FUTURE HUMAN
The Babies at the Fringes of Fertility Tech
Beyond the reach of U.S. law, doctors are changing the way babies are made
It’s 10:30 p.m. in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Dr. Valery Zukin is at the hospital with a patient who needs emergency surgery. The patient is 31 weeks pregnant and has intestinal obstruction — a rare complication that’s potentially fatal in pregnant women. Zukin says the situation is under control, but he’s exhausted, and the stakes are high.
Earlier that day, Zukin had been at a fertility conference in Barcelona, where his groundbreaking fertility treatments made him and his colleagues the stars of the show. Now he’s sitting in a pale-yellow room at the Leleka Maternity Hospital, where he is CEO. Zukin is conferring with a team of doctors about how to save the young woman’s life — and her baby’s.
Zukin is accustomed to this kind of emergency. He’s one of the first embryologists in Ukraine, and as a leader in assisted reproductive technology, he’s part of a small cadre of doctors specializing in a revolutionary fertility technology known as mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT). It’s promise: to make healthy babies possible for couples who are infertile or carry debilitating genetic disorders.
