Home » Science & Nature » Molecular Biology/Medicine » HAVING A BABY TO SAVE ANOTHER BABY´S LIFE - Page 2

HAVING A BABY TO SAVE ANOTHER BABY´S LIFE - Page 2

©

Now, about the cost. You can divide it in two parts: the economic one and the one related to all the suffering and the pain the family has to go through during this process. Let's start with the second part.

As you probably know, in IVF the mother must be prepared to accept the egg with hormone injections in what are called in-vitro cycles. The number of injections varies for each woman. In general, IVF has a success rate that is no higher than 25 percent. If you include the screening for a disease and for compatibility, the percentage decreases very rapidly.

Just to give you an idea. If the woman produces 20 ovules and let's say that of these 16 are good to be used in IVF and you have to match only three genes, statistically it means that about one-third of them -- that is five -- will be a perfect match and of those two or three will also be disease-free. Thus, you end up with two or three ovules to be fertilized. If you remember that the success rate is no more than 25 percent and that you are working against time, you can understand what the odds are of succeeding in this enterprise.

There have been cases in which the woman goes through the cycles for years without getting pregnant. You can imagine the suffering if she is only trying to have a baby. But the pain should be unbearable if she is doing it to save the life of an older son or daughter. Since the cost of each cycle varies from $10,000 to $15,000, when you add the cost of the genetic testing you can easily see the burden this process puts on the family.

All the new molecular biology techniques are making it easier to save lives, but the parents and the people involved must be told the risks, the costs and all the details involved in the treatment so they can make an educated decision.

In my last article I told you that in this one I would talk about the bioethics of this kind of experiment, but I decided to talk about this first because there is a lot of common ground between that article and this one. Thus, I'll discuss the bioethics in the next one.

The copyright of the article HAVING A BABY TO SAVE ANOTHER BABY´S LIFE - Page 2 in Molecular Biology/Medicine is owned by . Permission to republish HAVING A BABY TO SAVE ANOTHER BABY´S LIFE - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.