6 Ethics for Embryologists 151Another summed it up in the following manner: ‘We [as a professional
group] are perfectionists at heart...we’re very perfection oriented in
our own ways ... you are always trying to think of better ways of doing
things’.
This ethics of competency could be observed during teaching of IVF
specific technical procedures to newer entrants to the lab. While more
recently hired workers arrived with qualifications such as a Masterate
in Embryology, this still did not include experience with human repro-
ductive material. As a senior embryologist noted—reflecting on his own
introduction to the work through agricultural uses of embryology—it
was quite a mental shift to come to terms with learning how to manipu-
late someone’s potential baby rather than a $9000 investment in live-
stock ova and semen that could always be reacquired. Gawande ( 2002 :
11–34) has written at length on the complex ethical situation of learn-
ing surgery when the learning process is conducted on real patients and
embryology has many similarities. Users of IVF, in the same manner
as patients in surgery, wish for the contradictory desires of safety and
technical advances in treatment. It is through the body of the learning
scientist that such contradictions are reconciled. Senior scientists must
observe the technique of novices and calculate how much is deleterious
to the chances of fertility for the client, while they themselves must also
continue learning, refining and improving their own techniques and
practices as new techniques and reagents are introduced into interna-
tional best practice.
One scientist provided an example of the honest self-scrutiny that
was part of being competent: ‘the other day when I was trying to
hatch and I kept on breaking the needles...for some reason my nee-
dle set up wasn’t working for me...’ The scientist describes how they
then asked a colleague to finish the procedure, knowing that ‘there’s no
time in this job for you to just try, try, and try again [on a client’s mate-
rial] in order to get it right’. New Zealand’s regulatory environment for
HART, which excludes the experimental uses of viable embryos, cre-
ates a system that is premised upon the need to train on patients. Just
as Gawande ( 2002 ) notes of US surgery, there is no inbuilt option to
have a trainee-free experience of IVF. From this emerged the profoundly
ethical quality of embryologists’ decisions about who should perform