Lean in, freeze eggs 2

Facebook and Apple to offer oocyte cryopreservation in benefits package. See also Lean in, freeze eggs.

New Yorker: ... Earlier this year, Facebook began offering twenty thousand dollars’ worth of oöcyte cryopreservation to female employees as part of its health-insurance plan. Next year, Apple will offer its employees a comparable package. (A single cycle of egg extraction can cost between ten and fifteen thousand dollars, and more than one cycle is advised for many women; cold storage is about five hundred dollars a year.)

... likely, it will appeal to women who are experiencing no immediate threat to their fertility—no threat, that is, beyond their participation in a competitive workplace in which the bearing and rearing of children is perceived as an aberrant inconvenience. To such women, egg freezing might seem to offer liberation from those wearying dictates of biology by which their older sisters, no matter how successful their careers, were bound. Better an iBaby than no baby at all.

Deferring childbearing from one’s twenties or early thirties until one’s later thirties or forties certainly has its appeal for the woman with ambitions beyond motherhood. Lots of women have chanced it, even before egg freezing came along and supplied a possible, if not entirely reliable, form of counter-infertility insurance. Still, even with this tantalizing suggestion of reproductive liberty, it’s hard to figure out exactly how long to postpone. A woman might skip having children in her twenties or thirties in order to focus on her career, only to discover by her forties that its demands—not to mention the encroachment of middle age—make motherhood even less manageable than it appeared at twenty-five or thirty.

Bonus: The price of eggs.

Lean in, freeze eggs

Better this than Idiocracy. You could also argue that men should freeze sperm as the incidence of de novo mutations in children increases with paternal age.

WSJ: ... Egg freezing stopped the sadness that I was feeling at losing my chance to have the child I had dreamed about my entire life. It soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn't want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn't sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.

I decided to freeze on the afternoon of my 36th birthday, when I did a fresh round of baby math on the back of a business card at Starbucks. Even if the man I was dating at the time agreed to start a family in the near future, I was cutting it close to have one baby, let alone a second. Several months later, after injecting myself for nearly two weeks with hormone shots, I was in surgery at a Manhattan fertility clinic as my doctor pierced my ovaries, suctioned out nine eggs and handed them to the embryologist to freeze until I was ready to use them. As soon as I woke up in the recovery room, I no longer felt as though I were watching my window to have a baby close by the month. My future seemed full of possibility again.

Amid all the talk about women "leaning in" and "having it all," the conversation has left out perhaps the most powerful gender equalizer of all—the ability to control when we have children. The idea is tantalizing: Once you land the job and man you want, you can have your frozen eggs shipped to your fertility clinic, hand him a semen collection cup and be on your way to parenthood. You mitigate the risk of birth defects by using younger eggs, and you can carry a baby well into middle age. At a time when one in five American women between the ages of 40 and 44 is childless—and half say they would still like to have children—egg freezing offers a once-unimaginable reprieve.

Up until now, a woman who bumped up against her baby deadline could visit a sperm bank, make peace with being "child-free" or eventually break her heart and bank pursuing futile fertility treatments in an attempt to "snatch a child from the jaws of menopause," as the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett so famously warned a decade ago while encouraging women to plan their families as carefully as their careers.

I spent the majority of my 30s alternately panicked about my love life or feeling kicked in the gut every time I saw an adorable child. Fertility anxiety isn't exactly helpful when you're trying to snag the locker next to Sheryl Sandberg in the executive gym. And it's a buzz kill on dates when you feel compelled to ask the guy sitting across from you, clutching his craft beer, "So do you think you might want kids someday?"

... Last fall, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the procedure's experimental label, citing improved success rates with a new flash-freezing technology known as vitrification. Several trials showed little difference in in-vitro-fertilization success rates using frozen rather than fresh eggs. That rate is 30% to 50% per try, depending on the age of eggs and expertise of the doctor. Despite early fears of how freezing could damage eggs' chromosomes, a recent review of 900 babies born from frozen eggs found they had no more risk of birth defects than those conceived naturally.

See also The price of eggs.

Harvard Magazine

As a consequence of having been a Junior Fellow, I get Harvard Magazine every other month. By comparison, I was a faculty member at Yale, and they don't send me anything. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining the disparity in endowments? I would certainly give money to Harvard before I would give it to Yale. Harvard Magazine is consistently the best alumni magazine I've seen (I fairly regularly look at the Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford and Yale counterparts; the last two are sent to people I know, not to me), although that doesn't mean that there isn't an occasional snoozer of an issue.

This month there is a review of James Watson's book (no mention of his little faux pas in London, or of the interesting conversation with Derek Bok with which he ends the book -- but see below :-), an article about autism, and one on the new category of "alpha girls" in American society (Girl Power: what has changed for women and what hasn't).

Some random observations. The back cover is an ad for NetJets (fractional private jet ownership), a photo of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett relaxing on an overstuffed couch in a luxurious airplane. About 50% of Harvard graduates now go into finance (over 50% of men, and over 40% of women). The best and brightest! :-) Harvard is the university that recently decided to offer middle class families of "modest" means (up to $180k in income!) substantial financial aid. Families earning up to $180k will pay no more than 10% of their income to send their kid to Harvard. (Article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, with amusing comments.)

Here are the final paragraphs from Watson's book, excerpted by 02138, the other Harvard magazine.

Before leaving Bok’s temporary office in Loeb House, mindful of the Summers fiasco, I remarked to Derek that the time was not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to prove its hypotheses ever more indisputably, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes likely malfunctioning to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.

The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our desire to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of good will may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek, who had spent most of our meeting listening, asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of “15 years” meant that Summers’ then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.

Upon returning to the Yard, however, I wondered if even 10 years would pass.