'Ice baby' identified

Following the news last month of the baby boy who was conceived from sperm that had been frozen for a record 21 years, his name, and those of his parents, have been made public. Trevor and Joan White gave an interview with the UK's Daily Mail newspaper on Saturday, in which they told the story of their son Daniel's conception against the odds.

Trevor White had undergone treatment for testicular cancer at the age of 17, which made him sterile. Fortuitously, however, he had a sample of his sperm frozen before his cancer treatment started. At the time, in 1979 - only a year after the first IVF success - sperm storage was still in the early stages of development. At the age of 30 he was told he was free from cancer. In 1995, he and Joan, his partner, considered starting a family, and went back to the clinic at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester where his sperm was stored.

At first, the clinic attempted to inseminate Joan using Trevor's thawed sperm but, when this proved unsuccessful, the couple were accepted onto the NHS IVF waiting list. They were accepted for treatment three years later, in 1998, and, 21 years after it had been frozen, Trevor's thawed sperm was used to fertilise his wife's eggs using ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection), an IVF method where a single sperm is injected into the egg. Following the fourth cycle of the treatment, transfer of two of the embryos created resulted in the birth of the boy on 7 February 2002.

The Whites told the Daily Mail that they had no idea that Daniel was 'making medical history' until after he was born. They only realised last month how much interest there was in their story, when researchers said they were going to publish the details in the June edition of the journal Human Reproduction. The couple said they had 'no objections' to the publication of the story, but at the time wished to remain anonymous. 'The morning after the article was published, the story was in every newspaper, on every radio station, Ceefax, Teletext and every broadcast', they said, adding: 'It's difficult to associate all the fuss with Daniel. We now know that as far as the medical world is concerned he's an 'achievement', but for us, he's just our little boy'.