My daughter should be born around December 6. 10 days ago my wife and I were decided to cryopreserve her cord blood in a bank. The service is expensive (depending on the company, between 500 and 1500 to get in and then between 100 and 500 per year). They of course agressively market the service with cute pictures of babies, cozy scenes with small children holding onto their parents' hands, all kinds of corny-cheesy images targeted at making you feel that you are a very bad parent if you don't do this for your children. Most of them also publish a very long list of illnesses which cord blood cells might someday help to cure.
We were about signing the contracts and giving my credit card number to one of the companies when I decided to consult my sister in law. I know nothing of science, she does. She's from Argentina, like me, but she's at Harvard doing a post doc in genetic biology. She, in turn, checked with the guys at the lab next door... specially a woman who works on stem cells and who has had a baby a couple of months ago. My sister in law did a little research and came to this conclusion:
Each and every scientist she talked to turned out to be very skeptic, even surprised, at the fact that someone is actually offering to cure illnesses with cord blood stem cells. True, in the future therapies and treatments based on stem cells might be developed... but that doesn't mean that someone knows how to isolate and store those cells today so that they are useful some day. It is all, in her opinion, a scam... these people are manipulating your emotions to get your money. Which makes it harder to trust them on how well they will preserve the cord blood cells. This might perhaps make sense for someone from a family with a history of leukemia, because it's a blood illness and treatements for leukemia based on cord blood have been developed. Even in this case, more conventional treatments are usually effective with leukemia.
Now, this is the predicament I face. I gave you the whole narrative. As an immortalist, I don't want to lose any chance... and I'm thinking not only of my children... my wife or I myself (as the cord-blood companies kindly remind us) might be in a position to use those cord blood cells in the future (50% of possibility that my child's stem cells are compatible). At the same time, I don't have much money and I don't want to give it away to someone who is selling false promises and who is pretending to be backed by science, but is not.
Any opinions? data? advice? How do I solve this Immortalist Dilemma?