every 15 seconds or so a batch of human eggs is extracted from a woman somewhere on the planet most of the time they come from women who plan to use them in their own IVF treatment but a growing number come from donors in many cases donors are paid only a few hundred but for a select group women who are considered educated beautiful athletic and Tall the payout can run in the tens of thousands I followed one such shipment of eggs across continents the eggs came from a model in Argentina who was paid $35,000 I was in the operating room in buen Ates when 43 eggs were retrieved we are doing an oi retrieval the embryologist will pour the content of the tube in a dish and search for the eggs he quickly dissects a little bit of the egg and put it them away in that incubator a month later they started an 8,000m trip to California I followed the eggs through Argentine Customs onto flights to New York and Los Angeles and finally to a cargo warehouse on the edge of LAX I was even with them 57 hours later when they were rolled into a clinic in Beverly Hills by the end of the trip the cardboard box holding the eggs was dented and damaged at one point I even witnessed an American Airlines cargo Handler tossing the box like any other piece of luggage and it’s on its side I never did find out if the heavy-handedness damaged the precious cargo inside better egg freezing and shipping technology is underpinning the increase in global trade what that means is that we’re likely to see even more shipments like the one that I followed