I was thinking that they'll probably be able to clone humans pretty soon. Don't they just take the DNA from a non-egg cell and put it in an empty egg? I think its a bit more complicated than that, but along that general idea. you need the "Frankenstein-esque" spark that starts the dividing process...not sure how that works. It seems to me that if you could do that then you could mix up the DNA with some sperm DNA and then an older woman could have her own genetic child and just borrow an egg shell, not a whole egg. That part of it IS in the works. Still...you need to get a donor egg, and those are in very short supply. There's also the issue that these older, bad eggs aren't just bad in terms of structure, but also, have bad dna. (hence, the high incidence of birth defects in women of "advanced maternal age"). You could pick through a bunch after an ivf cycle, (which involves producing as many eggs as possible through hormonal stimulation), and find a good strand, but older women with this "poor egg quality" diagnosis also typically don't produce many eggs, even on the highest allowable doses of drugs. They do something similar to this now, that helps women who have had recurrant miscarriages, due to bad dna. their eggs are otherwise ok...they can "get" pg, but can't "stay" pg. Anyway, they do a regular IVF cycle, where multiple embryos are produced...then they examine the DNA of the embryos, and they can see which ones have bad dna. If they find a good one or two, they transfer those back to the uterus, and discard the others. This procedure is only done at a couple of clinics. they're not really "fixing" anything; just accelerating the process of finding a "good egg".
OTOH, maybe in 20 years there'll be a whole trend of women over 40 giving birth to their own clones. Pretty soon there will be no men left at all and BB's like this will be archaic relics of the past. won't last for long, because nobody will be able to reach anything on the top shelf...and nothing will ever get fixed, and society will crumble and disintegrate as a result.
