The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born on July 25, 1978,
Since then some four million babies worldwide have been conceived by mixing eggs and sperm outside the body and returning the embryo to the womb to resume the normal development.
Although the people who definitely need IVF are the ones where the female partner has blocked tubes on both sides, The procedure overcomes many previously untreatable causes of infertility and is used in 3 percent of all live births in developed countries.
At the outset of his research, Dr. Edwards spent two years trying to get eggs to mature outside the body, based on a report that human eggs matured in 12 hours. Eventually he learned that at least 25 hours is required.
Dr. Edwards, a physiologist at Cambridge University in England, devoted more than 20 years to solving a series of problems in getting eggs and sperm to mature and unite successfully outside the body.
His colleague, Dr. Steptoe, was a gynaecologist and pioneer of laparoscopic surgery, the method he used to extract eggs from the prospective mother The two began transferring fertilized eggs to the womb in 1972, assuming that the rate of implantation would be as high as with farm animals. Their hopes were dashed
At first, the hormones given the mother to induce ovulation interfered with the growth of the embryo. Drs. Edwards and Steptoe then injected mothers with extra hormones, but these turned out to induce abortions. They persisted through more than 40 embryo transfers before obtaining their first pregnancy. Unfortunately it was ectopic and had to be aborted. Louise Brown was born from the second pregnancy It required grit and determination to keep going,” Dr. Macnamee said of his colleague.
“But he had the conviction of his research work and he wanted to see it delivered to the people who needed it.”
Despite the ethical objections leveled at his work — some of which persist today, over the disposal of unused embryos and the high risk of multiple births — Dr. Edwards was nonetheless allowed to develop the technique over many years.
“It would be very difficult to develop in vitro fertilization now because the ethical committees would have stopped his research,” Dr. Macnamee said.
The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was awarded in 2010 to Robert G. Edwards, an English biologist who with a physician colleague, Dr. Patrick Steptoe, developed the in vitro fertilization procedure for treating human infertility
Dr. Steptoe, who presumably would otherwise have shared the prize, died in 1988 (the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously). Dr. Edwards, 85, has retired as head of research from the Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, which he and Dr. Steptoe founded as one of the world’s first centres for in vitro fertilization
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