150 R.P. Fitzgerald and M. Legge
I don’t think of myself as being somebody making some kind of superior
decision you know we – as a clinic - have come up with certain criteria
and those are the criteria we follow [to select viable embryos for transfer]. So
it’s much easier to focus on the criteria rather than sort of be constantly
thinking, “Well, what if I put that one back - what is so wrong with that
one?”It is important to note that the scientists were not hiding behind the
system, but rather actively nurturing it and attending to its demands.
Embryologists also trusted in the system to override those moments in
their professional lives when, despite excellence in technique, the actual
versus anticipated results were disappointing. As a very experienced sci-
entist summed it up:
You have to be able to not worry about [low fertilization rates] on a day
to day basis...[If] the eggs in my care didn’t fertilize very well...hopefully
it’s a property of the eggs and sperm and you’re the custodian and you do
your best but you can’t ...be a surrogate for everybody’s problems.Perfection in one’s own technical competency was mandatory in such
an environment, which served as a consolation to some. Perfection was
such a taken for granted aspect of scientific labour that only the most
recently appointed scientists could recall not experiencing it: ‘... I’ve got
very good and so I feel very confident TECHNICALLY now, but when
I was starting that was something I DID struggle with’. The interwoven
nature of the scientific process could make this practice of science ‘quite
stressful’, as several mentioned, because instead of being completely in
charge of their own project, as is the case in most research laboratories,
IVF consisted of days, months and (for the wealthier clients) years of
interwoven practices in which one had to ‘rely heavily on people doing
things meticulously um and to sort of report things [unanticipated vari-
ations]...everyone needs to be more or less sort of “aware” of the impor-
tance of documentation and so on...’ Or, as another scientist reflected:
‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be good at this as long you
don’t make mistakes!’. Most scientists developed forms of self-checking
at each stage of their procedures and kept interruptions to a minimum.
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