In a telephone interview, Dr. Van Steirteghem reported that in the last year, he had successfully fertilized 65 percent of the eggs he injected. A third of the women who have received the embryos grown from the fertilized eggs have become pregnant, he added. So far 300 pregnancies have been produced through sperm injection, and 100 babies born. Most of the rest are continuing pregnancies. The new technique's astonishing success is expected to create an entire industry for in vitro fertilization labs, which will now be able to treat couples who had been told that the man was hopelessly infertile.
Infertility affects about two million American men.
In about a third of them, the sperm count is so low, or the number of the abnormal sperm so high, that none of the previous methods developed to coax sperm to enter eggs could be used successfully. Doctors from all over the world have been trekking to Belgium to learn the method. The transfer is done with a pipette to hold the egg and special glass needles for injecting the sperm, which are washed in solutions before they are used. Dr. Van Steirteghem said he was not sure why it works. A second woman has just become pregnant, and a third was pregnant but miscarried, Dr. Schulman said.