The amazing story of IVF: 35 years and five million babies later

The birth of Louise Brown in 1978 was the start of a revolution in fertility treatment – and there's more to comeThere's an old bell jar that sits on top of a cupboard at a Cambridgeshire fertility clinic where history was made; it was in a dish inside this jar that the world's first IVF baby spent the hours after her conception. With the success of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), scientist Robert Edwards and his gynaecologist colleague Patrick Steptoe had changed the future for infertile couples around the world.Louise Brown, that first IVF baby, is 35 this month and what was then a revolutionary scientific advance has become a routine medical treatment. More than five million IVF babies have been born, and it's easy to forget quite how controversial the idea of fertilising human eggs in a laboratory was at the time of Louise's birth. "It was viewed with absolute suspicion," says Professor Peter Braude, head of the Department of Women's Heath at King's College London. "If you talk to people today about human reproductive cloning, the feeling you get that it is playing God is just how it was in 1978 with IVF."Steptoe and Edwards started to work together in the 1960s. Scientists had been experimenting with fertilising animal eggs outside the body, but few believed it would ever be possible to create human embryos this way. Steptoe and Edwards thought that they could help couples with fertility problems if they could take eggs directly from the ovaries and return them to the wo...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: The Guardian Children Fertility problems Medical research Society Features Science Source Type: news