Gábor Vajta
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The Modern Laboratory
Gábor Vajta
A Hungarian doctor turned embryologist who made embryo freezing faster, smaller and simpler.
From pathology to embryos. Gábor Vajta was born in Hungary in 1952. He trained as a medical doctor and earned a PhD in human pathology, then turned to embryology in 1989. He later took a Doctor of Science degree in embryology.
Denmark and the open pulled straw. At the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences at Foulum he worked on cattle eggs and embryos. In 1998 he and colleagues, among them Masashige Kuwayama, described the open pulled straw. A plastic straw was heated and drawn out until very thin, loaded with embryos in a tiny drop, and plunged into liquid nitrogen. Cooling ran at more than 20,000°C per minute, and both vitrified eggs and blastocysts gave pregnancies in cattle.
Smaller still. The lesson that faster cooling in less fluid protects cells fed directly into human IVF. In 2005 he joined Kuwayama and Stanley Leibo in vitrifying human eggs in a droplet of less than a tenth of a microlitre, with nine in ten surviving.
Simpler cloning. He also devised handmade cloning, a way of cloning cattle without micromanipulators, and worked on it with Alan Trounson's group at Monash University. In 2003 that group reported a cloned calf born from a handmade cloned embryo that had itself been vitrified.
Later years. He settled in Cairns, Queensland, and has held professorial posts in Australia and China while advising embryology laboratories around the world. He has written more than 160 books, chapters and papers.
Also see: Masashige Kuwayama, Stanley Leibo, Alan Trounson
About the sources
- Vajta Gábor. IVF-Worldwide advisory board member profile, ivf-worldwide.com, accessed October 2026.
- Gábor Vajta. Wikipedia, accessed October 2026 (birth 25 August 1952; move to embryology 1989; DSc, Copenhagen, 1999).
- Kuwayama M, Vajta G, Kato O, Leibo SP. Highly efficient vitrification method for cryopreservation of human oocytes. Reproductive BioMedicine Online 2005;11(3):300–308. PMID 16176668.
- Tecirlioglu RT, French AJ, Lewis IM, Vajta G, et al. Birth of a cloned calf derived from a vitrified hand-made cloned embryo. Reproduction, Fertility and Development 2003;15(7–8):361–366. PMID 14984692.
- Vajta G, Lewis IM, Trounson AO, et al. Handmade somatic cell cloning in cattle: analysis of factors contributing to high efficiency in vitro. Biology of Reproduction 2003;68(2):571–578. PMID 12533421.
- Vajta G, Holm P, Kuwayama M, Booth PJ, Jacobsen H, Greve T, Callesen H. Open pulled straw (OPS) vitrification: a new way to reduce cryoinjuries of bovine ova and embryos. Molecular Reproduction and Development 1998;51(1):53–58. PMID 9712317.
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
