Found: First IVF Baby Born in East Bay 25 Years Ago

Private investigator locates California medical practice’s oldest ‘test-tube baby;’ Three of America’s IVF pioneer babies to meet at 25th anniversary reunion

SAN RAMON, Calif., May 31 /PRNewswire/ — Elizabeth Castro Wilson, who on March 18, 1985, became the first “IVF baby” born in the East San Francisco Bay Area, will join two other “pioneer IVF babies” in a reunion with the doctors who helped create them, when the Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area (RSC) celebrates its 25th anniversary as of the one of the nation’s first private IVF clinics.

The June 14 reunion in San Ramon will unite 200 of the oldest and youngest IVF children born since RSC was established in 1983.

Wilson, now 24, lives in Prescott, Arizona and is a medical assistant, pre-med student, and mother of two. At the reunion she will meet two others whose births who made news: Travis McCullar, 22, the second baby in the nation born from a frozen embryo (October 26, 1986), and Brian Strickland, 24, the second IVF baby born in Contra Costa County (May 6, 1985).

McCullar’s birth was so notable that he was featured in USA Today as “A month-old miracle of science” and on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. “In those days I was involved in live televised debates with medical ethicists on the news of their births,” said RSC surgical and research director Donald I. Galen, M.D., the infertility pioneer who treated the McCullars and Stricklands.

A media backgrounder about the births of McCullar, Wilson, and Strickland is online.

RSC’s 25th Anniversary Family Day Picnic will be held Sunday, June 14, from 11 to 4 p.m. at Little Hills Ranch, 18013 Bollinger Canyon Road, San Ramon, California. A ceremony with doctors is planned from 11 a.m. to Noon.

Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area

Established in 1983, RSC was among the first centers in the United States to report a successful pregnancy from a donated egg and facilitated the nation’s second successful transfer of a previously frozen embryo. RSC’s six physicians maintain clinics in San Ramon, Orinda, San Jose, and Modesto. RSC is a member of the IntegraMed Fertility network. One of every five IVF procedures in the U.S. is performed in an IntegraMed practice. For more information, www.rscbayarea.com.

SOURCE Reproductive Science Center