Putting a Price on Human Eggs Makes No Sense
By Debora Spar,
Fortune
| 11. 21. 2015
Untitled Document
There’s something funny about the U.S. market for eggs. No, not the kind that spring from chickens and go into making pancakes, but those that come from humans and go into making babies. These eggs – tiny bundles of reproductive DNA – are produced by young women at the peak of their fertility. They are sold in the United States for anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000. And they exist in an Alice in Wonderland world of explicit denial, where prices are capped far below their open-market value and even the most expensive transactions are classified, universally, as “donations.”
The market for human eggs is a fairly recent development, prodded into existence by the explosive growth of in vitro fertilization (IVF) technologies in the 1990s and 2000s. Once it became possible — and then eventually commonplace — to create babies conceived outside the womb, it quickly also became possible to build those babies from other parties’ genes. By the mid-1990s, couples who suffered from male infertility, along with a growing numbers of lesbian couples and single women, were...
Related Articles
By Derrick Gingery, Pink Sheet | 11.01.2023
Some worries about heritable genetic modifications are subsiding and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Peter Marks said sponsors should consider the US for regulatory advice and clinical trials in the space.
The US Food and Drug Administration’s growing...
By Annalee Armstrong and Max Bayer, Fierce Biotech | 10.23.2023
A nearly year-long clinical hold on Verve Therapeutics’ base editing therapy meant to treat a genetic form of high cholesterol has been lifted in the U.S., thanks to data from an ongoing human trial elsewhere in the world and some preclinical...
By Christina Jewett, The New York Times | 09.29.2023
The Food and Drug Administration said on Friday that it was moving to close what has widely been viewed as a loophole allowing certain lab tests — like those that determine the profile of a tumor or the genetic health...
By Aki Ito, Insider | 09.18.2023
Sure, there have been a few nutjobs out there who think AI will wipe out the human race. But ever since ChatGPT's explosive emergence last winter, the bigger concern for most of us has been whether these tools will soon...