From rewriting cultural assumptions about love to the cutting edge science of new life, questions about having children to the -- took the writer Emily Witt to the limits of reproductive research.

In her latest piece for "the New Yorker," Witt reveals her discovery and explains to Michel Martin how a few biotech startups could be about to change the game.

Michel: Thanks, Christiane.

Emily Witt, thank you for talking with us today.

Emily: It is great to be here.

Michel: Before we get into your article, "the future of fertility, I want to get into your book, critically acclaimed, certainly made a lot of waves, you explore sex and desire in the age of the Internet.

Is there a line between that work and this latest report on fertility?

Emily: I think there really is, because that book was about examining three major challenges, one of which was people getting married much later or not at all, waiting longer to kind of settle down in the traditional sense, if they ever did, and it was about changes in technology and also changing the idea of what a family is and what a relationship is, a broader spectrum of identity and practices and exploring all that.

I think this does fit in, because it is very tied to the new timeline that many of us live under, and also new ideas of a family especially, I think.

Michel: It is my understanding that it really stemmed from your own personal question about some of these issues.

What were some of those questions, and do you still have them?

Emily: Yeah.

So I started writing that book when I turn 30, and this kind of, you know, my parents have been married for more than 40 years, and the relationship that they have and the traditional family that I grew up in seemed very elusive to me, and I was not sure if it was some kind of personal failing or some kind of structural change, but I noticed many people around me in a similar situation and demographic changes that reflected that many people were going through this at the same time.

And in the end, I spent much of my 30's in relationships, but now I am ready to come and I am single again.

And, you know, the book was, in many ways, about trying to figure out what was going on in my own life.

Michel: So in the future of fertility, the piece published in "the New Yorker," you profile new biotech startup firms repressing -- you talk about reproducing human cells without ovaries.

What exactly are they doing, so you can explain, so all of us can get it, and how did the research overlap?

Emily: In the past 10 or 15 years, there has been major advances in stem cell technology, which means that you can use the cell of your own body, skin cell or blood cell, turn back into a cell that has a potential to be any other kind of cell in the body, and that has been used to study cardiac problems, pancreatic problems, all kinds of things, but one kind of cell they might make is in egg cell or spur himself that might help people with fertility issues.

So I focused on two companies, one is trying to make a stem cell, and big sale, and the other is trying to create basically the ovarian environment in which an Excel matures.

So that an immature Excel can be taken from the human body and put in this environment which would kind of mimic the process of IVF but hopefully be a little less invasive and try.

Michel: There were major breakthroughs before your piece was published.

Can you tell us what they were and why they are important?

Emily: Yeah, so they have achieved this in mice but not with humans yet, and right before I went to press, one company conception managed to bring the human big sale to the -- egg cell, it is called a primary follicle, ready to progress into a mature egg cell.

That was an advancement that showed the technology has a lot of progress -- promise.

Another company is creating a lab made, ovarian environment using lab made cells, had a similar breakthrough creating that environment and published a paper about that.

Michel: There are so many dimensions to this.

There's the question of what this could potentially achieve for people, so let's talk about that first.

Why is this something that is appealing to people, not just scientists as a thought exercise -- can we do this?

But how this has a potential to do for humanity, for want of a better way to put it.

Emily: First, it would be really useful to couples suffering from infertility that want to have a genetically related child, especially egg cells in particular are kind of scarce and can be difficult to mature and grow and extract from the human body, so that is one, you know, couples suffering from traditional fertility issues.

But one area I was particularly issued in, is female reproductive longevity.

As we all know, women have a shorter reproductive lifespan than men do.

They are born with all the eggs they are going to have come and by the time they are in their early to mid 40's, those eggs are no longer viable for reproduction.

We are at a time where we are living longer, we start relationships later.

That is a big burden for a lot of women to try to fit, you know, their career, their relationship, their childbearing, all, you know, before the end of their 30's.

So I think there is a real desire to prolong that timeline a little bit, which can have really massive repercussions.

And then the third demographic that this might affect our same-sex couples that would like to have a genetic child.

So conception, the company that is working on making the human egg cell, two of its cofounders are gay men, and using that technology, it is possible that I cell -- a cell taken from a male donor, using this technology, could be turned into an egg cell with two X chromosomes.

That is part of the premise, too.

Michel: Let's talk about the concerns that have been raised about this kind of work.

Let's start with the safety concerns.

Are there any?

Emily: There are huge safety questions.

This is human life.

It is not even pharmaceutical, it is human life.

Yeah.

They would have to prove, you know, assuming they accomplish this, they will have to do animal studies across multiple generations, to ensure that, you know, the genetic and printing is intact, that there is no inherited diseases that only manifest a couple generations down the line.

And then there would need to be clinical trials of humans, too.

And, of course, nobody would be confident about doing this unless they felt safe, as big as the declaration -- desperation is on the people suffering from infertility.

Michel: There are broader social concerns.

One is, and which I am glad you raised in your piece, that, you know, the research into women's, you know, fertility overall or women's health overall, can we just say it, has not really been a priority of the scientific establishment, ever?

Ever!

One of the scientists whom you interviewed said, hey, can we figure out some of the things that affect women's health?

Could that be a higher priority?

Emily: Yeah.

So, you know, there's very little understanding of the causes of infertility beyond the biological timeline.

Scientists don't really understand, first of all, why menopause happens, what, you know, triggers the timeline of it, why it starts, why there is such a large window, you know, it could happen to a woman in her mid-30's or it could happen to you when you are 50.

Nobody really understands why or the effect of ovarian aging on aging and the rest of your body.

Nobody really -- one thing I learned in this article that was really interesting to me is that humans are pretty unique among mammals in that their ovaries a basically more than twice as fast as the other organs in the body -- age basically more than twice as fast as other organs in their body.

Chimpanzees can reproduce almost to the end of their life.

It is this kind of black box.

Science quite does not understand.

The argument is that, yeah, if we can better understand that process, there might be less kind of high intervention way of treating infertility, or at least prolonging reproduction longevity.

Michel: And then there is the tension that you describe in your piece between, you know, how these biotech startups share their information with the world versus traditional kind of academic, scientific research.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

I think that intersects with the core safety concerns and kind of the broader social concerns that other folks might want to weigh in on.

Could you talk a little but about that?

Emily: Yeah.

So this technology involves the creation of human embryos, and there's limited federal funding into that research.

There's restrictions.

And that means that most of the money can come from the private sector or from states, but it means that biotech in the private sector has a research and doing the research -- has an advantage over doing the research against academic channels.

The worry is that it might, perhaps, you know, some of the basic science, and academic research working at a slower pace might be able to achieve more thoroughly.

Michel: How do you think that this also intersects with the intense debate going on right now about abortion access?

You know, primarily in the United States, I mean, it is such an interesting moment, because you cannot help but notice in the United States, there is a major political push to restrict abortion access.

How do you think this research intersects with the outcome of this debate that we are having over access to abortion?

Emily: Yeah.

I mean, unfortunately, in the United States, pretty much any research that has to do with pregnancies, embryos, fetal tissue is extremely polarized and politicized.

And that means that this technology likely, even if they are able to achieve it, one legal scholar told me that she expects it will be more likely to be approved or tested in, for example, the U.K. before the U.S. because of our polarized political environment.

On the one hand, you have a lot of people suffering from infertility, that want to have children.

On the other hand, you have obstacles to scientific research that are rooted in a moral debate about conception and beginning of life and all of that.

Michel: Some of the researchers in your piece fear that this research, let's call it IVG research, VG stands for in vitro Genesis.

Returning to the idea that genetic connection is essential for families.

Emily: It raises the question around, why is genetic connection so important that you would go to such extremes to achieve it?

For some people, that might seem self-explanatory, for others, I don't know, is it worth it?

You know, LGBTQ families in particular have fought for a couple of generations now for legal recognition of a social relationship with their child that is as meaningful and important and deserves as much legal recognition as a genetic one.

And, yeah, so all of these questions will be coming up if this comes real.

Michel: if and when IVG becomes available to the public, you have to assume it will be expensive.

In vitro is expensive.

Is this a concern that this kind of further, I don't know, kind of widens the gap here between the haves and the have-nots?

This is yet another thing that, you know, if you delay childbearing, then this becomes the privilege of the few as opposed to something that human beings be able to do.

Emily: Yeah.

That is absolutely a concern.

Already assisted reproductive technologies, there is lack of access to it.

It is often not covered by insurance, and even if it is covered by insurance, it still can be very expensive.

So this would almost certainly fall under that inequality.

And there is another question that has been brought up, which is that if you have, you know, kind of unlimited supply of egg cells and could make more embryos, THthen it is also easir to do genetic reflection on those embryos, so, you know, people might try to optimize their health co outcomes for, yu know, any kind, and it might have a divide where you have one population trying to create these extremely healthy children and another part that might not even have access to contraception, terminate a pregnancy that is unwanted.

So, you know, there's a lot of questions we will have to ask about what this means, who has access, what it offers to the people who have access.

Michel: And who gets to have a say in that, you know, what process is thereby which the public gets to have its say about this and express its values around this?

Emily: Yeah.

I mean, it will be, you know, I think we have a lot of historical precedents to go on.

Contraception, you know, access is so uneven, limited, people who want it cannot get it, in some places is covered by insurance, and others don't.

It is an extremely polarized question, and I can only imagine this will be similarly polarized, and that, you know, there will be kind of a feminist, likely, I assume, a sort of feminist articulation of what it would mean to have reproductive freedom in this context as well.

Michel: Before I let you go, another question that a Forex -- that affects a lot of us is climate.

There are those that argue that, you know, a lower population does benefit the planet.

They feel that overall, this emphasis on maintaining population, increasing population is the wrong direction to take, given the status of the planet.

What are your thoughts about that?

Emily: Yeah.

I do have thoughts about that.

I mean, overall, the population of the planet is still growing and is expected to grow at least toward the latter end of the century, but when you look at many countries, including the U.S., their fertility rate is a little bit slower, where the decline of people having children in their 20's has not been made up by an increase in people having children in their 30's.

I guess I would say that I don't think this is some kind of pro Nadalist push --pro-natalist push, where you are pushing people to have children they don't want to have.

These are people who are wanting even one child, you know, and I think most of us who agree that having a child, for people that want it we should do everything , possible for those people to have a child.

The population question, you know, I don't, the way that the world has been trending, the United States, many countries in the world now, people just don't want to have a lot of kids, so I don't think we really need to worry about how this would affect the kind of macro trend of population stabilization, really.

Michel: Emily Witt, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Emily: Yeah, thank you.