Profile of Dr. Robert McGaughey

An unfertilized egg stained with a dye that appears red in a fluorescence microscope. It shows the large egg and the small first polar body at the bottom. The small line indicating size is 10 micrometers long = 1/100 of a millimeter. The egg is about 100 micrometers in diameter, so about ten eggs would fit side to side on a pencil line.

Words to know before you read Embryology- The science dealing with the formation, early growth and development of living organisms. Consultant A person who gives expert advice Intrigued- Interested

McGaughey (pronounced McGoy) is a researcher at Arizona State University who studies reproduction of mammals. He is a consultant at a hospital, where he is part of a team that implants fertilized eggs into the Fallopian tubes of women who have not been able to conceive a baby by other methods.

He has a mini lab in the operating room. He takes the eggs the surgeons have removed from the patient and sorts through them to find "the best" -- the most mature and the most likely to take to fertilization. Then he cleans the eggs by removing layers of cells that coat them, mixes them with sperm from the patient's husband and takes the mixture to the surgical table. Then the doctors put the egg-and-sperm mixture back into the patient. The people in the photos in McGaughey's office are ones who had this operation.

An egg that was stained with a dye that appears yellow in a fluorescence microscope. It shows the egg and the first polar body on the right side. At the top, the small second polar body is just forming.

When McGaughey was a kid, he had a microscope that he used to examine algae from pond water and other substances he found near his home. When he went to a small college in South Dakota and took a class in embryology, he looked at eggs of sea urchins, starfish and frogs under a microscope for the first time.

"Once you have that experience, you get so intrigued," he said. "That egg will make a baby." Eggs give clues about what's going to happen. "You have to learn to communicate with them," McGaughey said. "They have their own way of telling you what they're up to." For information on embryology go to The Virtual Embryo at the University of Calgary. Article by Gail Maiorana | Egg Photos Courtesy of Dr. Ian Gallicano | Portrait courtesy of ASU Research Magazine

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