the times | Thursday December 3 2020 2GM 17
News
HALEIGH CRABTREEFor Molly Gibson the last three decades
are a story of what might have been.
The embryo she grew from was
frozen 28 years ago and could have
been carried to term at any point since
then.
Instead she was born five weeks ago,
on October 26, setting what is believed
to be a new record for the longest inter-
val between embryo-freezing and birth.
The previous mark was set by her sis-
ter and genetic sibling Emma, whose
embryo was donated and frozen
together with Molly’s on October 14
- Their future mother, Tina Gibson,
was a year old at the time.
While Emma and Molly spent most
of the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s in
cold storage, Ms Gibson, now 29, grew
up, married and spent years praying for
a baby while she and her husband Ben,
36, struggled with infertility.
The devoutly Christian couple then
learnt about frozen embryo “adoption”.
The process is cheaper than in vitro
fertilisation (IVF) and also more moral-
ly acceptable to people who believe that
life begins at fertilisation and rule out
IVF because the process often yields
spare embryos.
Ms Gibson gave birth to Emma in
2017, calling her “a gift from the Lord,
for sure”, and found out that she was
pregnant with Molly in March this year.
“She’s definitely been a little spark of
joy for 2020,” she told CNN.“Here we go
again with another world record.”
Both pregnancies were made poss-
ible by the National Embryo Donation
Center (NEDC) in Knoxville, Tenness-
ee, where the Gibsons live.
For embryo adoption to take place,
couples who have IVF or laboratory
conception donate their unused em-
bryos to couples that cannot conceive.
Tina and Ben Gibson with their daughters Molly, left, and Emma. Both girls were born under an embryo “adoption” schemeSome counterterrorism training for
security staff at the Manchester Arena
was lifted from Wikipedia, the inquiry
into the 2017 suicide bombing heard.
Thirteen of the 176 staff on duty on
the night that Salman Abedi killed 22
people at a concert had been on train-
ing programmes run by the National
Counter-Terrorism Security Office.
Others had online training, which in-
cluded the example of the release of
sarin gas on the Tokyo metro in 1995
but had been lifted from Wikipedia.
Colonel Richard Latham and David
BaMaung, two security experts com-
missioned by the inquiry, said that
there was “almost no chance” of
noticing the Islamist terrorist when he
conducted three reconnaissance trips
to A&E at about 1pm and that “in my
view it was clear that Dr Bakalarova
was under the influence at this point. I
can’t remember the exact figure of the
blood alcohol level, but I know it was
very significant, maybe 10 or 11 times
the legal limit. She was slurring some
words quite badly, she had poor balance
and she kept repeating things.”
Dr Bakalarova told a Medical Practi-
tioners Tribunal Service hearing that
she was “ashamed” of the incident in
November 2018 but that it was a “one-
off” and her fitness to practise was not
impaired.
However, the tribunal said she had
put patients at risk of harm and her
actions amounted to misconduct. She
was suspended for nine months.Arena terror lessons from Wikipedia
because there were not enough secur-
ity staff and they had not been properly
trained. There was no one “proactively
monitoring” CCTV and the security
operation was “not sufficiently focused
on identifying suspicious behaviour”,
Colonel Latham added.
The inquiry was told that casual staff
were able to “skip through” the online
training without being checked. At the
end there were eight questions, which
did not cover hostile reconnaissance.
Two stewards for Showsec, which
provided security at the arena, had
their attention drawn to Abedi by a sus-
picious parent but did not notify their
control room. Colonel Latham said that
this was not their fault because they
were performing a role they had not
done before and hardly been briefed on.
Colonel Latham listed what made
Abedi, 22, stand out, including his“large and heavy backpack, which
affected his gait” and the facts that he
was overdressed, looked nervous and
did not fit the audience profile for the
Ariana Grande concert, which was
mostly attended by teenage girls.
However, the failures were the fault
of management because stewards had
“insufficient direction about how to
respond or report suspicious behaviour
and encouragement to act upon it”,
Colonel Latham said.
Duncan Atkinson, QC, for the vic-
tims’ families, said that Showsec should
have ensured that its workers had com-
pleted the online training rather than
clicked through it in minutes.
“Clearly to be of any value at all, they
have to make sure people do it, under-
stand it and learn from it?” he asked. Mr
BaMaung agreed.
The inquiry continues.Duncan Gardham
Fiona Hamilton Crime & Security Editor
Doctor arrived for work so
drunk she had to be treated
A radiologist has been suspended after
she arrived for work so drunk that she
had to be treated in A&E.
Sarka Bakalarova was “10 or 11 times
the legal limit” when she arrived for her
shift having drunk a bottle of vodka.
A disciplinary tribunal heard that she
was so intoxicated that colleagues said
she “had no idea where she was”.
Doctors found her slumped at her
desk and intervened to ensure she did
not perform any procedures at United
Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust.
Later Dr Bakalarova, who previously
worked in the Czech Republic, told col-
leagues she had drunk a bottle of vodka
on the train journey to work. The radi-
ology operational manager at the trust
said that Dr Bakalarova had been takenLandmarks in IVF
1890 Walter Heape, of
Cambridge University,
performs the first in vitro
manipulation of eggs or
embryos by transferring
fertilised eggs between
rabbits.1959 The Chinese-American
biologist MC Chang uses
rabbits to provide the first
unequivocal proof of IVF
in mammals.1977 The first IVF human
pregnancy leads to the
birth of Louise Brown in
Oldham, Greater
Manchester, on July 25,
1978.1981 The first IVF twins are
delivered in Melbourne,
Australia. Stephen and
Amanda Mays are the
world’s seventh and eighth
“test tube babies”.1984 Zoe Leyland is born in
Melbourne, the first baby
created from an embryo
frozen after IVF.1990 The UK’s Human
Fertilisation and
Embryology Act provides
oversight of IVF and
establishes the first
statutory body in the
world to regulate human
embryo research.2010 Sir Robert Edwards,
the English biologist who
developed IVF and
engineered the birth of Ms
Brown with Patrick Steptoe,
his long-term collaborator,
is awarded the Nobel prize
in physiology or medicine.
Steptoe, a gynaecologist,
died in 1988 and Edwards
in 2013.Source: IVF-Worldwide.com, Times research.Baby is born
after 28 years
in deep freeze
The embryos are frozen until a match is
found. They are then transferred to the
uterus of a woman who subsequently
gives birth to a child that is not biologi-
cally related to her or her partner.
About 75 per cent of all donated em-
bryos survive the thawing and transfer
process and between 25 and 30 per cent
of implants prove successful, the
NEDC has said.
Embryo adoption accounted for only
a tiny fraction of the more than two mil-
lion transfers of embryos to women’s
uteruses recorded in the United States
between 2000 and 2016.
But the practice is gaining popularity
rapidly: in that time period the number
of donor transfers rose from 334 to
1,940, according to figures compiled by
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the country’s leading
public health agency.
Dr Jeffrey Keenan, the president and
medical director of the NEDC, said that
Emma and Molly’s births were proof
that embryos should not be discarded
because they are unwanted or “old”. He
said embryos could be frozen “a great,
great deal longer” than 27 years.
Like many of the agencies and clinics
involved in embryo donation, the
NEDC is a faith-based organisation.
It requires potential adopting couples
to be “a genetic male and a genetic
female married for a minimum of three
years”.
Some activists and medical profes-
sionals have questioned whether such
criteria discriminate against prospec-
tive parents who happen to be single,
part of a gay couple or otherwise living
outside a traditional heterosexual
marriage.
The term “embryo adoption” is also
controversial, because it attributes
personhood to the embryo and there-
fore draws the process into the polar-
ised debate over abortion in America.
Molly Gibson’s world record is hard
to prove because American companies
are not required to report the age of the
embryos that they transfer.
Her mother is just grateful to have
two young girls, she said. “I’m still com-
pletely blown away that they are ours.”Couple who adopted
an embryo frozen in
1992 are celebrating the
arrival of a daughter,
Ben Hoyle writes