Final thoughts.

We live in a world so uncertain, so chancy, that we seek to fill it with certainty: fundamentalist truth, hard numbers, insurance policies, political correctness, regulatory schemes, IRBs, and tenure. But the truth is, nothing can save you from the loss at the heart of it all, the probability that you will wake, blinking, from a darkness you could not imagine, to a lit world you cannot expect. A fundamentalist politician can have a beloved gay daughter or a 15-year-old pregnant one, Wall Street firms can evaporate, you can lose your job, your house, America can lose wars, lose its cheerful, optimistic way. Nowhere is this uncertainty more terrifying true than in medicine, the tragic world to which bioethics attends. You can get cancer, your child can get cancer, and sickened and afraid, the choices you make just then will bridle or set loose the dark horse that is the future, and it will gallop off into parts unknown. In this chancy world comes the scientist, and really, it is not her fault that she is so determined. Against the angst of the philosopher, and the desperation of the patients, and the exhaustion of the physician, the scientist must do her work, which is to try to reduce, just a bit, the sense of unknowingness, the mysterious blank undiscovered nature of the world. It is into this world, of chance and loss and uncertainty, that I was invited in early 2003. Teresa Woodruff, a scientist with a big idea, and little more, invited me to think with her about the ethical issues in infertility research, not for women seeking IVF, but for a certain population of women, women facing the mortality and morbidity of cancer who yet yearned to survive and bear children. These women faced a paradox: they had chosen to struggle toward a treatment for cancer, but it bore great risks. First, it might not work or only work for a time. Second, it would likely destroy or diminish their ability to bear children, as we used to say, and non-ironically, naturally. It was one of the first questions a scientist asked me to think about when I arrived at Northwestern and, certainly not tangentially, Woodruff was one of my first colleagues to want a new interdisciplinarity at the core of her research. She wondered: could ovarian tissue be frozen, stored, and