[SunkenCiv]

Thanks decimon and swordmaker. Oh, look -- some touch-hole put "callingartbell" into the keywords.

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[Fred Nerks]

I’ve always found it more than a little interesting that in the procedure of in-vitro fertilization, (or is it cloning?) the process of cell division is begun with an electrical impulse. No electric impulse, no life.

(Need to do some searching and find a scientific explanation.)

[Fred Nerks]

http://library.thinkquest.org/C0118762/method.htm

A donor cell has to be forced into the Gap Zero, or G0 cell stage, a dormant phase, in which it shuts down its active genes and current definitions (e.g. to be a skin cell) and thus has the ability to take on another definition.

The donor animal cell is put it into an unfertilised egg cell (an oocyte) whose nucleus has been removed, so that what remains provides the cellular machinery required in the formation of an embryo.

An electric pulse fuses the two cells. Genes in the donor animal cell enter the egg.
Another electric pulse awakens the genes. The fused cells divide and form an embryo.

The embryo is implanted inside a surrogate mother to divide and grow normally. The resulting organism is a clone as it has the same genetic material as the donor body cell.

Scientists are still unsure of why an electric pulse sent to the two cells causes them to meld together and activates development in the egg, even though they have been carrying out this step for years in the process of cloning...