On June 25, our son Ian Robert Conway Erbacher was born. His mom, my wife and partner in particle physics crime, Prof. Robin Erbacher, labored some 14 hours to deliver him, pushing rather hard for about three hours at the end. Robin’s jogging and exercise during pregnancy, well into the eigth month, seemed to pay off here! He was big: 9 lb 4 oz, and 21 inches at birth, but even after the tight squeeze on the way out he was just fine.
We made a somewhat unusual choice with his name. His first name, Ian, is a name that Robin and I both liked. He has two middle names. Robert is for his great grandfather Robert Boche, Robin’s grandfather, who was a well known geneticist and one of the first people to study the effects of nuclear radiation on living organisms, as part of the Manhattan Project. He passed away last year at the age of 96. Conway is my last name – had to get that in there – and I have two Conway children from my first marriage, both college age now (Jenny is at Berkeley and Alex is starting this fall at the University of Chicago). Robin is the third of three sisters, and the last to have children, so Ian will carry the Erbacher name on.
Ian is special in another way – he was conceived in vitro. (This was due to problems on my end stemming from mumps orchitis when I was a young adult…despite the fact that I previously successfully fathered two children.) Neither Robin nor I had known much about IVF, but ended up learning more than we ever expected about endocrinology and embryology. This technology is incredible. In short, the woman’s ovaries are stimulated during an otherwise normal cycle to overproduce eggs, the eggs are harvested, fertilized, and if all goes well, up to about three of the fertilized pre-embryos, which at this stage have divided to about 6-8 cells, are put back into the womb on day 3. Some clinics wait until day 5, at which stage the pre-embryos are blastocysts. Not all 6-8 cell embryos make it to the blastocyst stage; only about a quarter or so do. Waiting for day 5 can be emotionally trying for the couple.
So it’s a game of statistics and skill. In our case, we were able to get 11 eggs from Robin, of which 9 were mature enough to fertilize. Of these they managed to successfully fertilize 6, using a micromanipulation technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). They hold the egg with a micropipette, suck up one of the sperm with a microscopic needle, somehow having cut the tail off, and inject the sperm head into the egg. This is, to my mind, one of the greatest feats of modern medicine…I am still in awe.
So, of the six fertilized eggs, by day 3 we had these three pre-embryos:
As pre-embryos go, well, these have good cell division but you can clearly see some extra “fragmentation” material inside. Ideally one would like to see eight clear cells, with only a little fragmentation. But, we were assured, it is quite normal that such pre-embryos result in healthy babies. The fragments are absorbed at later stages somehow – this happens in normal embryos routinely. So we put all three back that day, leaving none for cryopreservation (statistically there was little point). We got incredibly lucky: one of them made it to the blastocyst stage, implanted, and became Ian nine months later. We’d beaten odds of around one in four or five! For a while we referred to him as “Seven of Nine”. 
Of course we went through all the tests you can imagine. There is no reason to believe that IVF babies are more likely to have any sort of problems than naturally fertilized ones. Ian passed with flying colors, and by Christmas we started to let ourselves breathe a little easier.
Robin had a great pregnancy, and kept in great shape. Ian arrived more or less right at term, and now we are three weeks into the little guy’s life, getting to know him better. (Sleep…hmmm…could use that.)
It’s amazing to look at this little person and wonder whether he’ll see the dawn of the 22nd century. He should have quite a ride through this one!
July 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Congrats! He shares a birthday with me and George Orwell.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Congratulations! Cute little guy.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Many congrats John and Robin!
July 14th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Congrats John!
July 14th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Righteous! He is so gorgeous! You are blessed; many good tidings to all!
July 14th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Baby bro!
May he one day be as nerdy as his parents
July 14th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Wow. Not everyone has baby pictures from the pre-embryo stage. Congratulations!
July 14th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Congratulations to both of you.
July 14th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Congratulations John and Robin!
July 14th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Congratulations! He is adorable.
July 14th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Fabulous story. Cheers. Ain’t science wonderful! Thanks for sharing your marvelous news.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Congratulations!
July 14th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Totally cute! Best Wishes!
July 14th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Congratulations to John and to bouncing baby Ian.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Congratulations! From experience (from my wife, not me!), it really pays to be as fit as you can during pregnancy: it’ll help during labor.
July 15th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Congrats!
July 15th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
congratulations. and best of luck…
e.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Congrats, a cute baby and perhaps auspicious details of name and birth. First, anyone into the tongue-in-cheek “23 mystery” mostly started by cult favorite Robert Anton Wilson immediately recognizes there are twenty-three letters in “Ian Robert Conway Erbacher”, as indeed in “George Herbert Walker Bush” and “William Jefferson Clinton.”
As for the date:
(b.) 1864 – Walther Nernst, German chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1941)
(b.) 1907 – J. Hans D. Jensen, German physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1973)
1981 – Microsoft is restructured to become an incorporated business in its home state of Washington.
Two very distinguished scientists and perhaps the most important company in the world, whatever you think of it.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
The crazy thing about IVF is that the implementation of an IVF cycle has not changed in more than ten years.. because the hormones don’t stay in the body more than 24 hours, they have to be injected every day. But why hasn’t that part of the implementation been made more comfortable by the medical community? IVF is a twenty year old technology. One IVF cycle is about 90 injections (and many women are not successful the first time). I felt like a bruised pin cushion at the end of my one and only cycle, and definitely celebrated on the day of my last injection (which was two months after my first pregnancy test revealed that one or both of the transferred embryos had implanted).
[By the way.. YouTube is a fantastic IVF resource.. Giving oneself injections for the first time requires overcoming some innate fear mechanisms, and watching the calm way that other women did theirs and how they explained the procedures was reassuring. It was almost like immersing oneself in an underground sisterhood of IVF practioners (sufferers?) ]
I think that the other nerve-wracking part of the IVF technology is the improbability of implantation. There is only about 10-20% probability for one to implant. In the two weeks after embryo transfer that I was waiting, I must have read 20 biochemistry papers trying to understand exactly what biochemical processes must occur. I had the impression that this aspect of IVF is the most unknown and is one of the most active areas of research in the fertility field. Strange that so little is known about implantation isn’t it? The improbably low rate of implantation is why US doctors transfer so embryos (> 3), and then ’sort it out’ afterwards. My Estonian doctor told me that they and many European fertility clinics don’t transfer more than two usually (and I know that more than 3 is illegal by Estonian law).
But the technology _works_, and that is the most important aspect to keep in mind. The joy of success has no words to describe it (and I still have the second half of my pregnancy to go.. It will be eleventh heaven for me, that’s sure).
So then a hearty congratulations, John.. you and Robin went through a tremendous experience and succeeded!
July 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Congratulations — nice to see medicine improve people’s lives.
December 18th, 2008 at 3:29 am
[...] One of the great things about being a physicist, it turns out, is the travel. I’ve had the opportunity to travel all over the world, including to some destinations that I might not otherwise have put on the must-see list. In fact I am at one right now, along with Robin and our five month old, Ian. [...]