IVF Doc Promotes IVF Shock
A flurry of stories this week reveal that London's Daily Mail is widely read, and not always entirely accurate. This is the source story:
Sex will not be used to have babies in just 10 years, as couples turn to IVF
Cue "startling vision of the future," Brave New World reference, and so on. The article writes itself really. It got picked up by Fox News, LifeSiteNews (worried about playing God), the New York Daily News, and from there the Village Voice blog (which complained about the prohibitive expense of IVF), and so on. Most of the reports mentioned, sometimes derisively, that the claim was made by a veterinarian from Murdoch University in Western Australia, who did his research on cattle.
That's not correct. The story is based on a paper published in April in Reproductive Biomedicine Online, titled "Embryo culture: can we perform better than nature?" The abstract concludes:
Although some researchers suppose that the efficiency of the presently applied in-vitro culture systems have already approached the biological limits, authors are confident that substantial improvement may be achieved.
The corresponding author is Gábor Vajta, of the Cairns Fertility Centre in Queensland, but the quotes mostly come from his boss, John Yovich, who also runs the PIVET Medical Centre (Programmed IVF and Embryo Transfer) in Perth, Western Australia. Yovich is a long-standing practitioner, known for popularizing ICSI in Australia, and for once delivering twins, triplets and quads on the same day. ("At the time [1989] it was the norm to transfer up to five embryos because you were lucky if only one implanted. I got caught out because suddenly everything we implanted became pregnancies.")
Evidently, Vajta and Yovich think that IVF can become at least as reliable as natural methods of conception, in particular for women over 35, and perhaps more so. The only quote in the Daily Mail's story specifically focuses on "couples approaching 40" who may "assess the IVF industry first when they want to have a baby." Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Part of their argument is indeed that artificial insemination in cattle is rather efficient, but that is not quite what the tabloids were suggesting. The Mail reporters seem to have been confused into thinking that the paper was written by veterinarians.
Why so? Well, there is another John Yovich, who is the Vice Chancellor of Murdoch University, which is also in Perth (it's named after the media tycoon's great uncle). And indeed, a quick search for that rather unusual name turns up his wikipedia page, which reveals that he originally trained as a vet. From the pictures, the two men could be related. But they are definitely not the same.
Previously on Biopolitical Times: