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

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