13 Year Old Embryo Brings New Life

Snapshots In My Time...
Of My Time.....Hauntings.

Science is an amazing thing! A frozen embryo has been thawed, implanted and had just been delivered after 13 years of being frozen. This remarkable birth was done in a Spanish fertility clinic in Barcelona.

The clinic in Barcelona is claiming the world record for having brought about the birth of what could be termed the world's oldest baby. Conceived in a laboratory dish, but not used at the time, the embryo sat at minus 196C in a freezer cabinet awaiting its adoptive parents.

On the scientific level, the birth has proved that frozen fertilized eggs - which are usually referred to as embryos but are technically pre-embryos - can survive for much longer than the five-year restriction in some countries. In Britain there is almost always a 10-year limit. If the child had been born in Britain it would have had the right, under the terms of a law passed in April last year, to find out who its genetic parents were. Under Spanish law the child does not have that right.

The original parents used three and the three remaining eggs that were harvested were put up for adoption. No one knows who got the egg as it has not been revealed. The article also talks about something called "embryo dilemma." What do to with all the frozen embryos left over.

An estimated half a million frozen embryos, almost all of them left over from in vitro treatment, are being kept in the US alone. The previous record for a successfully implanted embryo was 12 years.

Doctors recently coined the term "the embryo dilemma" to express the difficulty many parents of embryos have when it comes to giving instructions for them to be thawed and, in effect, disposed of.

"Until recently, I don't know if any of us were aware of the scope of the embryo dilemma," Robert Nachtigall, an endocrinologist, told last year's meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "For many couples, it seems there is no good decision; yet they still take it seriously morally."

Full Story Here

I for one had not thought about that! Had you? It makes me think of The Matrix. Remember the field of babies?

Odd~Science~technology~News