Translucent sperm wriggle slowly across a sepia-toned laptop screen. Normally they’re much faster, the embryologist tells me, but these little guys are slogging through a gooey liquid that slows them down. It makes them easier to catch.
A skinny, hollow needle enters the scene from screen right and approaches a swimmer. The device sucks it inside, tail first. Its tiny, round body remains visible inside the clear sperm vacuum.
The screen blinks to a new scene. The sperm disappear and are replaced by much larger, free-floating eggs. Human eggs.
Another instrument arrives on screen, nudging one of the eggs until it floats away like a gently bumped beach ball. After another try, the fingerlike device successfully grabs an egg, using gentle suction to hold it in place.
The producer of this show is researcher Nuria Marti-Gutierrez, who sits at the microscope near the screen, never taking her eyes off her quarry as her hands maneuver between a half-dozen knobs and dials. The process she’s running is invisible to the naked eye. Each of these acts plays out in a clear droplet on the microscopic stage.
