Amazing Births

Babies from "donor eggs "

When the 25-year-old woman saw her healthy newborn son, she wept tears of joy and relief. A typical reaction, one might say. But the circumstances were extraordinary. Five years ago the mother had been diagnosed as prematurely menopausal: her ovaries had ceased to release eggs or to produce the hormones needed to sustain a pregnancy. The child she had carried for nine months was the genetic offspring of another woman, who had donated an unfertilized egg. The birth of the world's first "donor-egg baby" in November, which was announced last week by scientists in Australia, marks a new step in overcoming infertility. Declared Gynecologist Wayne Decker, executive director of the Fertility Research Foundation of New York: "It is a remarkable and astounding feat that offers hope to all women who suffer from ovarian failure or who have had their ovaries removed."

The successful pregnancy, reported in the British journal Nature by a team of researchers led by Dr. Carl Wood at Melbourne's Monash University, owes much to the experience of cattle and sheep breeders. They have long transferred embryos from prize animals to poorer stock in efforts to upgrade their herds. The human egg in the Australian experiment came from a 29-year-old woman who was trying to conceive. Although her ovaries were healthy, the fallopian tubes connecting the ovaries with the uterus were blocked.

Doctors were trying to help her become pregnant by using a fertilization method introduced in 1978. The so-called test-tube-baby technique bypasses the sealed passages by mating the wife's egg with the husband's sperm in a glass Petri dish. The resulting embryo is implanted in the woman's womb.

The Australian team retrieved four eggs from the second woman's ovaries for the test-tube fertilization; with her permission, they collected one more to be used in an impregnation attempt in another infertile woman. The prematurely menopausal woman was an ideal recipient. For 2 1/2 months she had been primed for a possible pregnancy with daily doses of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. She matched the donor in eye and hair color, body build, social class and education level.

The donor's egg was fertilized in a Petri dish using sperm obtained from the recipient's husband. Thirty hours later, when the egg had cleaved into two cells, it was inserted into the uterus of the menopausal woman. Her body adjusted so naturally to the pregnancy that she has even been able to breast-feed her son. One sad note amid all the celebration: the woman who donated the egg failed to become pregnant. She still does not know that in one sense, at least, she has become a mother.

The Australian experiment is expected to be followed by a birth in California this month that involves another kind of egg transfer between two women. The difference is that the California baby was conceived not in a Petri dish but in the body of the woman donating the egg. In the method used by Dr. John Buster and his team at Harbor/U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Torrance, a woman with healthy ovaries was artificially inseminated with sperm from the husband of an infertile woman. Five days after fertilization, the donor's uterus was flushed with a nutrient solution and the embryo was recovered and implanted in the infertile woman's uterus.

Dr. Georgeanna Seegar Jones, vice president of the first test-tube-baby clinic in the U.S., at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, thinks the technique has a major drawback: "Asking a woman to have a pregnancy, even an extremely brief one, is very different from asking a woman to donate an egg."

Scientists see immense possibilities for the donor-egg techniques. Says Australia's Dr. Wood: "It is now theoretically possible to override menopause, thus extending the childbearing years of women who marry late in life, remarry or defer having children until middle age."