Thursday, January 05, 2006

A Dozen Eggs Over Easy I see William Saletan at Slate noticed what I did too when the news came out about the South Korean scientist's fabrication of his cloning success. The same realization that made me want to retch. At first the guy had said he'd been able to produce 11 cloned stem cell lines using on average only 17 human eggs per line -- the previous year he'd reported needing 248 human eggs to make a single cloned line. He also said the eggs had been offered voluntarily, and were not paid for. Then it came out that he'd paid for the eggs, that he'd gotten them from research employees who presumably had little leverage to refuse. Then, of course, it turned out he had no clones at all... But I was stuck thinking back on the 248 eggs number -- that the lower ratio of 17 was most certainly a lie -- and did the mutiplication, and that meant he'd been experimenting using maybe more than 2,000 eggs in the past couple years. So how many women were involved, and how many times were they coerced into taking fertility hormones to make them superovulate and produce a dozen or so eggs at a pop? And suddenly I was thrown back into the dark days of my 30s when I was undergoing fertility treatment, back when they didn't know how to do it too well. But I was a desperate pioneer, and this one clinic pumped me so full of hormones that my ovaries blew up to the size of oranges, and I remember one night in particular, writhing in pain, convinced I was going to simply burst and die, while the bland doctor told me over the phone it was all a normal part of the process and not to worry, and I had a full-fledged hyperventilating panic attack that my husband talked me back from. And once they'd aspirated the eggs out of me and I felt safe again, I quit the clinic and  since have tried, without total success, to banish the memory from my mind. But it sticks there, parked in some neural circuit right next to the Nazi documentary I regrettably happened upon when I was about 12 describing the experiments they did, without anesthesia, on women's reproductive organs, including gluing the fallopian tubes shut. Yeah, Saletan and I noticed the same thing. I just remembered what it felt like. -RH 8:53:29 PM    comment []

Danyel Digs the NBA Hey, I'm back up north, my highlights bleached so clown-orange by the Rio sun I had to run over to the salon yesterday to get "lowlights." And my bikini tan line looks like it was lasered on, that Southern Hemisphere light is so amped. Alas, from watching beach volleyball, and marveling at the peculiar Rio no-hands game called "volleyfoot" it's back to the NFL and NBA.       Now you know I used to be a sportswriter back in the day; hence the name of this blog. But I haven't written up a game in decades. I just get to read other people's columns. But I usually leave dissatisfied. I'm not big into the statistical recitations that pass for analysis these days. What I want is to hear about the people and the beauty and how they pulled it off in such and such an impossible situation. Sometimes someone will do it for me -- maybe George Vecsey in the Times, or Frank Deford on radio when he's not feeling his usual curmudeon-like self. And sometimes, when she turns her literary blog to her love affair with basketball, I get the satisfying read from Danyel over at Naked Cartwheels. She's not a sportswriter, just an accomplished novelist who happens to be a basketball fan, but she writes sports the way I'd like to read it, and this week she's got this rollicking fun rundown of the NBA teams and who she likes and who you should watch and what you should watch and that includes the whole spectacle of "soap opera, fashion show, beauty pageant and the Olympics "as she describes it. Read her and tell her to do us all a favor and go get a job that gives her courtside press seats. She'd be just great. -RH 8:17:37 PM    comment []

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