ovulation could still be days away.

It's the slowpokes, caught up in the cilia lining the tube, who may have a better chance. It's
probably here that chemicals in the woman's body alter the sperm's outer coating. Only those
sperm that are altered can get a date with the egg. The sperm are released gradually, over the
course of a few days, so at any given time only a couple hundred sperm will move on.
If all goes well, then farther up the tube they'll find the egg. But it's heavily chaperoned by
support cells. And the chaperones are picky. Only some of the sperm are let through.
Those who make it will face yet another challenge. Underneath the cloud of cells, the egg itself
is encased in a thick protein shell, called the "zona." To fertilize the egg, the sperm must break
through the zona. But even the strongest can't do it by brute force alone. The egg demands a
proper introduction. Proteins protruding from the sperm's cap must hook up precisely with a set
of proteins on the egg's surface. If they match, the sperm is held fast and undergoes a dramatic
transformation. It sheds its outer coating, releasing powerful enzymes that dissolve a hole in the
zona, allowing the sperm to push its way through.
The final hurdle passed, the sperm still does not thrust its way into the egg itself. Rather, the
membranes of the two cells fuse, and the egg draws the entire contents of the sperm inside.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: I don't know. We weren't being as careful as we should have
been. And October came around and I was a day late. And actually I was having some other
problems with my wrist. And we went to the doctor and the doctor had asked me...he's like,
"Well, are you pregnant?" You know, because he wanted to do an x-ray of my wrist.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: Yeah.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: And I said, "No." And then I thought about it and I was like,
"Well, I don't know." I decided that I better check this out. And sure enough, it was positive. And
when he came home, I was like...
SERGIO IRUEGAS: I could tell she had something to tell me.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: And I was like, "Well you better sit down."
SERGIO IRUEGAS: It was something that we had discussed...
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: Yeah.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: ...but hadn't anticipated until about two more years down the road. So
when she told me...yeah...I was ecstatic.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: We were ready. We were definitely ready even if it was a little
early.

NARRATOR: Ready or not, once sperm and egg get together they have their own agenda: to
create a viable embryo. Their chances aren't great. It's estimated that more than 50 percent of all
fertilized eggs fail to develop. If it's going to survive, the egg has a lot of work to do.
First, it orders the zona to lock out all other sperm. And then the egg must finish meiosis,
expelling half of its chromosomes into this tiny pouch, called a "polar body." With the door
closed behind it, the single sperm already inside releases its precious cargo.
The sperm's 23 chromosomes stretch out in the roomy, welcoming egg. The chromosomes of
sperm and egg approach each other and then the cell divides.
Since the moment the sperm entered the egg, 24 hours have passed. All this time the fertilized
egg is moving down the fallopian tube toward the uterus. Every few hours, the cells divide.
Four...eight...sixteen...gradually creating the building blocks needed to construct an embryo.
On rare occasions, the tiny cluster of cells splits into two groups and creates two embryos
identical twins. But most of the time the cells stick together. They must complete just the right
number of cell divisions before they arrive in the uterus about five days after fertilization. What
started as a large single cell has divided into just over a hundred much smaller cells, but they're
still trapped within the hard shell of the zona.
Now called a "blastocyst," the bundle of cells must do two things to survive: break out of the
zona and find a source of nourishment. At the beginning of the sixth day, it orchestrates an
escape. It releases an enzyme that eats through the zona, and the ball of cells squeezes out. Free
at last, the blastocyst lands on the blood-rich lining of the mother's uterus. It has just passed one
hurdle, but is immediately presented with another.
For in fact it is now in very grave danger. Stripped of its protective coating, the blastocyst could
be attacked by the mother's immune system as a foreign invader. White blood cells would swarm
in to devour it. In its own self-defense, the ball of cells produces several chemicals that suppress
the mother's immune system inside the uterus, in effect, convincing the mother to treat it like a
welcome guest.
Then it is free to get to work. Searching for food and oxygen, cells from the blastocyst reach
down and burrow into the surrounding tissue. Eventually, they pull the entire bundle down into
the uterine lining. And sooner or later, the mother will notice.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: Even brushing my teeth would make me...the minty flavor was
just, like, gross. And it made me feel nauseous. And I would get up and I would try to eat
something. And if it...anything smelled off slightly, then it was...it made me nauseous.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: My mother has told me stories of how my father had gone through
morning sickness. And of course that never really registered until the first time it started
happening to me.

MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: He literally got...he would get really, really nauseous and upset,
and actually get physically ill sometimes.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: There was a couple of times when that...well, more than a couple of times
when that actually happened.
NARRATOR: Not everybody gets morning sickness. Sometimes months can go by before the
mother gets any sense of the drama unfolding within her body.
One milestone event takes place just two weeks after conception, when the blastocyst is about
the size of a poppy seed. This is the moment when the cells start to organize themselves into an
embryo. The process is called "gastrulation."
With animals like frogs, whose embryos develop inside transparent eggs, it's easy to see it in
action. After the egg becomes a hollow ball of many cells, some cells dive into the center,
forming layers which will go on to develop into different organs.
In humans, gastrulation happens deep inside the mother's uterine lining, so it can't be
photographed. But we think it works something like this:the blastocyst creates two oblong
bubbles, one on top of the other. Sandwiched between them is a thin layer of cells. These are the
cells which one day may become a baby. At the beginning of gastrulation, some cells begin
moving toward the center. Then they dive downwards, creating a new, lower layer. More cells
plunge through, squeezing in between, forming a third. The cells in the three layers may not look
different, but for each layer, a very different future lies ahead.
The lower cells are destined to form structures like the lungs, liver, and the lining of the digestive
tract. The middle layer will form the heart, muscles, bones and blood. And the top layer will
create the nervous system, including the spinal cord and the brain, as well as an outer covering of
skin, and eventually, hair.
This is a human embryo three weeks after fertilization. Less than a tenth of an inch long, its
neural tube, the beginning of the nervous system, is already in place. A couple of days layer, the
top of the tube is bulging outwards on its way to becoming a brain. With the primitive brain cells
exposed, we can see some are sending feelers, making connections to their neighbors.
As the days pass, changes proceed at a rapid-fire pace throughout the embryo. Everywhere, cells
are multiplying. And they're on the move. Some reach out to one another, forming blood vessels.
A heart begins to beat. As the embryo lengthens the precursor to the backbone forms. Groups of
cells bulge out on the sides, the beginnings of arms and legs.
This is the embryo four and a half weeks after fertilization. It is only about a fifth of an inch
long. The primitive backbone now curls into a tail, which will disappear in a few weeks. A large
brain is developing, and on the side of the head: an eye.
How does this happen? How does the embryo transform itself from a blob of cells into different
tissues and organs, and finally into a fully functional baby?

The secret, of course, lies in your genesin your DNA. Inside most every cell in your body, you
have the same 46 chromosomes, carrying the same genes. But not all the cells in your body are
the same. Nerve cells, blood cells, cells lining your intestine, they all look different and they do
different jobs.
That's because in each of these cells different groups of genes are turned on. And when a gene is
turned on, it tells the cell to construct a particular protein.Proteins are the molecules that build
your bodylike collagen, a fiber that makes up much of your skin, tendons, and bones, or
keratin in your hair. Crystallin is the protein that helps make the lens of your eye clear.
Some proteins do work. Actin and myosin move muscle fibers. Hemoglobin in the blood carries
oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body.
So when the embryo is developing, how does a cell turn on the right set of genes and create the
right proteins?
Part of the answer seems to be location. Once the basic body plan is established, with a head on
one end, back and front, and left and right sides, cells seem to know exactly where they are and
what they are supposed to become. This is because cells talk to each other in the form of
chemical messages.
Chemicals in one cell can trigger a reaction in the cell next door that can spread to the cell's
nucleus and turn genes on or off. But what's really going on in there? How does a gene get
turned on?
If all the DNA in a single cell were stretched out, it would be about six feet long. But it's all
wound up very tightly, coiled around balls of protein. For a gene to be turned on, something has
to come in and loosen up the right section. Then the cell's machinery can latch on and read the
DNA, the first step on the long road to building a protein. Those molecules that can turn genes
on play a key role in every aspect of development, including the process that transforms the
embryo into a boy or a girl.
SERGIO IRUEGAS: We didn't want to know. We wanted to do it, I guess, the old fashioned
way.
MELINDA TATE IRUEGAS: Well, you kind of wanted to know.