Beating the Biological Clock with Research

S A N   F R A N C I S C O, March 28, 2001 -- Millions of women plan their lives based on something of a deadline. And there's only a certain window of time when they can safely give birth.

Allison Carlson wonders if she waited too long to have a baby. She started trying to get pregnant at 42.

"We just hoped that everything would be fine and the statistics didn't apply to us," says Carlson.

Carlson soon turned to in-vitro fertilization. She got pregnant but quickly miscarried, as almost half of women over 40 usually do.

"It rocks your world," says Carlson. And rocks the family budget: She has spent $60,000 on fertility treatments.

"We'd rather spend our money on a baby than cars and [an] apartment," she insists.

Now at age 45, she's not giving up. "You want to feel you did everything that you could to have a reasonable chance to have a baby," she says.

The next generation of women in their 40s may have a better chance. Researchers have succeeded in freezing the eggs of a younger woman and thawing them later. It is one promising area of research, while another is pushing back menopause.

Extending Shelf Life of Healthy Eggs

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. By puberty, 95 percent of them are gone. The rest dwindle quickly through the 30s and 40s. By the age of 50, a woman's eggs are virtually gone.

But what if the timing were altered? What if there was a pill to stop the release of a woman's eggs that would resume when she stopped taking the pill?

That's exactly what Roger Gosden, the an infertility researcher at McGill University in Montreal is currently researching and finds "it might also delay menopause, instead of 50 then 60, that's the theory."

At Massachusetts General Hospital, John Tilly, the director of the Vincent Center for Reproductive Biology, has stopped menopause in mice. Tilly discovered a gene that causes ovaries to grow old and eggs to die.

The idea was that egg loss from the ovaries is the mechanism that drives menopause. "And if we could understand what causes egg loss, what triggers the death of the eggs," he explains, "then we could maybe one day stop it from occurring and extend how long the ovaries are functioning."

When he bred mice without that gene, "we had mice that were roughly the equivalent of 100-year-old women. And their ovaries were still functioning normally."

Research for women is years away, but revolutionary fertility treatments are already changing the biological clock.

"It's the patients who drive the techniques," says Dr. Jamie Grifo of New York University. "And that's what makes us do what sound like crazy things, but it's really to help people have healthy babies."

It's why Carlsen keeps trying: "It seems to be worth it when you have a baby in your arms."