To Get Pregnant in Your Sixties

In a breakthrough that sent shock waves through fertility clinics, Jonathan Tilly, a reproductive biologist at Harvard Medical School, released a study in March that suggests doctors may be able to boost women’s supplies of eggs and help them bear children long after the normal onset of menopause.

Biologists previously assumed that female mammals are born with a limited supply of eggs, which gradually declines with age. But the discovery of vast numbers of immature eggs dying in the ovaries of mice led Tilly’s team to find what they claim are hidden ovarian stem cells that can sprout new eggs to replace vanishing ones.

If this proves true in humans, women in their forties, fifties, and sixties may be able to bear children by freezing stem cells at a young age and having them re-implanted at a later date. Cancer patients, often left infertile by chemical and radiation therapy, could put stem cells on ice before treatment, or drugs may be able to rev up old or damaged stem cells. Tilly has already found a molecule that boosts the number of eggs mice make. “I think it’ll be in the clinic quicker than you can dream of,” he says.

Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/jan/get-pregnant-in-sixties

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Bitterling Test - pregnancy test in 1935

Monday, Jan. 07, 1935 - The minute a woman becomes pregnant certain hormones appear in her urine. If she wants to make sure of her pregnancy and can afford the expense, she may send a vial of her urine to her obstetrician. He will have a laboratory associate condense the specimen and inject some of it into the belly of a $1.50 virgin rabbit or a 20¢ virgin mouse. After two or three days the laboratory associate will kill the rabbit or mouse and examine its ovaries. If the ovaries are swollen, that shows that the woman is pregnant. The obstetrician then sends her the report and a good-sized bill.

Last week three University of Chicago doctors announced that they had discovered a cheaper and quicker method of certifying pregnancy. Drs. Aaron Elias Kanter, Carl Philip Bauer and Arthur Herman Klawans use a little carp-like fish which costs only 30¢. Within 24 hours after a female bitterling is placed in a quart of fresh water, which also contains two teaspoonfuls of urine from a pregnant woman, there grows out from the belly of the bitterling a long tubular appendage, called an oviduct, through which in the ordinary course of nature she would expel her own eggs. As soon as one pregnancy test is over, the bitterling may be returned to an aquarium of fresh water where she quickly recovers her form and is again ready to serve curious womankind.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748300,00.html

Dangers of pregnancy for 40+ women greatly exaggerated

From Monday, Sep. 28, 1959

The dangers of pregnancy for women over 40 have been greatly exaggerated, says Obstetrician Albert L. Higdon of Teaneck, N.J. Before a Canadian meeting of obstetricians and gynecologists, he reported that studies of 21,000 mothers indicate that childbirth presents only slightly greater risks to a woman of 40 than to one of 20. The older women bore only a slightly higher percentage of Mongoloid children, suffered no more difficult deliveries, had an average mortality rate.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,811285,00.html