National Geographic: The Incredible Human Body

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Narrator:
The human body...

A heart that will beat

some three billion times...

Lungs that deliver breath

through 1,500 miles of airways.

All superbly orchestrated

by billions of nerve cells

And billions of miles

of genetic information,

In combinations that

make each of us unique.

one incredible human body...

Every day it takes us

on a miraculous journey,

Pushing the frontiers,

meeting awesome challenges...

Defying the boundaries

of human achievement.

A basketball star redefines

the limits of peak performance.

PJ Brown:
I think

if I could look inside my body,

you'd probably see our heart

just beating a lot faster.

Narrator:
A childless couple challenges

the odds to create life.

Mark Sauer:

I would say she has at least

a 50-50 chance

of getting pregnant,

but you just don't know going

into it where it's gonna go.

Narrator:
A schoolteacher

battles the death

that lurks deep

within his brain.

Frederick Meyer:

How serious is it?

The tumor's gonna kill him.

So it's deadly serious.

Lisa Toenies:

It's like I said goodbye

because I didn't know what

he would be like coming out.

Narrator:
These are the

daily dramas of human life,

but they take place

inside ourselves,

in realms we could never see.

But now we can.

Today, awesome new technology

allows us to peer inside

our bodies as never before...

to see a brain think,

a heart beat, a life begin,

to discover

the boundless potential

of the incredible human body.

Donald Coffey:

The human body...

It's mind-boggling to see

how the whole system

is integrated, in a sense.

The heart beats. The brain

is firing electrical signals.

Your eyes are capable of

catching all these wavelengths

and storing the light,

retrieving the information.

If you approached me

as an engineer

and said, "make me a system"

"that can retrieve that kind

of information of sound, light,"

"Put it with memory, for

everything you've ever seen"...

This is an amazing

piece of equipment.

And it can all be stored

in these little teeny cells,

which can all come together and form

this beautiful snowflake called a human,

with each one of them

amazingly different.

Narrator:

From a cluster of cells,

a new human being begins

the journey to life

every quarter of a second

somewhere in the world.

To understand the amazing

results of that journey,

we must begin at the beginning,

the miracle of conception.

For some couples,

that seemingly commonplace

miracle seems impossible.

Today, reproductive science -

marrying skill and knowledge

to the magic of nature--

can make the impossible happen.

And here it will provide

a wondrous window

into the beginning

of human life.

Inez:
My husband and I

have been together 11 years

and we...we were trying,

but not trying.

And it just dawned on us one day

that something

might be wrong, you know,

that I'm not getting pregnant,

and we decided to investigate.

Sauer:
What I want to do

is spend most of the time

talking about in vitro

with you guys...

Narrator:
Dr. Mark Sauer

doesn't claim to make miracles,

but about once a week

his fertility team

will help to bring a baby

into the world

through in-vitro fertilization,

or IVF.

With dr. Sauer's help,

Inez and Darryl Pearson

will have a 50-50 chance

at creating a new life.

IVF really is

a natural process,

even though

it's outside the human body,

because it allows us

to put sperm and egg together

and create an embryo,

which is no different

than what happens in nature.

Narrator:
But unlike in nature, remarkable

access to dr. Sauer's laboratory

will allow us to observe

the encounter of sperm and egg

in extraordinary detail.

Sauer:
So we'll be seeing you

a lot over the next few weeks.

Inez:
Okay. We're just

waiting to get started now.

Woman:
You can go ahead

and push it back in

and try it again maybe

a little more slowly.

Narrator:
Inez begins a regime

of hormone injections

that will stimulate her ovaries

to produce more than

the customary one egg per month.

Inez:
Do it like this,

I'll squeeze the skin...

Woman:
You'll wipe

with alcohol...

...wipe with alcohol.

Like so, okay?

A little bit faster than that...

Yeah, like that.

Oh my god...

Narrator:
It's time.

As hoped, many eggs are ready.

As she is put to sleep,

Inez delivers a drowsy wish.

[Inez speaks]

Man:
What was that?

What did she say?

Woman:
She said,

"I want a boy."

Man:
That's what

I thought she said.

Sauer:
We'll start

on the left side.

There's a lot of follicles.

You can see the needle tip

there on the screen.

Narrator:
The remarkable egg

that begins human life

is a single cell -

no wider than a hair,

barely visible to the eye.

Coffey:
Most people have

no idea how small a cell is.

If I crudely scrape

the inside of my mouth,

I have about 10,000 cells

under my fingertip.

These things are really small!

You can't see that

without a microscope,

and yet, that can make a human.

See how amazing this is?

Narrator:
One by one,

When the safety

of the eggs is assured,

Darryl's semen is collected.

will filter out

the dead and less-healthy sperm.

Prosser:
Okay,

this is the "before" sample.

It has not been processed.

And so, from this

we can compare this

with the post-processing sample.

You can see that the sample

is much cleaner,

almost all of the sperm

are motile...

And they look like

happy campers.

Narrator:
Dr. Prosser positions

the egg, magnified 400 times,

And readies the single sperm

he has selected

from a pool of hundreds.

the sperm is injected

and the critical moment

for fertilization arrives.

Like a great celestial director,

he repeats the procedure,

guiding sperm to another egg.

If this is the meeting

that proves successful,

we are observing -

in the immediacy of real time -

the first miracle of many

that will lead to

the life of a child.

At this moment,

two human destinies intertwine

as genetic material from Inez's

egg and from Darryl's sperm

are shuffled together.

Each contributes

strands of information

that will soon unite.

Like a microscopic

mountain range,

each chromosome carries genes

built of molecules of DNA -

the most basic design element

of human life.

Together, these molecules

form an intricate instruction manual -

the blueprint for

an entire new human being.

The human body, like a house,

is built from a roll-Up,

rolled-up set of blueprints,

which is rolled up

into a little chromosome

and it's a DNA sequence,

and it says "blue eyes;"

it says "female;"

it says "about five foot eight

with brown hair."

Narrator:
The epic accomplishment

of revealing our genome -

the codebook of human life -

may soon open a floodgate

of biological revelations.

Craig Venter is at the crest

of this wave of knowledge.

Venter:
A genome is our collection

of all our genetic information.

It's a four-letter alphabet

composing DNA,

and when we sequence the genome,

we determine the exact order

of roughly three billion

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