Boston Globe Goes Down the Rabbit Hole with Grace Rubenstein

 

Did you know that the fact that men cannot have babies, as least with current technology is a prime case of "the highly inequitable realm of reproduction"?

I had never actually thought of it this way, but it is just so unfair and inequitable that when it comes to getting pregnant and having a baby, people who happen to have been dealt the biological deal of having an XY chromosome complement are just, well, you know, screwed.

But, there is hope on the (likely distant) horizon because "emerging technologies could increase equity for anyone trying to build a biological family missing a component, be that an egg, a sperm or a uterus." 

Grace Rubenstein

I learned all this from Grace Rubenstein, who, I learned from Linked in holds a BA in psychology from Williams College and is a "podcast coach"  not to mention a journalist and editor, and who wrote the story on the front page of The Boston Globe's Ideas section about the possibility that stem cells may someday allow male homosexuals to produce egg cells with their very own DNA, and those could be used to produced a baby with the sperm of their male partners. 

Now THAT would be EQUITY!

And all this may be possible because a brilliant scientist at the Branch Lab at Harvard, Christian Kramme, who has spun off a private start up company called Gameto (from the word, gamete, get it?) is working on something called an "ovaroid" and, he says, "we're trying to even out the burden" so it's not all on the woman with XX chromosomes to bear the burden of IVF which causes "bloating, headaches, mood disruptions and painful ovarian swelling" and "costs tens of thousands of dollars. And it's a process that the female partner may suffer through even when a couple's infertility problems are caused by the male partner."

Which really was news to me, because I thought IVF was basically a way to use male sperm to inseminate female eggs in a petri dish and if the male sperm is immotile or diminished, having an egg awaiting it in a petri dish is not likely to help much.

But that's just me. Maybe some IVF clinics will try anything, if you pay them.

And, oh, about paying, Dr. Kramme says that his work is likely to succeed eventually, given enough money.  Which is to say if you give him enough money and Gameto succeeds, then, as the CEO of Gameto says, women can have the same flexibility about when they get pregnant as men have when it comes to becoming a parent. Of course, the way I heard Dr. Kramme is: "Give me money." Ms. Rubenstein seems to have missed this aspect of Dr. Kramme's "passion" for his work. It's all about equity for Dr. Kramme, making child bearing as available to men as to women--as if men would really want that. What kind of market research has he done? But, nothing as crass as simply making money could possibly motivate Gameto.

It's always a clue when a professor at Harvard spins off his work to off campus and establishes a company, which apparently doesn't bother Harvard much.

Of course, they seem to have forgotten about the part where you have to carry the pregnancy for nine months at age 44, or whenever you are ready. But wait! They are even working on stem cell uteruses which can incubate the baby outside the body making surrogate parents obsolete.

Vardit Ravitsky

And don't worry about bioethics: Vardit Ravitsky, who is president of the bioethics research institute, the Hastings Center of the University of Montreal, says, "Any technology that allows us to do things we couldn't do before, my impulse says, if we manage to do this responsibly and wisely, who gets to join the party of reproduction?"

This should comfort Hei Juankui, the Chinese scientist who produced a gene edited baby and raised the specter of "designer babies," and was sent to prison for that particular reproductive party.

It is just so unjust that women cannot have babies after menopause, that men cannot make eggs, that transexual females (i.e. those who started life out as males) cannot have babies, and oh, the INEQUITY!

Of course, every year we are told about stem cells.  Folks with diabetes type 1, who cannot make a single hormone, insulin, could theoretically be cured if only we could implant into them stem cells which had been turned into insulin producing cells pumping out insulin. And every year for the past 30 years, we have been told that stem cells which can do this are only 10 years away. That cell has been 10 years away for 30 years. 

I won't hold my breath until that stem cell miracle occurs. 

But that won't stop Gameto from raising venture capital, and it won't stop Grace Rubenstein from dreaming of that last frontier of inequity, that only women can get pregnant and it won't stop Vardit Ravitsky from celebrating the idea that anything we haven't been able to do before must be something we should do now, especially if it allows more people to join the reproductive party.

But what I'm really wondering is: Have the lay offs at the Boston Globe meant that they have fired all the editors?

I mean, doesn't anybody over there even read these stories before they are published?