Recently, I received this question from a blog reader, ” I want to ask you about testicular stem cell transplantation– is it true or hoax?”. The short answer is, “No, it is not a hoax, but it is not a clinical treatment yet either”.  I found this review article, “Restoring Fertility in Sterile Childhood Cancer [...]

You have probably heard by now that egg freezing is no longer defined as “experimental” by ASRM. What does this mean to patients? It means that the process of egg freezing, especially when vitrification is employed, can yield as good as fresh results. It does not mean that every lab can deliver those “good as [...]

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 [...]

The short answer to the title question is, that Yes!, we are getting considerably closer to achieving therapeutic applications of stem cell technology to replenish ovarian reserve. Dr. Jonathan Tilly and his colleague Dr. Dori Woods recently summarized the dramatic advances in ovarian stem cell technology in their paper “The next  (re) generation of ovarian [...]

You might think that the infertility community has nothing in common with the ProChoice community, but you would be very wrong. Both groups risk access to reproductive health care if the numerous personhood bills pending in various states are actually passed. If you haven’t already run across these personhood bills, they all have in common [...]

IVF frequently upends old law that existed before IVF was created. Original laws regarding who is eligible for social security survivor benefits may be a case in point. The 1939 Social Security Act states that Social Security survivor’s benefits go to any child of a covered deceased individual. To further complicate things, social security looks [...]

We’ve all heard the expression, “You are what you eat”, meaning that good dietary habits will positively influence how you look and feel overall. But did you expect that the food you eat might have an effect on your sperm? Two new studies presented at this week’s American Society for the Study of Reproduction (ASRM)’s [...]

One of the routine questions that patients get asked when they submit a semen sample for analysis is “Have you taken any medications in the last 60 days?” The 60 days is relevant because it takes around 60-70 days for a sperm cell to be produced and so exposures that occurred two months earlier may [...]

With technology comes new opportunities and always new ethical questions. I subscribe to a professional andrology list-serve group to keep up to date on the sperm side of things. Most of the topics are usually medically oriented  for male urologists but recently there’s been a pretty animated discussion about the ethics of posthumous sperm retrieval [...]