6 | NewScientist | 24 October 2009

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EGG freezing looks increasingly promising as an insurance policy for women who need or want to delay having children, according to the first systematic monitoring of success rates for IVF using eggs that were frozen then thawed out.

The results come from the first year of the Human Oocyte Preservation Experience (HOPE) Registry, which is analysing the results of thawed-egg IVF over five years. “This is the first registry to collect results in a standardised way, rather than sporadic reports of single cases,” says Zsolt Peter Nagy of Reproductive Biology Associates in Atlanta, Georgia.

Of the 115 IVF cycles recorded in

the registry, about 90 per cent of thawed eggs survived the freezing process. With the most successful version of the technique – where eggs are frozen very rapidly – 65 per

Frozen hopes cent of women became pregnant. This pregnancy rate is similar to

that achieved when IVF eggs have not been frozen. Nagy admits, however, that “careful selection” of the patients and egg donors may have boosted the success rate. None of the eggs was frozen for more than two years and most came from young women.

Nagy presented the results at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting in Atlanta. The ASRM says its advice remains that healthy women should not rely on egg freezing to preserve their fertility.

Lunar washout

WAS NASA’s moon smash ill-conceived? Weeks before the LCROSS spacecraft smashed into the moon on 9 October, some team members were predicting disappointment. Meanwhile, some critics outside NASA believe the mission will never deliver a useful scientific result.

It was hoped LCROSS would kick up a visible plume of debris that could be studied for traces of water, but a faint image detected last week showed that the impact had thrown unexpectedly little

material into the sunlight. This fits with previous experiments hinting that the debris would be ejected in a sideways spray rather than a vertical fountain.

Even if LCROSS does turn out to have detected water, it will not indicate how much of it there is on the surface. “That tells me the fundamental rationale behind the mission was flawed,” says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. A lunar rover would have provided better science, he adds. “Instead, NASA came up with a PR stunt, and it kind of backfired.”

Beware dirty docs

SWINE flu and hospital superbugs may have a common weapon: the dirty hands of doctors and nurses that act as germ “superspreaders”.

Didier Guillemot of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and colleagues created a mathematical model of a hypothetical intensive care unit (ICU) with a staff of 22.

They found that staff who saw all patients briefly were better at spreading germs than those who tended a few patients very closely.

–Ready for lift-off… or the junkyard–

–Don’t forget to remember–

Crunch time for Ares ITALK about pressure. As the troubled

successor to NASA’s space shuttle

powers up for its first flight test, a

White House panel is weighing up

whether to cancel the project.

The Ares I rocket is designed to

carry a crew capsule called Orion to

Earth orbit, where it could dock with

the International Space Station or

form part of a mission to the moon.

But it has been plagued with budget

problems and technical hitches.

On 27 October – or a few days later,

depending on how the preparations

go – NASA is expected to launch the

first Ares I test flight. A solid-fuel

rocket like those used on the space

shuttle will boost a dummy second

stage and crew capsule to an altitude

of about 45 kilometres. The flight will

determine the rocket’s stability and

test its flight-control software.

The stakes are high. A White

House panel has been considering

cancelling Ares I in favour of a

commercial launcher. Its final

report is expected this week.

Mark Lewis, former chief scientist

for the US air force and president-

elect of the American Institute of

Aeronautics and Astronautics,

recognises that policy-makers will be

watching the outcome closely, but

warns against overreacting to any

technical problems that emerge

during the test. “If they have any sort

of glitch and someone says, ‘Oh, we

have to cancel the programme now,’

they’ve completely missed the point,”

he says. “There are always things you

learn in flight that you missed or you

didn’t properly simulate.”

“About 90 per cent of the thawed human eggs had survived the IVF freezing process”

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