Life Before Birth

The miracle of life that starts with just a single egg and a single sperm may be even more incredible than we think...

New ultrasound techniques - 3D and 4D scans are opening up a unique portal on the miracle of life that starts with just a single egg and a single sperm. With remarkable findings revealing that the foetus dreams, jumps, sucks it thumb, open it eyes and reacts to pain far earlier that ever realised before. The essential senses, hearing and seeing also develop far earlier that we had ever realised.

It all starts with a humble sperm – and there are loads of them – around 300 million per ejaculation to be exact – and the largest cell in the body - the female egg. In 9 months (38 weeks) this single fused cell will grow to 2 trillion cells with 200 different cell types – a complex self sustaining human baby.

A sperm can survive for about 48 hours (yes 48 hours!) and it can take 10 hours to reach its destination – the female cell waiting in the fallopian tube - swimming at the mightily impressive rate of 3mm per hour. Natural selection is as brutal here as anywhere in the outside world – only a few healthy sperm will make the entire journey and the first to penetrate the female cell wall will be the winner. Within 12 hours the nuclei of sperm and egg fuse and the blueprint for building a new human is complete. The 23rd chromosome determines the sex of the baby – all the mothers eggs have X chromosomes and the sperm carry either X or Y in equal proportions. If the X sperm gets through then it’s a girl and if it is the Y a boy.