The big news item yesterday was the announcement that Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University and his colleagues produced embryonic stem cells from a human clone they produced. Their study, Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, was published in Cell. How they made a [...]

If you like to think (and perhaps debate) about ethical issues in assisted reproduction, you’ll  want to listen to this video debate. It’s put on by a foundation called Intelligence Quotient Squared (IQ2) in front of a live audience which votes before and after the debate on the question at hand. The question is “Should [...]

Although the trend has been toward more insurance companies offering coverage for infertility, most patients still have little or no insurance coverage for infertility treatments which can be very expensive, especially if high tech in vitro fertilization lab work is involved. To pay for these treatments, patients sometimes take out personal loans through a bank [...]

Anyone with a compassionate heart understands why couples want to have children and start families. Sometimes these couples need help from ART to conceive. Some of these couples may even need donated  gametes (eggs and/or sperm)  or embryos from non-related donors to establish a family.  The immediate focus for both ART providers and patients is [...]

Recently Dr. Craig Sweet of Sweet Fertility published a thought-provoking blog post entitled “Why Creating McEmbryos is Plain Wrong” which describes his misgivings with the alleged practices of another infertility clinic, California Conceptions, as reported in a recent LA Times article, “An Ethics debate over embryos on the cheap”. In the article, LA Times reporter [...]

I wrote this article for Journal of Clinical Embryology because I was concerned about the dangers of unregulated free enterprise driving the business of  IVF,  especially in  small stand-alone practices which operate under strong economic pressures without any independent ethical oversight. (Originally published in the Journal of Clinical Embryology, Vol. 15, no 3. Fall Issue 2012, [...]

Many years ago, I had a conversation with a patient that stuck with me. One of our IVF patients wistfully asked me, “Can’t you just knock two eggs together to make a baby?” She was in a lesbian relationship and like most people in love, wanted to share a genetic link with her partner via [...]

There’s been a lot of “firsts” in reproductive technology recently and I will cover another one of them today.  Last weekend, at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, two moms donated their uteri to their daughters in uterine transplant procedures. In each case, the hope is that by surgically transplanting the mother’s uterus into her daughter, the [...]

If you could know the DNA sequence of your entire genome- the instructions that make you who you are–would you want to know it? What if knowing that sequence could help your doctor identify drugs that will work best for you and avoid drugs that are unlikely to work or cause severe side effects for [...]

Craig Sweet, MD, a reproductive endocrinologist, recently published a thought provoking article which argues for reducing the minimum recommended age for egg donation from 21 (as ASRM Guidelines recommend) to 18. You can read his entire piece here. He argues persuasively that women of 18 years (and younger) are able to make decisions about their [...]