Officials at a fertility clinic at University Hospitals in Cleveland says the clinic had been experiencing problems with a frozen embryo storage tank for several weeks before it malfunctioned in early March and ruined more than 4 thousand embryos.
Officials say the problem forced the clinic's staff to manually fill the tank with liquid nitrogen to keep the embryos frozen. The hospital, which is now subject of several lawsuits, suspects this contributed to the failure. An alarm system was turned off on a storage tank that should have alerted staff to changes in the temperature on March 4. Hospital CEO Tom Zenty said in a videotaped statement Tuesday the facility is cooperating with the state, the College of American Pathologists and other organizations investigating what happened.
Zenty also issued a formal apology.