I am committed to helping women with cancer have a chance to become mothers. Many of them are unaware that they may lose their fertility

How to preserve the fertility of a young woman with breast cancer, what her chances are for future motherhood. Interview with Monika Łukasiewicz, MD, PhD, a gynaecologist, sexologist and specialist in gynaecological and reproductive endocrinology.

Early days of IVF in Europe

You are from the first generation of doctors whose careers have developed in parallel with the development of IVF. You have had the opportunity to watch this process as a junior doctor.

I was born four years before Louise… Louise Jay Brown was born on 25 July 1978 as the first ‘test tube’ baby. In 2010, Geoffrey Edward, a British biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for developing the method of in vitro fertilisation. When I was 25 and Louise was 21, I went to a gynaecological clinic in Germany where I worked for a month. What I saw there completely stunned me and affected my professional life. I became fascinated with the IVF treatment procedure. I saw those sperm cells under the microscope and thought: “Isn’t it fascinating that millions of existences released during ejaculation gallop to an egg cell and only one gets it?” Fertilisation is an incredible thing. This one spermatozoon, when it touches the egg cell with its acrosome, gives no chance to its opponents. This is because this one spermatozoon enters the egg cell, and it immediately closes itself off to other spermatozoa. In medical terms this is called a cortical reaction.

Read the entire interview in Wysokie Obcasy magazine