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A triplet born 11 years apart sounds like the opening of a shaggy dog story, but that’s what actually happened in Midland, England:
It’s hardly surprising that Ryleigh Shepherd is the image of her 11-year-old twin sisters when they were babies. For despite being born in different centuries, the three were all conceived on the same day.
While the embryos of twins Megan and Bethany were implanted in their mother in 1998, Ryleigh’s was frozen for more than 11 years. [...] ‘When Ryleigh arrived she looked like both the girls did when they were born 11 years before,’ said their mother Lisa, 37. ‘It was uncanny.’
Lucy Laing of the Daily Mail has more: Link (with photo of the triplets)
The longest time between conception and birth of a human embryo has been thirteen years. That record has now been blown away by the recent live birth of a boy who was conceived twenty years ago:
The 42-year-old mother of the boy, who is not named in the study, began trying to get pregnant using IVF ten years ago. At the time, she and her husband received embryos from a heterosexual couple who had themselves undergone IVF.
That couple had anonymously donated their leftover embryos after the woman successfully gave birth. Thing was, they did so in 1990 – meaning that the boy just born to the woman in the study has a sibling out there somewhere who was conceived at the same time but is 20 years younger.
Link | Image: RWJMS IVF Program
British medical researchers are working on growing human embryos that would have three parents: the father’s sperm, the mother’s egg nucleus, and another mother’s egg cytoplasm. In The Daily Telegraph, Richard Alleyne writes:
IVF often fails in older women because there are abnormalities in the outside of their eggs, known as cytoplasm, which surrounds the nucleus.
The team at St Mother Hospital in Kitakyushu, Japan, believe one way around the problem would be too implant the healthy nucleus – which contains most of the information to produce a baby – into the cytoplasm of a donor, usually a younger mother.
The team successfully did this in 31 eggs and of these seven formed “early stage embryos” when injected with sperm in a test tube.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NIH
