Startling Admissions in IVF Journal

Some IVF patients are being offered risky, unsafe techniques which have not been developed with clinical trial and which offer dubious benefits, according to an extraordinary article in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine Online (RBO). Writing in the journal founded by Robert Edwards, who won  a Nobel Prize for developing IVF, two British scientists have made a devastating critique of the IVF industry. Rachel Brown and Joyce Harper, of University College London, say:

“In 1978, the first child conceived by IVF was born. In the following 33 years, numerous technologies and techniques have been developed ... However, these techniques have rarely been robustly tested and approved before they are routinely offered to infertile couples. In other cases, a development in our scientific understanding of a technique has failed to be quickly incorporated into clinical changes. This raises the concern that some of the techniques offered to some patients offer little or no benefit, and in the worse cases is not confirmed to be safe.”

Brown and Harper worry that even riskier techniques -- such as artifical gametes -- are being...