SCIENCE: BRAVE NEW BABIES

If the scientists were expecting to be treated as heroes, they were disappointed. When the treatment was announced at a conference in San Antonio, Texas, it was greeted with an outcry heard halfway around the world. One ethically complicating factor was that even though most of the children's DNA came from the two parents, the borrowed egg cell's surrounding cytoplasm also contained some of the donor's DNA. Did that mean the children had three parents? The technique was also, as the researchers had feared, seen as being similar to those used in human cloning. The Chinese government promptly squelched the research. The team that performed the work has disbanded.

Despite its image as a haven for far-out medical research, China has actually been more diligent in its legislation than countries like Italy so far. Two years ago, in the face of proliferating fertility services, Beijing banned surrogacy and payments to egg donors and restricted the number of IVF cycles a clinic can perform. Last fall the authorities moved to ban advertising of infertility treatments and restricted the number of fertilized eggs that can be implanted to two for each woman under 35, and three for each woman over 35. As in India, where it's illegal to use ultrasounds or amniocentesis to determine the sex of babies (for fear that female fetuses will then be aborted), the law is not the problem so much as social attitudes. The gender-selection technology that's most dangerous--one that's skewing sex ratios in Asia's two largest populations--is simple female infanticide.

In a few years there may not be many countries left that perform the latest reproductive techniques. The ones that remain--like Israel, perhaps--may see business boom. Last year the Israeli government tried to cut back on state-supported IVF treatments, to one child per family from two, but backed off in the face of stern opposition. Israel has 30 IVF clinics and produces more scientific papers on fertility per capita than any other country. The Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv performs almost 4,000 cycles of IVF each year. Because treatments are subsidized by the state and labor costs are rather low, clinics are able to charge overseas patients only about $3,000 a cycle for IVF--a quarter what U.S. clinics charge. In India and South Korea as well, fertility has become a fast-growth export industry. "There's nothing I want more than my own baby," says Helit, a 33-year-old American woman who recently traveled to a Jerusalem hospital for infertility treatment, "and if I have to travel all over the world, I'll do it." No doubt she will not be alone.

WITH SUDIP MAZUMDAR, JOANNA CHEN, B. J. LEE, MICHAEL HASTINGS AND KAREN SPRINGEN

© 2004