Emerging menu options for gonadal reincarnation
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EDITOR'S COMMENTARY
Emerging menu options for gonadal reincarnation David F. Albertini
Published online: 16 January 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
For nearly a decade now, amidst the promises and purviews of regenerative medicine, the prospects for rehabilitation or replacement of tattered organs have resonated with those unwilling to accept the fate of their aging bodies. Your personal candidate for tissue replacement is often dictated by your genetics and some combination of luck–good or bad–that challenges your organs’ abilities to withstand the test of time after years of use and abuse. Regenerative medicine is fast becoming a reality, and will likely debut on a commercial level as tractable tissue replacements for joints, blood vessels, and bladders, which are less complex, histologically-speaking. But anxious moments accrue for those whose replacement needs include the likes of hearts, brains, kidneys, and livers. What about your gonads? The search for a fountain of youth when it comes to preserving or extending your reproductive ability reduces to a most fundamental biological principle: use it or lose it! Gonads carry the burden of performing two basic tasks during our reproductive lifespan and they do so on a continuous or discontinuous schedule. For males, the call of puberty enlightens the testes such that hormonal rhythms sustain the continuous process of spermatogenesis, yielding sufficient numbers of spermatozoa to meet the regular demands of a fully-loaded ejaculate. For females, on the other hand, the strategy of putting all the eggs in one basket Capsule Banking germ plasm that works–what we were endowed withor fabricating gonads from scratch, sit soundly as potential menu options for future ARTs for patients whose ability to reproduce has been prevented by the failure of their gonads to make germ cells when they would most like to have them. D. F. Albertini (*) University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, KS 66160, USA e-mail: [email protected]
(sic two ovaries) at birth leads to the discontinuous provision of a single mature oocyte at ovulation, the tell-tale outcome of periodic fluctuations in a hormonal conversation that took place between the brain and gonads. In both cases, germ plasm wastage is the norm, not the exception, with the vast majority of germ cells vanishing into an abyss not unlike the one that so many aspiring actors find themselves resolved to on the road to Broadway or Hollywood. Fortunately (or not), the one-on-one encounter of sperm and egg happens against all odds, accounting for our growing numbers on this planet. The less fortunate among us seek medical intervention for infertility treatment when and where available. Enter the world of fertility preservation. 2012 was indeed a remarkable year. The prospects for manipulating gonadal physiology and germ cell wastage were measurably advanced by a series of landmark papers, which spawned a journalistic feeding frenzy that captured the global attention of health specialists and the public at larg
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