The Founding Papers · FP·05 · 1978
1978: Durga is born in Calcutta
Seventy days after Louise Brown, a girl was born in Calcutta. Her doctor, Subhas Mukherjee, reported that she had begun as an embryo frozen and thawed in his laboratory.
The story
Working with a cryobiologist, Sunit Mukherjee, and a gynaecologist, Saroj Kanti Bhattacharya, Subhas Mukherjee fertilised eggs in his laboratory, froze the embryos and later thawed one and returned it to the mother. On 3 October 1978 a healthy girl was born. She was named Durga, and is now known as Kanupriya Agarwal.
The team described their work in this brief note, and in a signed report to the West Bengal government on 19 October 1978. An official committee rejected it. Mukherjee was never able to present his work abroad, and he died in 1981.
Recognition came later. In 1997 T. C. Anand Kumar studied his papers and made the case for him, and in 2002 the Indian Council of Medical Research recognised his work. Because the original records are so brief, the museum marks his claim as contested, while celebrating what he achieved. His story is told on his own page.
“One such frozen embryo was subsequently thawed slowly and when transferred into the uterus of the woman apparently resulted in the production of a clinically normal female baby after normal period of gestation.”The 1978 note, as quoted by T. C. Anand Kumar in 1997
The paper
The Feasibility of Long-Term Cryogenic Freezing of Viable Human Embryos: A Brief Pilot Study Report
Subhas Mukherjee, Sunit Mukherjee, S. K. Bhattacharya
Indian Journal of Cryogenics 1978;3:80, as cited by Anand Kumar (FP·13). Some later sources date it to 1979. Not indexed in PubMed.
How we know
Known through Anand Kumar's 1997 paper and the ICMR-NIRRCH booklet (Mukherjee and Mehta, 2020), read 6 October 2026. The 1978 note and the 19 October report themselves have not been seen by the museum.
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