I’m all for expanding our scientific understanding, but creating sperm cells in the lab from germline cells will not tell us exactly what processes occur in the human body to make this work. Cloned animals seem to have a significantly shorter lifespan than naturally-conceived individuals, but we don’t know why. Children conceived through IVF also seem to have a higher rate than the general population of certain birth defects and genetic disorders – but again, we don’t know why.
My husband and I went through our own bout of infertility, so I know the desperation and frustration of not being able to make your body do what so many others seem to do effortlessly. But there are limits to how far we should tamper with reproduction – especially given the rapid consumption of global resources by an ever-expanding population.
Instead of spending money and time to figure out how to make one particular human fertile enough to reproduce – the end game of this sort of research, to give any individual infertile man the chance at natural fatherhood – why don’t we look at the causes (especially environmental and social) of the rapid growth of male infertility, especially in industrialized countries?
Making adoption more affordable would also help enormously. We would have given up at the first sign of infertility and simply gone the adoption route if we could have afforded the $15-20k price tag. Instead, I spent months on covertly-acquired hormones left over from a friend’s failed infertility treatments (under the care of a physician – we just couldn’t afford to buy thousands of dollars in drugs from the clinic, by far the greatest expense); bloated with grapefruit-sized ovaries, with the cystic acne and emotional stability of a premenstrual 15-year-old, I still came up empty. And this was just for intra-uterine insemination: making my body pump out as many eggs as possible at one time, and then delivering J.’s sperm via syringe to my fallopian tubes right when the eggs were exploding like Jiffy-Pop from an overheated pan. IVF – “test tube” – and other fertility treatments were far beyond our reach.
There is an animal drive to reproduce using our own genetic material, no question. But we’ve tempered other of our animal drives, and we risk the health of the greater human gene pool (and the health of the individuals so conceived) by mucking about with the elemental, cellular-level processes of reproduction.
Current Comments