Australian Woman Unknowingly Gives Birth to a Stranger's Baby after IVF Error

FILE - Lab staff prepare small petri dishes, each holding several 1-7 day old embryos, for cells to be extracted from each embryo to test for viability at the Aspire Houston Fertility Institute in vitro fertilization lab Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, in Houston.  (AP Photo/Michael Wyke, File)
FILE - Lab staff prepare small petri dishes, each holding several 1-7 day old embryos, for cells to be extracted from each embryo to test for viability at the Aspire Houston Fertility Institute in vitro fertilization lab Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, in Houston. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke, File)
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Australian Woman Unknowingly Gives Birth to a Stranger's Baby after IVF Error

FILE - Lab staff prepare small petri dishes, each holding several 1-7 day old embryos, for cells to be extracted from each embryo to test for viability at the Aspire Houston Fertility Institute in vitro fertilization lab Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, in Houston.  (AP Photo/Michael Wyke, File)
FILE - Lab staff prepare small petri dishes, each holding several 1-7 day old embryos, for cells to be extracted from each embryo to test for viability at the Aspire Houston Fertility Institute in vitro fertilization lab Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, in Houston. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke, File)

A woman in Australia unknowingly gave birth to a stranger’s baby after she received another patient's embryo from her in vitro fertilization clinic due to “human error,” the clinic said.
The mix-up was discovered in February when the clinic in the city of Brisbane found that the birth parents had one too many embryos in storage, said the provider, Monash IVF, in a statement supplied Friday. Staff discovered an embryo from another patient had been mistakenly thawed and transferred to the birth mother, The Associated Press quoted a spokesperson as saying.
Australia news outlets reported the baby was born in 2024.
The company, one of Australia’s biggest IVF providers, said an initial investigation had not uncovered any other such errors. Its statement didn’t identify the patients involved or divulge details about the child's custody.
“All of us at Monash IVF are devastated and we apologize to everyone involved,” said CEO Michael Knaap. “We will continue to support the patients through this extremely distressing time.”
The “human error” was made “despite strict laboratory safety protocols being in place,” the statement said. The company said it had reported the episode to the relevant regulator in the state of Queensland.
Monash IVF opened in 1971 and sees patients in dozens of locations throughout Australia. Last year, the firm settled a class action lawsuit from more than 700 patients, making no admission of liability, after claims its clinics destroyed potentially viable embryos.
The clinic paid a settlement of 56 million Australian dollars ($35 million).
Rare cases of embryo mix-ups have been reported before, including in the United States, Britain, Israel and Europe. A woman in the US state of Georgia in February filed a lawsuit against a fertility clinic after she gave birth to a stranger’s baby.
Krystena Murray realized the error after the baby's birth because she and her sperm donor were both white and the child was Black. Murray said she wanted to raise the baby but voluntarily gave the 5-month-old to his biological parents after she was told she would not win a legal fight for his custody.
In Australia, each state makes its own laws and rules governing the use of IVF, which advocates say puts patients at risk of error or oversight failings. Queensland’s parliament passed its first laws regulating the sector in 2024.
The measures will establish a registry for all people conceived at a clinic and made the destruction of donors’ medical histories illegal. The change followed an official report that lambasted the storage of frozen sperm donations in Queensland, finding nearly half of samples checked were at medium or high risk of misidentification and recommending thousands be destroyed.
Australia’s states and territories “need to see if their regulations are up to scratch,” the Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth told the Today news program Friday.
“Confidence needs to be brought back and it’s imperative that happens.”



Astronomers Spot Galaxy Shaped Like the Milky Way But is Far More Massive

An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS
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Astronomers Spot Galaxy Shaped Like the Milky Way But is Far More Massive

An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS

Astronomers have observed a galaxy dating to an earlier epoch in the universe's history that surprisingly is shaped much like our Milky Way - a spiral structure with a straight bar of stars and gas running through its center - but far more massive, offering new insight into galactic formation.

The distant galaxy, called J0107a, was observed as it appeared 11.1 billion years ago, when the universe was about a fifth of its current age. The researchers used data from the Chile-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study the galaxy, Reuters reported.

They determined that the galaxy's mass, including its stars and gas, was more than 10 times greater than that of the Milky Way, and it was forming stars at an annual rate approximately 300 times greater. J0107a was more compact than the Milky Way, however.

"The galaxy is a monster galaxy with a high star formation rate and plenty of gas, much more than present-day galaxies," said astronomer Shuo Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.

"This discovery," said study co-author Toshiki Saito, an astronomer at Shizuoka University in Japan, "raises the important question: How did such a massive galaxy form in such an early universe?"

While a few galaxies that are undergoing star formation at a similar rate to J0107a exist in today's universe, almost all of them are ones that are in the process of a galactic merger or collision. There was no sign of such circumstances involving this galaxy.

J0107a and the Milky Way have some commonalities.

"They are similarly huge and possess a similar barred structure. However, the Milky Way had plenty of time to form its huge structures, while J0107a didn't," Saito said.

In the first few billion years after the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe, galaxies were turbulent entities and were much richer in gas than those existing currently - factors that fostered extreme bursts of star formation. While galaxies with highly organized structures like the barred spiral shape of the Milky Way are common now, that was not the case 11.1 billion years ago.

"Compared to other monster galaxies in the distant universe (dating to an earlier cosmic epoch) whose shapes are usually disturbed or irregular, it is unexpected that J0107a looks very similar to present-day spiral galaxies," Huang said.

"Theories about the formation of present-day galactic structures may need to be revised," Huang added.

The Webb telescope, as it peers across vast distances back to the early universe, has found that galaxies with a spiral shape appeared much earlier than previously known. J0107a is now one of the earliest-known examples of a barred spiral galaxy.

About two thirds of spiral galaxies observed in the universe today possess a bar structure. The bar is thought to serve as a form of stellar nursery, bringing gas inward from the galaxy's spiral arms. Some of the gas forms what are called molecular clouds.

Gravity causes the contraction of these clouds, with small centers taking shape that heat up and become new stars.

The bar that is part of J0107a measures about 50,000 light years in length, Huang said. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The Webb telescope "has been studying the morphology of early massive galaxies intensely recently. However, their dynamics are still poorly understood," Saito said.