Test Tube Births Safe, Med School Doctor Says

Although conceiving babies in test tubes may slightly increase the chances of birth defects, the technique "may be a useful last resort for barren women," John D. Biggers, professor of Physiology, said last week.

Despite the low success rate for the procedure, "it presents little real danger for the mother except for minor interferences," Biggers, who published a report on test tube babies in yesterday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, said. The danger of increased genetic defects is not high and the risk "is certainly not greater than if a parent carries an inherited receissive defect and decides to have a child anyway," he added.

The procedure can be used when a woman's fallopian tubes are blocked. Doctors remove an egg from the prospective mother, fertilize it with her husband's sperm outside the body, and then emplant the embryo in the woman's womb. Biggers said no more than four babies have been conceived and born using the method.

The defect most likely to result from the test tube conception is the production of an extra set of chromosomes, "but 99 per cent of defective embryos will die when they are transferred into their mother's womb," Biggers said, adding that even in normal pregnancies as many as half of all embryos are naturally aborted.

"The number of actual births using this procedure is still too small to yield reliable conclusions," he added.

Doctors at the Medical School yesterday declined comment on the article as most said they had not read it yet.

The test-tube technique, currently successful only four per cent of the time, could be effective in at least 25 per cent of the cases, Biggers said.

An alternative method would be to produce and transfer more than one embryo, Biggers said. He added, however, that the modification could result in multiple births. Another method would be the removal of several eggs at a time to allow for repeated attempts at implantation, he said.

The federal government has refused to fund research, Biggers said. An expert committee he sat on recommended that the government end its moratorium on such research, but its recommendations had no effect.