A couple of very strange questions I need answered.

[gridlore]

I'm working on a story. Don't mind me.

1. How many eggs would you normally find in the ovaries of a health woman ih er twenties?

2. After death, how long do you have to harvest those eggs before they become unusable? The death in question comes from the failure of the long-sleep system on a slower-than-light colony vessel. So assume a fairly sterile environment with no insects or scavengers getting at the body.

Don't worry, this is not the main focus of the plot, I just need the right numbers to plug in when the time comes.

Comments

[kengr]

1. Maybe two. Eggs form from oocytes IIRC. You get an egg and a polar body once a month, sometimes you get one in each ovary maturing.

You have to admister drugs and wait a bit to get bunches of them to mature for harvesting. If she's dead, ain't gonna happen.

BTW, after a similar topic came up on the Swarm Mailing List, someone did some checking and it seems that contrary to popular myth, menopause does *not* mean the ovaries have run out of eggs (or oocytes if you want to get technical)

You won't have as many as you have sperm generating cells in a male, but the total *possible* number is more in the thousands than the hundreds.

2. See above. You'll have to harvest intact ovaries and keep them alive and functional. My guess is an hour. Allowing for the chill, maybe several hours.

Two factors. First, the cells are apt to go non functional if deprived of blood circulation (and hence of oxygen and waste removal).

Second, bacteria and even some of the body's defender cells will start attacking things if left alone.

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

The eggs in the ovary are stored in follicles (from folliculus, meaning sack in Latin). These cellular sacks contain the eggs; as well as granulosa cells and theca cells which nurture the egg , and produce the female hormones. The ovary has about 2 million eggs during fetal life. From that point onwards, the number of eggs progressively decreases, till only about 300,000 eggs are left at the time of birth - a lifetime's stock. During the fertile years fewer than 500 of these eggs will be released into the fallopian tubes - once in each menstrual cycle. Unlike the testis which is continually churning out billions of new sperm, the ovary never produces any new eggs. One of the existing eggs is matured for ovulation each month.(/i>.

No idea how long after death, but these links might give you a starting point for some investigation.

http://www.clevelandclinic.org/reproductiveresearchcenter/info/patientinfo4.html

http://www.infertilityspecialist.com/ovarian_cryopreservation.html

http://www.rbej.com/content/6/1/47