By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 15, 2004

The woman was just 30 when she learned she had breast cancer. With chemotherapy, her odds of a long life were good, her doctor told her. But her dream of having a child would be over. The drugs would destroy the eggs in her ovaries and leave her infertile.

Six years later, the woman has come within a whisper of becoming pregnant and may yet succeed, thanks to an experimental procedure that may someday help many of the thousands of women who each year face premature menopause because of cancer treatments or disease.

The woman's story, described in last week's online edition of the medical journal Lancet, suggests that fertility can be restored years after ovary-destroying therapies if pieces of those ovaries are frozen before treatment and later transplanted back into the body. In a separate report in Thursday's Nature, Oregon scientists said they had become the first to use a similar technique successfully in a primate, producing a healthy baby monkey named Brenda.

"Now we're no longer just thinking about curing these young patients, but making sure that down the road they have a quality of life," including the capacity to have children, said David M. Lee, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland who treats infertile women and led the monkey study.