The petri dish can't replace the female body

It’s not really surprising, but it is interesting that evidence of the long-term health risks to babies born from IVF is starting to emerge. For a while now there has been some evidence of higher rates of prematurity, low birth weight, and birth defects in IVF babies. What’s more interesting is what the New York Times is reporting today—that there are “unusual gene expression patterns”—bad ones—in IVF babies.

This dovetails precisely with what current biological science would predict. Turns out that the science I was taught in high school biology class about genes, that they are blueprints from which critters are mechanically churned out, is nearly all wrong. The blueprint, or computer code, metaphor doesn’t work. We can’t be said to simply be the sum of our genes. It’s more like we’re the sum of a process, namely what’s called by biologists “development”—the precise, complex choreography that results in the growth of a creature from (almost) nothing.

So it makes sense that doing part of that development in a Petri dish instead of the human body would have consequences, genetic ones at that. The age-old yearning to be free of the female body has once again been frustrated.