EGGS ON THE ROCKS

There appeared to be no reason the healthy Georgia woman could not conceive a child. Already the mother of two girls, she had figured she would return to school, finish her education and then go back to the business of having babies. Her body figured otherwise. At 39, after several failed attempts to get pregnant, she learned that while she was in school an ovarian failure had triggered premature menopause. Although her womb was perfectly ready to carry a fertilized egg to term, her depleted ovaries could no longer provide one.

Last week an Atlanta fertility clinic announced that the woman had given birth to two robustly healthy boys. The improbable pregnancy was big news for the woman’s family–and the way it was achieved was equally important to millions of other women. For the first time in the U.S., babies had been born from eggs that were frozen–and then thawed–before they were fertilized.

If this technique proves reliable, women could begin putting their own eggs on ice. And if that happens, the way babies are conceived–and the rules by which women plan their lives–could radically change. Women, like men, could have children well past middle age, allowing them to marry later, choose their partners with less reproductive urgency, even undergo body-wide traumas like chemotherapy–all the while knowing that a few eggs, banked years earlier, were preserving their ability to bear children. The very idea of menopause as a procreative cul de sac could be made obsolete. “This,” says Dr. Joe Massey, a scientist who helped develop the technique, “stretches the reproductive field as far as you can envision it now.”

For women with fertility problems, reproductive technology has never played fair. Sperm cells take readily to freezing, slipping into cryogenic sleep and remaining viable for years. Fertilized eggs–in the form of embryos–can be similarly preserved if water is first removed and replaced with an organic antifreeze that prevents the formation of cell-bursting ice crystals. Unfertilized eggs, however, do not fare so well: even when they’re cryoprotected, their fragile membranes–or even worse, their chromosomes–are often damaged during freezing.

In Atlanta, scientists at Reproductive Biology Associates decided to see if they could do something about that. First, they treated women with a 10-day regimen of hormones that stimulated the ovaries to produce a batch of eggs, which were then harvested. Next, they bathed the eggs in a chemical solution similar to the one the ovaries use to protect them. Finally, they injected the ova with antifreeze, placed them in a freezer that slowly lowered their temperature, and then thawed them just as gradually. The plan seemed to be a good one, but time and again it failed–just as it had failed for other scientists who had tried similar methods. On one trial, however, the Atlanta team happened to extract the eggs on the eighth day of the hormone regimen rather than the 10th. When these younger, presumably hardier ova were frozen and thawed, they emerged from the process intact. “It was more a matter of timing than anything else,” says Michael Tucker, scientific director of the lab.

But just because an egg survives in a dish does not mean it will thrive in a womb. To test their technique, the Atlanta researchers needed a volunteer. The Georgia mother, who wants to remain anonymous, came to Massey’s clinic when she learned she was infertile and was offered a deal: if she would take part in an experiment with frozen eggs, she could have the clinic’s services for free. “This was sort of an end-of-the-line option,” says Tucker. As it turned out, it was an option that worked. “When I gave birth,” the woman says, “they told me I made history.”

She won’t be making it alone. Another patient at the clinic is three months pregnant with a baby produced from a frozen egg. Researchers in Australia and Germany have reported similar results, and last week scientists from Bologna announced that four Italian women are carrying babies conceived from cryopreserved eggs. For the time being, however, the Atlanta scientists, with their early-harvesting technique, are enjoying the best results.

The new procedure is not yet ready to go mainstream; it will be a good while before a woman can walk into a clinic and ask to have her eggs frozen. The scientists have tried their technique 23 times, and have only the two recent successes to show for it. This does not match even the modest 25% birth rate achieved with frozen embryos. While infertile women may find any new technology attractive, fertile women, who would be freezing their eggs simply to delay pregnancy, may not think it’s worth the bother.

Freezing eggs certainly carries less ethical baggage than freezing embryos, which many people view as unborn babies. What’s more, it’s hard to argue with a technique that gives women parenting choices that biology had reserved only for men. One of the largest markets for the technique, says Dr. Ekkehard Kemmann of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J., is likely to be single women “who have not found Mr. Right.”

But is indefinitely extended fertility a good thing? Men who start second families late in life may grow too old to enjoy their offspring or die too soon to provide for them. Women who start families after they’ve had a long career must not only raise the child but bear it–an ordeal even for young mothers.

For now, however, such reservations are doing little to diminish enthusiasm over the Atlanta team’s breakthrough. Researchers are pressing ahead, harvesting still less mature eggs in the hope of finding ones that are even more rugged than the eight-day samples. If the scientists succeed, they will almost surely find more takers for their technology. “This research,” Massey says, “offers women maternity insurance.” The question is whether, like any other insurance, it will come at a price.

–Reported by Lawrence Mondi and Alice Park/New York