SPAIN: The child could have been born in 1993 but its first experience of the world came 13 years later, or nine months after an embryo was pulled out of the freezer at a Spanish fertility clinic.
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 196 degrees in a freezer cabinet awaiting its adoptive parents.
The original parents had donated the fertilised egg to the Instituto Marques clinic after a sibling was born from a separate embryo successfully implanted in the mother's womb.
In the meantime, the baby has missed the first 13 birthday parties of a sibling who, under other circumstances, might have been considered a non-identical twin.
On the scientific level, the birth has proved that frozen fertilised 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.
It was not revealed yesterday whether the embryo had been implanted into a Spanish woman or into any of the foreigners who travel to the Instituto Marques for IVF treatment.
The fertilised egg was one of six created by the genetic parents, three of which were used in the original treatment. The three others were put up for adoption and at least one was accepted by the new couple. It was not clear yesterday whether any of the remaining fertilised eggs were still in the clinic's freezer cabinet.
Doctors Maria Luisa Lopez-Teijon and Juan Alvarez are to publish a report on the birth in the Cambridge-based Reproductive Bio Medicine journal in December. The journal has already made preliminary information available to online subscribers.
The doctors would not discuss the case yesterday, but a representative of the clinic confirmed details published in the Spanish press. The doctors have called a press conference for next week.
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.
"Parents variously conceptualised frozen embryos as biological tissue, living entities, 'virtual' children having interests that must be considered and protected, siblings of their living children, genetic or psychological 'insurance policies', and symbolic reminders of their past infertility," he wrote in the society's journal, Fertility and Sterility, last year. - (Guardian service)