ICSI: changing lives (but not a VC's)
How a stunning advancement in reproductive technology was a publicly-funded good
Note: I’m aiming to write short notes more often, as opposed to my typical longforms I shared across on my Medium Blog. Here’s a start.
I’m writing this with my five week-old son hanging in a sling on my chest. To say that his arrival in the world is a miracle would be…well, it would suggest that modern science is a miracle, which in many ways, it is, but not in the mystical way we often use it.
The TL;DR is that we conceived through a process called Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), which if viewed in the eyes of a 5th century alchemist, would be viewed as pure alchemy in its complexity. Basically, though, it’s like the nanotechnology of IVF: while a typical artificial insemination process requires 50,000-100,000 sperm cells per attempted fertilization, ICSI can fertilize an egg with one. Simply remarkable. I’ll explain in the future why we had to go this route.
ICSI is an incredible leap forward in technology, and as a tech-adjacent person, my mind immediately goes to thinking of ICSI’s origins. The hypothesis I went in with aligned with my Salkian hopes: this was invented in a publicly-funded lab by researchers seeking out demonstratable technology that could be replicated and, eventually, made more cost-effective.
And wouldn’t you know it — I was right. At the time of his breakthrough research into ICSI, Gianpiero Palermo was teaching professor at Vrije Universiteit in Belgium, which is funded by combined private dollars and state funding. Ultimately, the procedure was adopted by clinics globally as the preferred method for helping patients with male-factor infertility to conceive. And while this procedure became widely adopted, Dr. Palermo raised $100 million in Series A funding from multiple Sand Hill investors to privatize the technology (cough) I mean, continued to study and teach at universities worldwide on the topic. Moreover, he even published a cautionary article on the abuse/overuse of the technology he discovered.
The discovery of this life-changing technology isn’t what fascinates me. It’s that, along the way, the creator of it didn’t become insanely rich. It didn’t make a venture capitalist wealthy. And it didn’t create a new crop of angel investors working for PalermoCo who cashed out and now boast a portfolio of startups they’ve funded, yet by many measurements, we would view a technology that does not achieve those things as menial or uninteresting, and that is a fundamental problem with the state of technology and its investors today.
Meanwhile, it did make two folks parents, and as I rock my son back and forth typing this, that is a measureable difference that is priceless.