LONDON, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) — Britain will conduct a large-scale clinical trial of a new in vitro fertilization technique, according to Xinhua News Agency. Unlike the current IVF technology, this technique allows fertilized eggs to develop directly in the womb rather than in a test tube. The technique, invented by the Swiss company ANECOVA, involves placing a set of IVF crystal embryos in a perforated capsule-type silicon container, implanting them in the human uterus, allowing them to develop in a more natural environment, removing this container a few days later, and then selecting the crystal embryos with the highest likelihood of survival for reimplantation in the uterus, according to the New Scientist magazine website on the 27th. The silicon capsules that hold the fertilized embryos are about 5 mm long and less than 1 mm wide, with 360 holes in the walls, each about 40 microns in diameter. This new technique has been tested on a small scale in Belgium. The results of the trials show that crystal embryos grown in vivo weigh more than those grown in test tubes and therefore have a higher probability of survival when grown in vivo. An artificial fertility organization in Nottingham, England, has begun recruiting 40 women under the age of 37 for a large-scale clinical trial of the technique and is preparing to collect eight to 12 eggs from each woman and then conduct separate comparative studies using the traditional and new techniques. Through the trial, researchers hope to determine whether the new technique improves pregnancy rates and whether the crystal embryos grown with the new technique are less likely to have chromosomal abnormalities.