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Right cell, right result with contolled-rate freezing

Advances in embryology that have characterised medical progress over the past quarter of a century have relied on the application of methods such as controlled-rate freezing, as Paul Lakra and Geoffrey Planer explain.

Twenty-five years ago, in the spring of 1984, Britain triumphed on the ice when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won gold as Olympic ice-skating champions in Yugoslavia. At nearly exactly the same time, a less well-known triumph, but also a frozen one, occurred when an Australian team using equipment made by a British company helped the first baby ever to be born from a frozen embryo.

On 28 March 1984, Zoe Leyland was born in Melbourne after Alan Trounson and Carl Wood, the doctors who managed her birth, had decided to try 'test tube' fertilisation of a frozen embryo. Her mother had hormonal stimulation and produced 11 eggs, which were frozen using a new type of controlled-rate freezer made by a London company. 

Professor Trounson set something of a trend and since then, of the three million or so babies born via in vitro fertilisation (IVF) techniques, some 20% (about 600,000 people) are estimated to have been created from controlled-rate frozen embryos.

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