Cheaper Test Tube Babies?
You're not going to believe this (I barely did). But researchers in London say it may be possible to do IVF procedures for a little over $200 for women in developing countries. That's because embryos apparently require very little care, according to Maria Cheng at the AP. " A human embryo doesn't need much beyond some basic solutions, a steady pH level and constant temperature," she quotes Jonathan Van Blerkom, a fertility expert at the University of Colorado, who developed the new procedure. . "My first reaction was, 'You've got to be kidding,'" he says to Cheng in the article. The simpler approach allows women to take cheaper fertility tablets to stimulate their ovaries to release more than one egg per month. In conventional IVF, expensive, potent drugs that are injected can produce more than 20 eggs, Cheng notes. With just two test tubes and special solutions, "it's possible to generate the exact same conditions, or ver...