Word: kim
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...Angeles clinic wants to bring that hope one step closer to reality by opening the first for-profit egg-freezing operation in the country. "It's like an insurance policy," says Dr. Thomas Kim, medical director of the CHA Fertility Center, which wants to start freezing the eggs of women ages 35 and younger beginning this fall for about $8,000. "If they are willing to do it, we are happy to give them the service...
...center's ambitious plans are sparking a fierce debate among fertility researchers. Is egg banking a godsend for anxious women or a recipe for heartbreak and failure? Kim claims he has the medical results to justify egg banking, and he has several healthy babies to prove it. Critics insist that it will be years before egg freezing will be ready for prime time. "It's a shot in the dark," says Dr. Richard Paulson, chief of reproductive endocrinology and fertility at the University of Southern California's School of Medicine...
...Kim and his team use a 10-minute, fast-freezing process called vitrification that he says reduces the chance of ice-crystal formation. Porcu, on the other hand, claims comparable results with a slow-freezing technique that takes about two hours and uses more highly concentrated preservatives...
...Kim and Dr. Eleonora Porcu at the University of Bologna both say recent technical advances have boosted success rates to the same level as embryo freezing, which is about 20%. In Porcu's most recent studies, 70% to 80% of the eggs survived the defrosting process without breaking down. Kim puts the current frozen-egg birth rate at 21%, based on a recently completed study in which 6 out of 28 women in South Korea became pregnant and later gave birth. One even had twins...
...study recently suggested that those babies have a higher risk of genetic damage. "We need to have 700 or 800 babies to prove statistically that there is no increase in birth defects [for frozen-egg babies]," says Dr. Michael Opsahl of the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va. Kim doesn't buy that argument: "The bottom line is, Can you produce a baby? We say yes." He adds that the chromosomal tests done on his babies have so far come out normal...