Linda Mohr
The Modern Laboratory · People
The Modern Laboratory
Linda Mohr
She learned to freeze embryos in animals first, then helped give the first human embryos a safe way to wait.
Learning on animal embryos. Linda Mohr worked with Alan Trounson at Monash University in Melbourne in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her first papers were about animal embryos. In 1980 she tested a fluorescent dye as a way to tell living mouse embryos from dead ones. In 1981 she described, under the electron microscope, the damage that freezing does to cattle embryos.
The first frozen pregnancy. With Trounson she worked out how to freeze and thaw human embryos at the four and eight cell stages. In 1983 they reported in Nature a pregnancy from an eight cell embryo that had been frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen for four months. The pregnancy was lost at 24 weeks to an infection, and the paper said so plainly.
Making it work. In 1985 she was first author of a study of 162 frozen human embryos. Embryos survived best when cooled slowly, at 0.3°C a minute, with a protective chemical, and thawed with similar care. Half of the embryos tested came through with at least half their cells intact, and their transfer led to nine pregnancies. The same year she was a co-author of the report of a baby girl born in Melbourne after the transfer of two thawed embryos.
Little else about Linda Mohr's life and later career is on public record. Her careful work sits underneath every frozen embryo that waits today.
Also see: Alan Trounson
About the sources
- Tuoti WA, Shah D. “Human Pregnancy Following Cryopreservation, Thawing and Transfer of an Eight-Cell Embryo (1983), by Alan Trounson and Linda Mohr”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University, 10 July 2024.
- Downing BG, Mohr LR, Trounson AO, Freemann LE, Wood C. Birth after transfer of cryopreserved embryos. Medical Journal of Australia 1985;142(7):409–411.
- Mohr LR, Trounson A, Freemann L. Deep-freezing and transfer of human embryos. Journal of In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer 1985;2(1):1–10.
- Mohr LR, Trounson AO. Cryopreservation of human embryos. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1985;442:536–543.
- Trounson A, Mohr L. Human pregnancy following cryopreservation, thawing and transfer of an eight-cell embryo. Nature 1983;305(5936):707–709.
- Mohr LR, Trounson AO. Comparative ultrastructure of hatched human, mouse and bovine blastocysts. Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 1982;66(2):499–504.
- Mohr LR, Trounson AO. Structural changes associated with freezing of bovine embryos. Biology of Reproduction 1981;25(5):1009–1025.
- Mohr LR, Trounson AO. The use of fluorescein diacetate to assess embryo viability in the mouse. Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 1980;58(1):189–196.
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
