The Ice Babies

By Frederic Golden

His doctor thought he was one for the record books. His middle-aged parents welcomed him as an unexpected 8-lb. 15-oz. bundle of joy. Delivered by C-section in a suburban Los Angeles hospital, Baby Billy, as he was nicknamed by the local paper, is a medical miracle--the product of an embryo frozen for 7 1/2 years. For a few days last week, Billy, whose parents prefer anonymity, was hailed as the oldest human embryo ever brought to term. Then the bubble burst.

Shortly after the widely publicized blessed event, Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hospital announced that a baby born there in December came from an embryo frozen four months longer. The next day, N.Y.U. Medical Center in New York City said it had successfully transferred an embryo frozen for more than eight years. "It's no big deal," said Dr. Alan DeCherney, UCLA's chief of obstetrics and gynecology, who noted that because fertility clinics have been working with frozen human embryos since 1984, other physicians may well have transferred even older ones without making a fuss.

Record or not, Dr. Michael Vermesh, the proud Tarzana, Calif., fertility specialist who supervised Baby Billy's birth, says such cases will bring new hope to thousands of would-be parents who may not realize they have frozen embryos in storage. Billy's parents, who in 1989 spent $7,000 for the fertilization procedure that resulted in the birth of their first child, were not aware they had created any backup embryos until a lab notified them last year that it was holding three on ice. By then Billy's mother was 44 years old, though the embryos were those of a 36-year-old woman. Now she is the proud mother of fraternal twins born 7 1/2 years apart.

With thousands of embryos retrieved and frozen in fertility clinics across the U.S., this could be the tip of an obstetrical iceberg.

--By Frederic Golden