Featured Image Credit: Sky News/Rejoice Fertility
You’d think that every baby in the world would be born at the same age, but that’s just not true as the oldest baby in the world has just been delivered.
Medical science has been on a roll in the last few decades, producing groundbreaking results from in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to being able to deplete additional chromosomes in embryos and also the world's first baby to be conceived by a robot.
But there’s even now a way to birth older babies.
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Thaddeus is a newborn, but he holds the world record for being the oldest baby to ever be birthed.
Of course, as soon as he was delivered, he was aged 0, but that’s not what his age is based on.
Instead, it comes from the fact he was developed from an embryo created when his dad, Tim Pierce, was just a toddler.
Tim and his wife, Lindsey, 'adopted' the embryo from Linda Archerd, a woman who said the whole situation is 'pretty surreal'.
“It’s hard to even believe," she said, while speaking for the MIT Technology Review.
Lindsey said her family church have described it as 'like something from a sci-fi movie', which doesn’t sound far off any science fiction movie.
While embryo donation is common, Thaddeus’s embryo was created in 1994, before going into storage for 30 and a half years.
Lindsey said due to the age difference: “The baby has a 30-year-old sister."
The embryo was created by Linda created with her then-husband when they were trying to get pregnant in the 1990s.
From there, they made four of them, one which was transferred to Linda's uterus, giving her a baby girl, and the remaining three were cryopreserved.
While Linda planned to use them herself, but when she divorced her husband and started going through menopause, she then looked into what she could do with them.
That’s when she started researching embryo 'adoption', which could allow her to adopt them out.
“I didn’t want them to go out of the country,” she explained. “And being Christian is very important to me, because I am.”
That’s when she found the perfect match.
Lindsey and Tim had signed up for the same program after having spent seven years trying for a baby.
When they matched with one another, Lindsey had two of the embryos transferred into her uterus, but the third wasn’t viable and therefore could not be implanted using IVF.
Of the two, Thaddeus was developed and born.
While Linda wants to meet the little boy, she went on to say if possible, it would be a 'dream come true', adding: "I wish that they didn’t live so far away from me ... He is perfect!”
Lindsey said: “We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records. We just wanted to have a baby.”
In vitro fertilisation is a tool which helps struggling people to have a baby, with many ways of implementing the practice.
One popular method is intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which helps with male infertility.
For this, a single sperm cell is injected into mature eggs before the embryos are inserted into the uterus.
Another way is to mix the eggs with sperm in a lab dish, and artificial intelligence is also being explored to develop more effective processes.
