History
Sperm washing was first used in Milan, Italy. The oldest child conceived using this method is now about 11 and is HIV negative. The first known US-American baby conceived this way, Baby Ryan, was born in 1999 through the Special Program of Assisted Reproduction started by Dr. Ann Kiessling
Starting in the mid-1990s it was adopted to help HIV discordant couples conceive without passing the virus from the father to the mother or child. The idea is that when the male is HIV positive the technique will reduce the risk of transmission to the female. For years there were lingering doubts about the safety of the procedure, and many couples had to travel to locales that would do the procedure, such as Italy. Today, hundreds of babies have been born through this process.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)