The Business of IVF: How Human Eggs Went from Simple Cells to a Valuable Commodity
By Catherine Waldby,
The Conversation
| 10. 03. 2019
I think they collected […] maybe, six eggs. I think we got four embryos out of that […] One was transferred and three were frozen. So, the fresh cycle didn’t work. Tried a frozen one, didn’t work. Went to try the third frozen and they told me that one didn’t survive unfreezing, so then we had one left and that didn’t work, so we had no embryos left. So we did a fresh egg cycle again, and they got even less this time […] So I was thinking this is all going to be wasting time. But […] I think they fertilised four eggs, and then there was only one viable one, which is my baby.
Eva, a teacher in her early 30s, describes in my recent book The Oocyte Economy: the Changing Meaning of Human Eggs, a very common experience for women who have fertility treatment.
Many women and couples, encouraged by success stories and marketing, hope their years of unsuccessful attempts to conceive a child naturally are over, and fertility treatment will work.
Assisted reproductive technologies cover a...
Related Articles
By Dr. Coco Newton, Progress Educational Trust | 03.30.2026
Have you ever wondered what it means to have dozens of half-siblings across the world – or to never know where half of your genetic identity comes from? A recent episode of Zembla explores the human consequences of the global...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.23.2026
The Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene therapy to restore hearing for people who were born deaf.
The decision, while only immediately affecting people born with a very rare form of genetic deafness, is being hailed as...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 04.23.2026
A STARTUP OUT of Utah, Paterna Biosciences, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used the sperm to make visibly healthy-looking embryos. The technique could eventually help men with certain types of infertility have biological children...
By Julianna LeMieux, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 04.14.2026
Twenty years ago, Sven Bocklandt, PhD, sought to create a hypoallergenic cat. He had the genetic engineering chops to do it, but the embryology was beyond his capabilities. At a small animal genetic engineering conference, known as TARC (Transgenic Animal...