A woman in California has become pregnant with sperm taken from her husband after he was already dead, according to the latest issue of the British journal New Scientist.
In the first case of its kind, sperm was extracted from Bruce Vernoff, a 35-year-old man who had died 24 hours earlier from a reaction to medication, and were frozen.
The sperm was later defrosted and injected into an egg removed from his widow, Gaby, which was then implanted in her womb. She is now four weeks pregnant, and has asked to avoid publicity until the end of the third month.
Other women in the past, including Ms Diane Blood in Britain, have become pregnant with sperm taken from men before they died. But this is the first time the sperm obtained after the father's death has been used.
The pioneering work was carried out by Dr Cappy Rothman and a team at Century City Hospital in Los Angeles. He told the New Scientist: "It gives people hope and lessens the pain of suddenly losing a loved one."
But it is certain to spark an intense ethical argument about dead people being used as genetic parents.
In Britain, Ms Blood had to fight a legal battle to win the right to be implanted with her husband's sperm because he had been too ill to give his consent for it to be used. A court finally allowed her to take the sperm to Belgium for implantation, but the authorities have since closed the loophole.
For the first time, doctors said, they have performed successful foetal surgery on a child suffering from spina bifida at 23 weeks into the gestation period.
The child, Noah Kipfmiller, is now two months old and perfectly healthy. His case could pave the way for a normal life for the estimated 1,500 babies born in the US each year with spina bifida.
"It feels good to know my baby can help others," said Ms Mellissa Kipfmiller of Bay City, Michigan, as she watched Noah, her first child, wiggle his toes. "I couldn't help but compare him to the other babies. And he didn't seem to be moving any slower than the other ones," she said. "For some reason, I knew all along this was going to work out."
After only 20 weeks in his mother's womb, doctors could see that Noah's backbone had not closed. His spinal cord was partially deformed and nerve bundles were protruding from his back.
The only hope was to let doctors operate on the foetus while it remained in the mother's womb.
Five of the seven babies who have undergone the open-womb operation have survived and have shown improved prognoses. The other two babies have not been delivered yet, according to Dr Joseph Bruner, director of foetal diagnosis and therapy at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee.
But, excluding Noah, those surgeries were conducted significantly later in the pregnancy - at 28 weeks. Conducting the surgery sooner can reduce the chance of spinal damage, he said.
"This has not been scientifically proven to be beneficial, but I've seen things come and go, and heard a lot of promises, and it's obvious to me this is the real thing," said Dr Bruner, who conducted most of those spina bifida surgeries.
"Patients may now have the opportunity of having this surgery done earlier in hope of a better outcome and more options."