Inside the opaque world of IVF, where errors are rarely made public

It was one of the worst accidents in the history of reproductive medicine.

A storage tank at a San Francisco fertility center imploded, its trove of 4,000 human eggs and embryos damaged or destroyed. A jury later found that a manufacturing defect was largely to blame for the disaster but also implicated the center. The lab director had unplugged a malfunctioning computer, muting 128 alarms that warned of trouble. Lab personnel did not transfer the contents of the vessel to a backup tank when the computer failed. And there is no evidence that repairs were initiated for the 13 days between these first problems and the implosion.