We are expecting our first child in August and have seen a lot of adverts for cord blood banking - the idea is that the blood in your baby's umbilical cord contains stem cells that might be useful for curing diseases later in life and so you should bank the blood as a form of insurance. The ads and marketing literature are very compelling, but of course that's what they're designed for! We've done a little basic research, and it looks like not everyone agrees that banking cord blood is desirable (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_blood_bank). However, as my wife pointed out, while the organizations in that wikipedia article who
recommend against banking are the kinds of people who should know what's best for mothers and babies, they don't necessarily seem like the best people to judge the potential effectiveness of stem cell therapies.I'm posting this in the hope that there are some biotech folks reading Hacker News who can cut through the marketing spin and give us a straight answer - would you do this yourself, for your own children?