Jean Purdy

Jean Purdy was the third member of the team that produced the first IVF birth, was left off the commemorative plaque, and died at thirty-nine. She trained as a nurse, answered an advertisement from Robert Edwards in 1968, and worked with him and Patrick Steptoe for the whole of the programme that led to Louise Brown's birth in 1978. Her role was not incidental. She was an embryologist in practice, cultured the embryos, kept the records, and was the first person to observe a human blastocyst developing in vitro; she is a named author on twenty-six of the team's papers, including the 1969 Nature paper that first reported human eggs fertilised outside the body. She also drove between Cambridge and Oldham for a decade and kept the clinical relationships with the women in the trials, most of whose attempts failed. When Oldham hospital was to be given a plaque in 1980, Edwards submitted the wording with all three names and the health authority proposed only two; he objected in writing, more than once, saying that she had contributed as much as either of them and that he would not accept the plaque otherwise. He lost. She was named on a plaque there only in 2015 and on one at Bourn Hall, the clinic she helped found, later still. She died of melanoma in 1985 at thirty-nine, before the Nobel Prize that went to Edwards alone in 2010 and which she could not have shared in any case. Her erasure has become a standard case study in how scientific credit is assigned.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history