60 Minutes - 08/03/2025: Demis Hassabis and Freezing the Biological Clock

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Demis Hassabis, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is shaping the future of humanity. As the CEO of Google DeepMind, he was first interviewed by correspondent Scott Pelley in 2023, during a time when chatbots marked the beginning of a new technological era. Since that interview, Hassabis has made headlines for his innovative work, including using an AI model to predict the structure of proteins, which earned him a Nobel Prize. Pelley returns to DeepMind’s headquarters in London to discuss what’s next for Hassabis, particularly his leadership in the effort to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a type of AI that has the potential to match the versatility and creativity of the human brain. Fertility rates in the United States are currently near historic lows, largely because fewer women are having children in their 20s. As women delay starting families, many are opting for egg freezing, the process of retrieving and freezing unfertilized eggs, to preserve their fertility for the future. Does egg freezing provide women with a way to pause their biological clock? Correspondent Lesley Stahl interviews women who have decided to freeze their eggs and explores what the process entails physically, emotionally and financially. She also speaks with fertility specialists and an ethicist about success rates, equity issues and the increasing market potential of egg freezing. This is a double-length segment. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TV Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD. Ready for you. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime.

Their symptoms and history are clues. You saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson, all episodes now streaming on Paramount+. Paramount Plus. It's moving incredibly fast. Few understand the speed of artificial intelligence like Dimas Hasabas.

He won a Nobel Prize and showed us what's coming next. It's reasoning. Yep, definitely, yes. AI, he told us, promises a future of wonder. The end of disease? I think that's within reach. Maybe within the next decade or so. I don't see why not.

Let's get some eggs. Let's go. Let's get some eggs. More and more American women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility. Those are the eggs. Could egg freezing offer what previous generations only dreamed of? The chance to put the biological clock on ice. There definitely is that TikTok clock and I'm not ready quite yet.

I think that egg freezing is as revolutionary as the pill was in 1960s and 70s. It's as revolutionary as the pill. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim.

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Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms and history are clues. We saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson. All episodes now streaming on Paramount+.

When Demis Hasabis won the Nobel Prize last year, he celebrated by playing poker with a world champion of chess. Hasabas loves a game, which is how he became a pioneer of artificial intelligence. The 49-year-old British scientist is co-founder and CEO of Google's AI powerhouse called DeepMind. We met two years ago when chatbots announced a new age. Now, as we first told you this past spring, Hasabas and others are chasing what's called artificial general intelligence, a silicon intellect as versatile as a human, but with superhuman speed and knowledge.

After his Nobel and a knighthood from King Charles, we hurried back to London to see what's next from a genius who may hold the cards of our future. What's always guided me and the passion I've always had is understanding the world around us. I've always been, since I was a kid, fascinated by the biggest questions, you know, the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality itself. I've loved reading about all the great scientists who worked on these problems and the philosophers, and I wanted to see if we could advance human knowledge. And for me, my expression of doing

that was to build what I think is the ultimate tool for for advancing human knowledge which is which is AI. We sat down in this room two years ago and I wonder if AI is moving faster today than you imagined. It's moving incredibly fast. I think we are on some kind of exponential curve of improvement. Of course the success of the field in the last few years has attracted even more attention, more resources, more talent. So that's adding to this exponential progress. Exponential curve, in other words, straight up.

Yep, straight up and increasing speed of progress. Start. We saw the progress. Hello, Scott, it's nice to see you again. In an artificial companion that can see and hear and chat about anything. Early chat bots learned only the internet. An app called Astra also takes in the world. Do we call her she?

It's a good question. I'm not sure we all know the answer yet. Bebo Shu is product manager for Project Astra, an app in a new generation of chatbots that interpret the world with their own eyes. We challenged Astra with virtual paintings we chose and showed to Astra for the first time. This is July Hay by Thomas Hart Benton from 1942. How about this one? That is The Virgin of Charity by El Greco.

That painting is Automat by Edward Hopper. The person in the painting, what emotion is she exhibiting? The subject in the painting appears pensive and contemplative, her expression suggesting a sense of solitude. Can you create a story around this picture? It's a chilly evening in the city, a Tuesday perhaps. The woman, perhaps named Eleanor, sits alone in the diner. She is feeling melancholy due to the uncertainty of her future and the weight of unfulfilled

dreams. The scene freezes in time, only the flow of ideas moving onward." That line, only the flow of ideas moving onward? I wish I'd written that. And did we hear a limit to Astra's patience? What was that fictional conversation about? Ah, in the story I imagined, Eleanor and her friend talked about their shared dreams and the challenges of pursuing them. Something about the way you said ah made me wonder if you were getting bored. I apologize if my tone came across that way. My aim is always to engage thoughtfully. And she said, well, I'm sorry if you don't like my tone.

Well, you see... What's happening there? Well, that's interesting. That's again a challenge with these systems as they act in the moment with the context that's around them, and that may have never been tested before. He's often surprised because AI programs are sent out on the internet to learn for themselves. They can return later with unexpected skills. So we have theories about what kinds of capabilities these systems will have. That's obviously what we try to build into the architectures.

But at the end of the day, how it learns, what it picks up from the data, is part of the training of these systems. We don't program that in. It learns like a human being would learn. So new capabilities or properties can emerge from that training situation. You understand how that would worry people. Of course. It's the duality of these types of systems. That they're able to do incredible things,

go beyond the things that we're able to design ourselves or understand ourselves. But of course, the challenge is making sure that the knowledge databases they create, we understand what's in them. Now DeepMind is training its AI model called Gemini to not just reveal the world, but to act in it, like booking tickets and shopping online. It's a step toward AGI, artificial general intelligence, with the versatility of a human mind.

On track for AGI? In the next five to 10 years, I think. And in 2030, you will have what? Well, we'll have a system that really understand everything around you in very nuanced and deep ways and kind of embedded in your everyday life. Embedded like Astra in eyeglasses. What can you tell me about this building I'm looking at?

This is the Cole Drops Yard, a shopping and dining district. She sees what I see. There's a speaker in the earpiece only I can hear. What was it originally before it became shops? The Coal Drops yard was originally a set of Victorian coal warehouses used to receive and distribute coal across London. Was coal ever a problem for the environment in London?

Yes, coal was a significant source of air pollution in London, particularly during the Industrial Revolution. It occurred to us that the only thing we contributed to this relationship were legs, which will also soon be engineered. I also think another big area will be robotics. I think it will have a breakthrough moment in the next couple of years where we'll have demonstrations of maybe humanoid robots or other types of robots that can start really doing useful things. For example, researchers Alex Lee and Giulia Vizzani showed us a robot that understands

what it sees and reasons its way through vague instructions. Put the blocks whose color is the combination of yellow and blue into the matching color ball. The combination of yellow and blue is green and it figured that out. It's reasoning. Yep, definitely, yes. The toys of Demis Hisabas's childhood weren't blocks, but chess pieces. At 12, he was the number two champion in the world for his age. This passion led to computer chess, video games, and finally, thinking machines. He was born to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother.

Cambridge, MIT, Harvard. He's a computer scientist with a PhD in neuroscience because he reasoned he had to understand the human brain first. Are you working on a system today that would be self-aware? I don't think any of today's systems, to me, feel self-aware or conscious in any way. Obviously, everyone needs to make their own decisions by interacting with these chatbots. I think theoretically it's possible. But is self-awareness a goal of yours?

Not explicitly, but it may happen implicitly. These systems might acquire some feeling of self-awareness. That is possible. I think it's important for these systems to understand you, self and other, and that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness. But he says if a machine becomes self-aware, we may not recognize it.

I think there's two reasons we regard each other as conscious. One is that you're exhibiting the behavior of a conscious being, very similar to my behavior. But the second thing is, you're running on the same substrate. We're made of the same carbon matter with our squishy brains. Now obviously with machines, they're running on silicon. So even if they exhibit the same behaviors,

and even if they say the same things, it doesn't necessarily mean that this sensation of consciousness that we have is the same thing they will have. Has an AI engine ever asked a question that was unanticipated? Not so far that I've experienced. And I think that's getting at the idea of what's still missing from these systems. They still can't really yet go beyond asking a new novel question or a new novel conjecture or coming up with a new hypothesis that has not been thought of before. They don't have curiosity.

No, they don't have curiosity and they're probably lacking a little bit in what we would call imagination and intuition. But they will have greater imagination, he says, and soon. I think actually in the next maybe five to ten years, I think we'll have systems that are capable of not only solving an important problem or conjecture in science, but coming up with it in the first place. Solving an important problem won Hasabas a Nobel Prize last year.

He and colleague John Jumper created an AI model that deciphered the structure of proteins. Proteins are the basic building blocks of life. So everything in biology, everything in your body depends on proteins. You know, your neurons firing, your muscle fibers twitching, it's all mediated by proteins. But 3D protein structures like this are so complex, less than 1% were known. Mapping each one used to take years.

DeepMind's AI model did 200 million in one year. Now, Hasabis has AI blazing through solutions to drug development. So on average, it takes 10 years know, ten years and billions of dollars to design just one drug. We could maybe reduce that down from years to maybe months, or maybe even weeks, which sounds incredible today, but that's also what people used to think

about protein structures. It would revolutionize human health, and I think one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI. The end of disease? I think that's within reach. Maybe within the next decade or so. I don't see why not.

Demis Isabis told us AI could lead to what he calls radical abundance, the elimination of scarcity. But he also worries about risk. There's two worries that I worry about. One is that bad actors, human people, you know, users of these systems, repurpose these systems for harmful ends. Then the second thing is the AI systems themselves, as they become more autonomous and more powerful,

can we make sure that we can keep control of the systems, that they're aligned with our values, they're doing what we want that benefits society, and they stay on guardrails. Guardrails are safety limits built into the system. And I wonder if the race for AI dominance is a race to the bottom for safety. So that's one of my big worries, actually, is that, of course, all of this energy and racing and resources is great for progress, but it might incentivize certain actors in that

to cut corners. And one of the corners that can be shortcut would be safety and responsibility. So the question is, is how can we coordinate more, you know, as leading players, but also nation states even? I think this is an international thing. AI is going to affect every country,

everybody in the world. So I think it's really important that the world and the international community has a say in this. Can you teach an AI agent morality? I think you can. They learn by demonstration. They learn by teaching. And I think that's one of the things we have to do with these systems is to give them a value system and a guidance and some guardrails around that, much in the way that you would teach a child. One of the things we have to do with these systems is to give them a value system and

a guidance and some guardrails around that, much in the way that you would teach a child. Google DeepMind is in a race with dozens of others striving for artificial general intelligence, so human that you can't tell the difference. Which made us think about Demis Hasaba's signing the Nobel Book of Laureates. When does a machine sign for the first time? And after that, will humans ever sign it again? I think in the next steps it's going to be these amazing tools that enhance our, almost every endeavor we do as humans.

And then beyond that, when AGI arrives, I think it's gonna change pretty much everything about the way we do things. And it's almost, I think we need new great philosophers to come about, hopefully in the next five, 10 years, to understand the implications of this. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. AI systems.

Hungry now? Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O. Henry Bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big crunchy salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating, swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today. O'Henry, O'Henry. Fertility rates in the U.S. are near historic lows. One reason is a sharp decline over the last three decades in the number of American women

having babies in their twenties. And yet there's been no change in women's biology or the age at which fertility declines. Unsolvable problem? Enter egg freezing. As we first reported earlier this year, freezing embryos for in-vitro fertilization, IVF, has been possible for decades. But freezing unfertilized eggs was a tougher scientific challenge used initially for patients with cancer and other conditions that threatened fertility.

Egg freezing, for non-medical reasons, an accepted practice 12 years ago, and since then, demand has skyrocketed, with hundreds of thousands of eggs now frozen, raising big money, big hopes, and big questions. Could egg freezing offer women what previous generations only dreamed of, the chance to put that dreaded ticking of the biological clock on ice? Early one rainy Tuesday, Kate Sonderreger came to a fertility clinic in midtown Manhattan to undergo a minor surgical procedure to harvest and then freeze her eggs. The next morning, at a different fertility center, we scrubbed up and met another egg-freezing patient, Katherine Schneider.

Her doctor, Tomer Singer, head of Northwell Health's fertility practice, escorted her into the O.R. Let's get some eggs. Let's go. Let's get some eggs. Egg retrieval is the culmination of an arduous process. Nearly two weeks of daily, self-administered hormone injections, sometimes several a day. The shots induce the ovaries to ripen multiple follicles,

the sacs that contain eggs, so that a surgeon can go in with a tiny needle. You can see the white end of the needle. And drain the fluid in those follicles, which is then run into an adjacent embryology lab to search for the eggs. So the patient is right around the corner? Correct.

We watched as a pair of embryologists did the delicate work of maneuvering tiny pipettes under a microscope to find and isolate Catherine's egg cells in the fluid. And here are all the eggs together. See? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Wait, those little black balls are... Those are the eggs? Those are the eggs. Oh my goodness.

After a few hours, the eggs are put onto tiny special straws, then plunged into liquid nitrogen and stored in tanks at negative 320 degrees where they will stay possibly for years until their owner is ready to thaw them, add sperm and turn them into embryos which is effectively the second half of IVF. According to the data thus far, as with IVF, there are no differences in the health of babies born from frozen eggs. I think that egg freezing is as revolutionary as the pill was in the 1960s and 70s.

It's as revolutionary as the pill? Yeah. That changed everything, as you know. I know. Women had the option of choosing who to be with and not to accidentally get pregnant with the wrong guy. Egg freezing took it to an extra level. So you don't have to have a baby at 30 because you're 30 or 35.

You can delay fertility into your 40s. You'll have women having kids in their late 40s with their own eggs that were freezing in their 20s and 30s. There's a famous painting of the young woman with tears going down her face, oops I forgot to have a baby. That won't be true anymore. Correct. I think that we're pushing the envelope. I'm currently 40. I froze my eggs when I was 35. The first time I did it I was 34 years old and the second time I was 36. I did two cycles last year when I was 34.

We spoke to a group of women about their decision to freeze their eggs. Why is it a good idea? I 100 percent know that I really would love to have children. Yasmin Higby is 30, works in in consulting and has a serious boyfriend. I'll be able to enjoy these times with my partner a bit more instead of rushing to have kids because there definitely is that TikTok clock that started and I'm not ready quite yet. It's an insurance.

I know that I'm going to be an older mother. Namitha Jacob, 38, a health care administrator and strategist, isn't ready yet because she hasn't found the right partner. It takes the stress away from dating. You're not pressured to find someone and settle down and get married. You don't hear the ticking. That damn biological clock.

It ticks in every woman's head. Amazing. Like it or not, says Dr. Lucky Sikhan of Fertility Clinic RMA of New York, that damn clock is very real. We're born with all of the eggs that we're ever going to have, and we don't make new eggs, and we can't fix or repair them. It's always decreasing over time. So you're born with a number.

Yes. And it starts decreasing right away? It pretty much starts decreasing even before you're born. You're a fetus in your mother's womb at 20 weeks, and that's when you have the peak number of eggs, 6 to 7 million. You have eggs at 20 weeks, and that's when you have the peak number of eggs, 6 to 7 million. You have eggs at 20 weeks? Yes.

And from then on, the number keeps going down, and the eggs keep aging. So when you freeze an egg, you are stopping it from aging any further. Correct. So if you remove the egg and freeze it when you're 28... Right. That egg is 28 years old.

Yep. Until you thaw it when you're 28. Right. That egg is 28 years old. Yep. Until you thought. Yes, it's incredible. Because it's not just the quantity of women's eggs that decreases with age, it's also their quality, meaning their likelihood of becoming a baby. Even at peak fertility, in women's 20s, some 25% of eggs, when combined with sperm, will create embryos that are chromosomally abnormal and will likely lead to miscarriages,

and the percentages rise from there. As you get to 35, that number has steadily increased to about 30 to 35% of embryos being abnormal from your 35 year old eggs. At 37, 38 years of age, 50 percent. That's a turning point. Things start to move more rapidly. And at 40, you're looking at 60 to 70 percent of embryos being abnormal. By 45, 90 percent.

90 percent. Correct. A lot of times, people think that if they've done all the right things, if they've led a healthy lifestyle, they do yoga, they've never smoked a cigarette in their lives, they feel younger than their age and they feel like their eggs will be younger than their age. And I have to explain to them that we have no data to suggest that you can influence your egg quality in that way, unfortunately.

Is there an optimal age to freeze your eggs? Yes, your 20s, because that's when you're at your lowest possible rate of genetic errors in the embryos that result from those eggs. And you also have a lot more eggs at that age. Kate decided to freeze her eggs at the unusually young age of 22 because she's going to medical school and knows she has a long journey ahead of her. You know, education for four years,

training for anywhere from four to seven years after that, and so I'm not even going to think about building a family personally until after I'm done with all of that. Younger and younger women are beginning to freeze their eggs. When I started doing egg freezing in 2012, most of the women were 40, 41, 42. When I see patients today, most of them are late 20s, early 30s. He says there used to be a stigma,

as though freezing eggs meant something hadn't worked out in a patient's life, but not anymore. It became a common thing. It's almost empowering. You come in, I'm in my 30s, I'm not ready for a baby. I want to freeze my eggs, I'm not going to compromise on the wrong guy. Freezing eggs is expensive. A single cycle, including medication, costs an average of $12,000 to $15,000, plus another $500,000 to $1,000 each year for storage. To thaw and

fertilize the eggs later on costs an additional $10,000. Back in 2014, Apple and Facebook made headlines when they started offering egg freezing as a covered benefit for their employees. Today, more than a third of the largest corporations in the U.S., those with 20,000 or more employees, cover egg freezing, our parent company Paramount among them. When I was job searching, it was something I was really looking for. Carissa Simic changed jobs three years ago. More and more companies started to offer it or I was seeing it.

So that was a consideration? Absolutely. As to where you worked? Yes, absolutely. Her egg freezing cycles were covered, as were Namitha's. But there's also been criticism of those companies' motives. There are some people who feel that the companies do that to keep you at work so that you won't have a child and leave, not to make you happy, but to keep you at your desk. I personally don't see it that way.

When I learned about the fact that they're offering this really wonderful benefit, it made me more dedicated and committed to my company, actually. It's a good way to retain top talent. My insurance did not cover egg freezing at the time. Tina Rampino, now 46, learned about egg freezing in its early days, when she went for a routine doctor's visit at age 35 and got a message she wasn't expecting. My gynecologist said to me, have kids now. You're running out of time. You can get married whenever you want to get married, but you can't have kids forever.

Whoa. And I went home, and I think I cried. And I was like, what should I do? The doctor had mentioned egg freezing. And I said, you know, this is kind of scary, but I decided to do it. Paying out of pocket, she froze 10 eggs, which she considered her backup plan. I did not have a partner. Lindsay Smiths and Stanley also paid out of pocket when she froze her eggs at 35.

A few years later, she got engaged to Paul. They want children, but not until they're married and Lindsay finishes her Ph.D. So Dr. Singer recommended thawing her 18 frozen eggs, fertilizing them with Paul's sperm, and then doing genetic testing to assess viability. That's a day five hatching... Which is possible once fertilized eggs grow into five to seven-day-old embryos.

The results? Lindsay and Paul have four chromosom day old embryos. The results? Lindsay and Paul have four chromosomally normal embryos on ice waiting for them. Did they tell you the gender? We have two boys and two girls. You can't stop grinning. It's exciting! Tina's story took a different turn. After the pandemic, still single, she decided to become a single mother by choice and selected a sperm donor. I had just turned 40 and I knew that motherhood was something that I always wanted. Sorry, I'm like... But the first embryo created from her frozen eggs failed to implant. But then, a second embryo from her frozen eggs did. She gave birth to a son, Christopher.

He's such a happy, healthy boy. He's so playful. He loves people. On the day that I started my egg freezing cycle, I screenshotted a quote that said, do something today that your future self will thank you for. And that is something that I think about all the time because that really was the decision that changed my life. But not every egg freezing story has such a happy ending.

It was just devastating. It's really the worst thing that's ever happened to me by far. They think they have an insurance policy that they don't have. Does egg freezing promise young women more than it can deliver? When we come back. More and more American women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility. The number of procedures has increased more than six times over, from 6,000 in 2014 to more than 39,000 in 2023, with numbers continuing to go up from there.

Investors have taken notice, seeing a market that could one day include a significant percentage of all young American women. Venture capital and private equity firms have backed egg freezing startups and have bought up and invested in existing private and academic fertility clinics to consolidate them into giant networks. But not everyone is convinced that egg freezing

is such a gift to young women. You're taking the financial cost, you're taking the medical cost for what? For a gamble. Vardit Ravitsky is president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, and is a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. The women we've spoken to, they're almost giddy with this choice. They say that they're freezing the biological clock. That ticking thing is, you know, unbearable and it's gone. I totally understand why young women are excited about it.

My fear when I hear young women say, I froze the biological clock, is that they think this is guaranteed. They think I put a baby on ice, not my eggs, and I'm just going to go and thaw it when I'm ready to become a mother. It's not that. That's the problem. She points to stories like Evelyn Gosnell's. Evelyn froze her eggs three times, at ages 32, 36, and 38,

for a total of 30 eggs, considered a very safe number. Did you have some level of comfort? Absolutely. Even my doctor was like, that's insane, like, this is going to be a breeze, totally, no problem. But when Evelyn and her now-fiance Edward went to use her 30 frozen eggs, only 19 survived

the thaw, an unusually poor result. Even worse, once those 19 eggs were fertilized, only one grew to be an embryo. Anxiously hoping for positive results, they sent a few cells off for genetic testing to see if the embryo was viable. So I was at work and got this message saying, we have your test results. Before we give them to you, just confirming if you want to know the sex. Boy, girl. I just started to think, oh, wow, they've asked me this, if I want to know the sex,

it means that there's a real embryo there, it means that this is real, it's normal, it's going to be fine, it's all going to be good. And then, boom, I get the report, and I open it, and it's abnormal, and it was a girl. There was no chance the embryo could become a baby. Stories like Evelyn's are heartbreaking, and though rare, there have also been incidents where a storage tank has malfunctioned and thousands of eggs and embryos have been destroyed.

Dr. Lucky Seacon says she explains to all her patients that frozen eggs can never be a guarantee, because just as in naturally occurring pregnancies, there is drop-off at every step along the way. She calls it an inverted pyramid. It's like you start out with this many eggs and then this many fertilize, this many turn into embryos, this many embryos are actually genetically healthy,

and this many embryos actually implant. You're taking a bet. It's a gamble that you'll actually need these eggs, it's a gamble that it would work, and even if you manage to get pregnant, the older you are, the riskier it is to be pregnant. So you're taking multiple risks. You're gambling on multiple stages.

But are you saying, don't do it? You know, Leslie, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying it's probably a good option for some people, but I would like young women to really have options. Good job! She believes that society pushes high-achieving women but I would like young women to really have options. Good job! She believes that society pushes high-achieving women to get so much accomplished before they have children

that they run out of time, and it would be better if they could become mothers younger. The optimal time, from a biological medical perspective, is in your 20s or early 30s, but the socially optimal time is later than that. So I think we're telling women, oh, in your 20s, focus on your education, your career, finding a partner, having financial stability, relationship stability, so that when you do have a baby, you can be a responsible mother.

I mean, you're making it sound as if that's wrong. It sounds pretty right to me. What's wrong with that? I think elective egg freezing sends women a message of, okay, don't worry, we have a solution for you. Delay motherhood. It will cost you thousands of dollars. It does involve medical risks.

There's a good chance it won't work at the end, and if it does work, your pregnancy will be riskier for you and for your baby, but that's okay. We have a solution. A better solution, she argues, would be to have policies like paid parental leave, flexible hours, child care at the workplace to make it easier for women to have babies younger. Who's dating? But these women told us they weren't ready to have children younger. Still active and trying to find the right person.

And say they understand there's never certainty. How do they explain that it's not a guarantee? They said exactly those words. it's not a guarantee? They said exactly those words. It is not a guarantee. So what are the chances of success if you freeze your eggs? A 2022 study from one large fertility center found that 70 percent of women who froze at least 20 eggs before the age of 38 had a baby. But success rates dropped off considerably the older women were, and the fewer eggs they froze.

Which means that many women, like Carissa and Namitha, do more than one round of egg freezing to bank more eggs. And that brings us back to the money. Business is booming in the field of fertility, and egg freezing is a big part of it. Companies target women with catchy ads on social media, host fun events like fitness classes, even a manicure, to give women information and draw them in. What I've seen is a transition in my own field. Dr. Marcel Cedars, a fertility specialist with the University of California, San Francisco,

and a past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, says getting women information is great, but she worries that the emphasis on profits she's seeing in private equity-backed fertility companies is creating warped incentives. Have you heard in any companies that are owned by large firms that the doctors are being pressured to encourage more cycles, encourage things that will lead to more revenue. I would hope it's not universal, but that is definitely occurring in some companies. How quickly do you get someone?

How many cycles do you get per patient? That's how revenue is based. That's how payment and compensation is based. And so that's what the motivation becomes. It becomes much more a business. It does. I mean, I have always bristled when I hear my specialty called an industry.

And I think in the past, it wasn't, but I do think it is becoming that. And it is painful to me. Pink number 14. She also worries about the unfairness when lower-income women and those who don't work for large companies can't afford egg freezing.

Vardit Ravitsky agrees. The majority of women who freeze their eggs electively are white and well-resourced. And there's a significant gap in your options their eggs electively are white and well resourced. And there's a significant gap in your options and your reproductive autonomy if you have resources or you don't. Everyone cannot do this. Right.

Poor women. I think we have a lot of work to do as a field. We don't yet know how to properly drive down the cost. It's a very expensive endeavor. If this is being done just for someone's peace of mind, Right. should they go through this? I think it depends on their age and attitude towards family building.

If someone says to me, I'm 35, I know I want children, then yes, I think they should absolutely do this, especially if they say I want to have more than one child, because they might be ready at 37, 38 and have no trouble at all. But when are they going to be ready for baby number two? Stars. Speaking of baby number two, Tina gave birth to a second little boy, Christopher's baby brother Theo, last July, from the final embryo from her frozen eggs.

See the car? Egg freezing technology, Northwell's Dr. Singer thinks, will get better and better. Do you think that one day, virtually every young woman will do this as it would be routine. I really do think so. Once it's going to be affordable, covered by insurance, I'm a big believer that egg freezing and IVF is going to be the way our next generation will expand. I think that having timed intercourse or unprotected intercourse for reproduction is going to be

falling out of favor in the next generation or so. Wait, wait, wait. What? Yeah, I think- What did you just say? I said that sex is going to be for fun and for pleasure, but most likely in the generation from now, when couples want to have kids,

most likely they're going to be using artificial reproductive technique. You'll have frozen eggs. Wait, are you saying that we won't have sex to have children? I'm sure my two-year-old will ask me, mom, dad, you had unprotected intercourse? What about chromosomal abnormalities, miscarriages, twins? What were you doing? Russian roulette. Dr. Singer thinks in the future all women will freeze their eggs so that the only reason to have sex is for fun.

Well, they didn't seem entirely convinced of that. They are definitely with him on egg freezing and the need for more education. Should gynecologists talk about this when you go in and you're young? Yes. Absolutely. Yes. I wonder why they don't. I think our health classes were always, this is how you don't get pregnant. And I think opening the conversation to, this is how your body works,

this is, you know, at what age you might want to consider this if you want a family. Knowledge is just power in this circumstance. If a woman goes to her gynecologist, do you think that doctor should introduce a subject? Consider this if you want a family. Knowledge is just power in this circumstance. If a woman goes to her gynecologist, do you think that doctor should introduce a subject? I think it's a good idea. I do. It's a very sensitive topic, so you have to kind of navigate it carefully.

You don't want to be judgmental. Not everyone has to freeze their eggs. Not everyone has to have children. But everyone should take the moment to consider their options and really think about what they want. A piece of good news. Evelyn, whose egg freezing journey led to heartbreak, kept trying. And after many more rounds of egg retrieval and IVF, in December, she and Edward welcomed

a baby girl. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms and history are clues.

You saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson, all episodes now streaming on Paramount+.