Louise Brown

Louise Brown was the first person conceived outside a human body, and the fact that this is now unremarkable is the measure of what her birth changed. She was born by caesarean section at Oldham General Hospital shortly before midnight on 25 July 1978, weighing five pounds twelve ounces. Her parents, Lesley and John Brown, had been trying for nine years; Lesley's fallopian tubes were blocked. The physiologist Robert Edwards and the gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe had been working on in vitro fertilisation for a decade, largely without institutional funding, since the Medical Research Council had refused them a grant on ethical grounds. The technique that worked used a single egg recovered by laparoscopy in the patient's natural cycle rather than stimulated ovulation. The reaction was not uniformly celebratory: there were editorials about test-tube babies and Frankenstein, theological objections, and genuine expert doubt about whether abnormalities would appear. The Browns were besieged by the press and received hate mail along with the congratulations. Her sister Natalie, born in 1982 by the same method, later became the first person so conceived to have a child of her own, conceived naturally, which quietly answered the fertility question. Louise Brown has worked in ordinary jobs, married in 2004 and had two sons, both conceived without assistance. Robert Edwards received the Nobel Prize in 2010; Steptoe had died in 1988 and the prize is not awarded posthumously. Something over twelve million people have since been born by IVF, which is a larger number of lives traceable to one laboratory result than almost any other in medicine.

• Lived: 1978 CE – ?
• Nationality: British
• Roles: other