Infertility is too often thought of as a “woman’s” problem, but  the truth of the matter is that without sperm to tango with, the egg is pretty insufficient to make a baby. The good news for men is that today’s male infertility toolbox contains more diagnosis and treatment tools than what was available in their [...]

Preferring a child of one gender or another is as old as sex itself. Old wives tales abound of various methods to ensure that your child is a boy (or a girl).  For prospective parents, determining your child’s gender was believed to be dependent on what you ate, what you drank, what positions you used [...]

Apparently, “Boris” loves INVOcell and reads my blog. I got his irate feedback the other day on my previous post “INVOcell: Not nearly IVF” and he wanted me to respond to his comment. “Boris”  doesn’t identify himself or his interest in INVOcell but he does appear to have a personal stake in the success of [...]

There should be a limit to what women are expected to subject themselves to for pregnancy. In my opinion, INVOcell is one thing too much. INVOcell is a device that is marketed as a low cost alternative to IVF even though  it appears to have none of the advantages and several disadvantages in efficacy and [...]

The term aneuploidy gets thrown around a lot to explain infertility, particularly infertility associated with advanced maternal age. Wikipedia does a pretty good job of defining aneuploidy. Aneuploidy is an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell. This begs the question,  “What is the normal number of chromosomes in a cell?” In humans, twenty three [...]

Harvard scientist Jon Tilly proposed a radical new idea about how eggs are produced that called for the existence of ovarian stem cells which could continually produce new eggs. Stem cells are accepted as essential to sperm production in males. In men, the sperm stem cells (called spermatogonia)  produce daughter cells that either make the [...]

Dear Readers, When I started this blog in May 2010, I needed a way to keep doing what I loved, namely, the lab part of reproductive medicine. Without a lab and newly unemployed, my blog became my virtual workplace. I have been overwhelmed by some of the wonderful comments I have received over the months, [...]

I love embryology and IVF and realize it has opened new possibilities for people to have and raise children that didn’t exist 35 years ago. But I also know IVF is not the answer for every person with infertility problems. Sometimes we fall in love with a technology and expect too much from it. In [...]

Third party reproduction is an umbrella term that covers using donated sperm, egg, or embryo or  “loaner” uterus to conceive and take home a baby. This option is rarely a first choice and is often the last resort before adoption or deciding to go on without children. As with much of reproductive biology, third party [...]

In part two of female infertility diagnosis, I thought I’d put on my plumber’s hat- well, sort-of- and talk about the glorious female reproductive tract – the plumbing that gets the egg to sperm and the embryo to the uterus for implantation and pregnancy. When dear Mrs. Cannon taught our 7th grade sex education class [...]