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Editor's Choice
Context-based infertility care
Over the last few months we have reflected in these pages on a number of challenging issues that need to be addressed if clinical research in our field is to continue to impact on day-to-day infertility care (Macklon et al., 2019; Fauser and Macklon, 2019). As articulated by others (Horwitz et al 2017; Kent et al. 2018), we have argued that limiting clinical practice to only those interventions that have been shown to be ‘effective’ for a group of patients included in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) threatens to prevent rather than encourage the development of a clinically useful evidence-based medicine (EBM) for individual patients.Female meiosis and beyond: more questions than answers?
Three years ago, there was some excitement about a publication reporting that female germline stem cells are present in the adult mouse ovary, can be isolated and propagated in vitro, and can generate oocytes, embryos and healthy live pups after transplantation into recipient, infertile females (Zou et al., 2009). More recently, it was reported that haploid cells could consistently be derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells of non-ovarian male- or female-derived tissues (Eguizabal et al., 2011).Personhood: to be or when to be – is that the question?
The dictionary definition of personhood reads: ‘the quality or condition of being an individual person’, which does not advance our understanding of this term! Indeed, the concept of personhood has exercised philosophers for centuries, the state being variously, and disputedly, accorded the attributes of life, individuality, consciousness, agency, self-awareness, empathy, and/or the capacities to anticipate, remember, plan and choose – the capacity to exercise free will. How personhood is understood is of great significance, as, when conferred socio-legally on an individual, it carries with it privileges, protection and rights, together with responsibilities and liabilities – sometimes incorporated into the political and legal concept of citizenship.The uses and abuses of bibliometrics
Bibliographic databases provide us with easy access to many more journals than was possible when each of us editors started in science. We well remember the treks around libraries, the frustration of the missing volumes and the broken photocopier, the ‘reprint request’ post cards sent and received, and the bundling up of hard copy papers for posting to our colleagues. Now, at the press of a button, papers can be located, paid for (unless freely accessible), down loaded, filed – and sometimes even read! However, with this easy access to databases and papers come problems: notably the increased risk of deliberate or accidental plagiarism (Cohen et al., 2012) and the fact of information overload.Trophoblast tales
The placenta has to be the most complex organ in the body – genetically, functionally and structurally. It is uniquely complex genetically, comprising tissues of both maternal and fetal genotype in close apposition, as well as having a complex gene expression profile according to the parental epigenetic imprint inherited on selected genes. It is complex functionally in its sheer range of hormonal products, combining roles assigned to many or most other endocrine glands, and also in its transport systems, its physical anchoring role, and in its immunological properties.
