[Page 32]
Away from the glow of the spotlight, meanwhile, a number of smaller businesses are also growing around the business of conception. Some of these are exceedingly high tech, developed on the back of painstaking breakthroughs in reproductive science and genetics. Some are more mundane, serving primarily to accommodate the needs of small sectors of the infertile population. Together, they compose the final tier of the fertility trade.
One piece of this market centers on techniques for handling and preserving eggs. In 1997, doctors at Reproductive Biology Associates, an Atlanta-based fertility center, announced that a thirty-nine-year-old woman had given birth to twins conceived from the frozen eggs of a twenty-nine-year-old donor. Several months later, the center announced that another patient had given birth to a child produced from her own previously frozen eggs. [78] These announcements were not completely without precedent. Indeed, since 1986, sporadic reports of successful egg freezing had emerged from reproductive specialists scattered around the globe: a single pair of twins in Singapore, a smattering of isolated births in Australia and Europe. But none of the doctors involved had been able to duplicate their successes, and most acknowledged that the technology for freezing eggs remained highly unreliable.
The problem, it appeared, lay with the very high water content of eggs: during the freezing process, the water tended to crystallize, destroying the delicate spindle that contained the egg’s crucial cytoplasm. In the early 1990s, however, researchers in Italy began to experiment with techniques for dehydration, adding sucrose during the freezing process to absorb water from the egg and limit the formation of ice crystals. As these techniques improved, they pushed success rates for egg freezing higher, eventually making it possible for clinics like Reproductive Biology Associates to offer egg freezing to a select group of patients: young women about to undergo chemotherapy, for example, or couples who needed to wait between the time of egg retrieval and implantation. [79]
This content is authorized for use only in the HarvardX course "Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics," September/October 2016. Copyright 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of Harvard Business School.