A baby boy born has made history, arriving in the world after developing from an egg fertilized more than 30 years ago. It's the longest-frozen embryo to result in a live birth. It was a "rough birth," but Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived Saturday in the Ohio city of London, and his mother, Lindsey Pierce, are recovering well, Pierce tells MIT Technology Review. The embryo that became Thaddeus was one of four created in 1994 by IVF patient Linda Archerd, now 62. After having a daughter, Archerd kept the remaining three embryos frozen. Once she reached menopause, she turned to embryo adoption—a process that allows donors and recipients to choose each other, typically managed by religious agencies.
Most fertility clinics won't work with embryos frozen so long, but Nightlight Christian Adoptions' Snowflakes program accepted Archerd's. Her preference was that they go to a married Christian Caucasian couple in the US. Lindsey and Tim Pierce, who'd been trying to have a child for seven years, fit that description and were open to any embryos, even hard to place ones. Still, "we thought it was wild," says Lindsey. "We didn't know they froze embryos that long ago." The embryos were thawed at Rejoice Fertility in Tennessee, a clinic known for accepting even the most challenging cases. Thawing the older, slow-frozen embryos required meticulous work, but two of the three survived transfer to Lindsey's uterus, with one developing into Thaddeus—a baby with a 30-year-old sister, whom he resembles, per MIT.
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