Resetting the clock?

A Canadian doctor may have found a natural way to extend women’s fertility

Dr Robert Casper, gynaecologist, reproductive endocrinologist and Toronto-based fertility guru, is telling me a bunch of stuff I really don’t want to hear.

‘The ageing female reproductive system is like a forgotten flashlight on the top shelf of a closet,’ he says in his flat, matter-of-fact Canadian bedside voice; a voice, incidentally, that reminds me of my father’s. ‘When you stumble across it a few years later and try to switch it on, it won’t work, not because there’s anything wrong with the flashlight but because the batteries inside it have died.’

The ‘batteries’ he’s referring to in his miserable metaphor (I understand the need to make a scientific point, but is it really necessary to evoke the image of lonely death in the dark?) are a woman’s eggs, or ‘O-sites’ as they are called in medical reproductive lingo.