Patrick Steptoe

Patrick Steptoe was the gynaecologist who performed the procedure that produced Louise Brown, the first person conceived by in vitro fertilisation, in July 1978. He had spent the war in the Royal Navy, was captured after his ship was sunk and held as a prisoner in Italy, and afterwards built a career in provincial obstetrics at Oldham. His contribution was laparoscopy: he learned the technique in France in the early 1960s when British surgeons regarded keyhole methods as a gimmick, wrote the first English textbook on it, and used it to retrieve eggs from the ovary without open surgery, which is what made repeated attempts practical. Robert Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist working on fertilising human eggs in the laboratory, read a paper of his and telephoned him in 1968; the partnership lasted twenty years, run from a small hospital because the Medical Research Council refused funding in 1971 on ethical and safety grounds. They worked with more than two hundred and eighty women before a pregnancy went to term. Opposition came from churches, from parts of the medical establishment and from newspapers that called the results test-tube babies, and both men received a good deal of hostile mail. Steptoe co-founded Bourn Hall clinic in 1980, the first IVF centre in the world, and was still working there when he died in 1988. Around twelve million people have since been born by the method. The Nobel Prize went to Edwards in 2010, twenty-two years after Steptoe's death, and the prize is not awarded posthumously. Louise Brown was delivered by caesarean section just before midnight on 25 July 1978 at Oldham General Hospital. Steptoe was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the year he died. He had been an accomplished pianist and played in the prison camp orchestra in Italy.

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