"Stop, stop! My embryos!!"

When I was a PhD student, there were quite a few characters in the lab where I worked; some good, some not so good, most very interesting and entertaining. There was a particular Romanian double-act that always provided much amusement, but also stacks of irritation and tension.

It's unfortunate that I can't really name either of the pair involved, but anybody who's particularly interested can e-mail me for more details. The couple consisted of a PhD student and her supervisor. The student, "Marianna", was a medic (obs & gobs I think), but she'd come to the UK to work on her PhD with, oh fuck it, "Marcella".

Marianna was the oddest person you could ever meet; she was quite tall, but always spoke to you as if you were the most revered person on the planet, bowing down to, but invading your personal space a little too much. She spoke in a high-pitch, monotone, whisper - anybody who has heard the cosmetic surgery junkie character Maxine Bendix in Tittybangbang will know how Marianna spoke.

She was highly suspicious of everyone: she was convinced that Marcella was in cahoots with the KGB because she had managed to leave Romania during the Ciaocescu regime - "But nobody else could get out!" she complained. She once tore down a newspaper cutout from the Daily Mirror because she thought it was an instrument of the Communist Party. She was also very supersticious of everything and generally rather weird: a housemate of hers told of a time when they'd gone down to the kitchen to find her on all fours, cleaning over the kitchen floor with the two cut halves of a white cabbage.

Marianna's relationship with her boss was very strained. It didn't help that the both of them had the most horrendous tempers and things degenerated to such an extent that they would often engage in screaming at each other in the lab.

But Marianna was fab. She was doing work on embryos. That's right, the things that are made when daddy plants his seed in mummy. She mainly used mouse embryos, but would occasionally need to go to the hospital (which was a fair way out) to pick up human embryos - they were the excess from IVF and deemed unfit for implantation, but the patients had given their consent for them to be used for research. There was a slight problem in that Marianna didn't drive and so she had to catch the bus to pick up her embryos from the hospital and then transport them back to the lab in a portable, battery powered incubator. On one occasion, the bus was either stuck in traffic, or it broke down and this coincided with a battery pack failure on the embryo incubator. She retold the story to the lab, how she'd pleaded with the bus driver: "But my embryos, my embryos! I need to get my embryos back safely!"

Every time I'd try to use a flow cabinet, she'd be hovering near me or rushing about: "I need it, you see, my embryos!". Oh for fuck's sake. Anything for a quiet life and a 3 hour coffee break.

She was an absolute darling and was treated extremely unfairly. I guess she just didn't help herself with her attitude towards her boss and her general level of being a bit of a fruitcake.


My embryos!
Rightly or wrongly, the European Court of Human Rights has judged that an infertile woman can't use her frozen embryos because her partner at the time of the treatment has withdrawn his consent.

I agree in respect of the fact that consent must be given freely for all stages of the treatment. Let's face it, the potential father would have absolutely no chance of trying to force his ex partner to undergo embryo transfer if she'd changed her mind, so I don't see why it should be any different the other way round.

On the other hand, I bet there are a load of fathers out there who wish they could be given a second chance and not have children with previous partners.


Quick count
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