A 45-year-old woman delivered a healthy baby weighing 3,300 grams in Jiangsu Province on Monday. The woman suffered from infertility and began trying to get pregnant through assisted reproductive technology in 1998. After three unsuccessful implantations, she decided to wait for some time to try again. Kept frozen for 18 years, another embryo was implanted in November 2015 at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai.
Embryo cryopreservation is a process of preserving an embryo in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius, which is close to absolute zero and enough to stop biological activity. According to Shanghai health department data released in 2013, the storage life for frozen embryos should be kept within five years. However, successful pregnancies have been globally reported from frozen embryos that were stored up to 20 years long.
