Dianna Payne
The Modern Laboratory · People
The Modern Laboratory
Dianna Payne
She filmed human eggs in the hours after sperm injection and showed fertilisation as a sequence of living events.
Learning to work at the scale of a cell. Dianna Payne was a scientist in the Reproductive Medicine Unit of the University of Adelaide, based at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woodville, South Australia. Her papers from the unit run from 1991 to 1999. They follow the arrival of micromanipulation in the IVF laboratory: first zona drilling and zona cutting, then injecting sperm beneath the zona, and in 1994 the results of the unit's first 100 cycles of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).
Filming fertilisation. In 1997 Payne was first author, with Sean Flaherty, Michael Barry and Colin Matthews, of a study in Human Reproduction that used time-lapse video to watch 50 eggs for 17 to 20 hours after ICSI. The eggs sat in a small chamber kept at culture conditions, and they fertilised as well as their sibling eggs in an ordinary incubator. The films showed circular waves of granules passing through the egg, the second polar body leaving, and the two pronuclei forming and drawing together until they touched. Eggs with steadier timing tended to give better embryos.
Films that travelled. Her work reached well beyond Adelaide. Video from her studies with Flaherty and Matthews is held in the Virtual Human Embryo collection at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, credited as generously provided by her. In Japan, Yasuyuki Mio and his team wrote in 2024 that Payne's pioneering work inspired them to build their own high-resolution time-lapse system in 2001. Mio's clinic records that Payne and Flaherty visited in April 2005 for a joint research meeting on filming embryos, and his team later thanked them both for their support and collaboration over many years.
Few people have watched the first hours of a human life so closely, or shared what they saw so freely.
Also see: Sean P. Flaherty, Michael F. Barry, Colin Matthews, Yasuyuki Mio
About the sources
- Mio Y, Yumoto K, Sugishima M, Nakaoka M, Shimura T, Tsounapi P. Morphokinetic features in human embryos: analysis by our original high-resolution time-lapse cinematography. Summary of the past two decades. Reproductive Medicine and Biology 2024;23:e12578. PMC11077290 (abstract, introduction and acknowledgements).
- Mio Fertility Clinic, Yonago: "About MFC" page, director profile and clinic history (mfc.or.jp/about_mfc), opened 7 October 2026.
- Virtual Human Embryo, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center: Carnegie Stage 1 video page "Stage1_VideoPayne1" (credit to Dianna Payne, Sean P. Flaherty and Colin D. Matthews).
- University of Adelaide Digital Library, record 2440/8231 (the 1997 paper, with authors given in full as Dianna Payne, Sean P. Flaherty, Michael F. Barry, Colin D. Matthews).
- Payne D, Flaherty SP, Barry MF, Matthews CD. Preliminary observations on polar body extrusion and pronuclear formation in human oocytes using time-lapse video cinematography. Human Reproduction 1997;12(3):532–541. PubMed 9130755.
- Payne D, Matthews CD. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection: clinical results from the Reproductive Medicine Unit, Adelaide. Reproduction, Fertility and Development 1995;7:211–218 (University of Adelaide Digital Library record 2440/8487, author given as "Payne, Dianna").
- Payne D, Flaherty SP, Jeffrey R, Warnes GM, Matthews CD. Successful treatment of severe male factor infertility in 100 consecutive cycles using intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Human Reproduction 1994;9(11):2051–2057. PubMed 7868673.
- Payne D, Warnes GM, Flaherty SP, Matthews CD. Local experience with zona drilling, zona cutting and sperm microinjection. Reproduction, Fertility and Development 1994;6:45–50. PubMed 8066222.
- Europe PMC author search, "Payne D" with Adelaide affiliations, papers 1991 to 1999.
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
