Dealing with loss of life across the spectrum of humankind
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COMMENTARY
Dealing with loss of life across the spectrum of humankind David F. Albertini 1 Published online: 16 June 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.” ―J. Robert Oppenheimer Loss of life of the magnitude witnessed after the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was but one consequence of the nuclear holocaust enabled by the scientific breakthrough of the Manhattan Project. For Oppenheimer, it was the beginning of the end. How scientific breakthroughs are heralded or denigrated by today’s societies depends mostly on the truthiness factor accorded by professionals willing to acknowledge the limitations and weaknesses of their approach and the conditions of the times. Loss of life is, sadly, very much a matter of the times. And, fortunately, societies can no longer afford to choose silence in a world being ravaged by COVID-19 and inequality and racism in these troubled days. Just as the world has been measurably impacted by the millions of new lives enabled by reproductive medicine and ARTs, the irony at hand within our own “species space” is fostered by our own ineptitude to reproduce successfully without medical assistance. Taking a critical look at the subject of pregnancy loss was the charge of the most recent Capri Workshop Group held last fall, and the summary of that meeting was brought to our readership’s attention last month as both a guide to understanding some of the truths that have permeated our profession and as a sentinel to concerns about access to care (Early pregnancy loss: the default outcome for fertilized human oocytes, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-02001749). Far from resolved from an etiological or biological perspective, and hardly a topic short on rhetoric, pointing a finger at causality factors has become a less than a scientific exercise and more a matter of deep-pocket commercialism.
* David F. Albertini [email protected] 1
Bedford Research Foundation, Bedford, MA, USA
But knowing what our reproductive limits are as the aging and threatened species we have become remains much more than an academic pursuit. So is it that Wilcox and colleagues bring to bear on the subject of human fecundity perhaps the most thorough and engaging treatment to have been made available for public consumption in years (1). Among the pearls of wisdom they cast is just how the history of this field evolved from the decades of research engaged providing at best inferences based on the evidence available at the time―from missed menses to having sensitive measures of hCG. Wilcox and colleagues have come a long way with their insightful analysis for which we should all be grateful. A long way indeed from the days and images of the infamous “egg hunts” of Hertig and Rock that still grace the digitized pages of contemporary human embryology text books (2) and which prompt many a heated conversation when looking back from our lofty ethical standards of today(3). For many to
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