Robert Edwards
Robert Edwards developed in vitro fertilisation and was awarded the Nobel Prize forty years after the first baby was born. Born in 1925 in Yorkshire to a working-class family, he served in the army in the Middle East, studied agricultural science at Bangor and then took a doctorate in animal genetics at Edinburgh, working on mouse embryos. He moved to Cambridge in 1963 and began trying to do in humans what had been done in rabbits since the 1950s. The first problem was maturing human eggs in culture, which took years; the second was fertilising them outside the body, achieved in 1969; the third was obtaining eggs at all. That was solved by Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist in Oldham who had pioneered laparoscopy in Britain against the resistance of his own profession, and who could retrieve eggs directly from the ovary. Their partnership ran from 1968, with Edwards driving 150 miles each way to a small hospital because no Cambridge facility would host the work. The Medical Research Council refused funding in 1971 on ethical grounds, and the work continued on private donations. Louise Brown was born on 25 July 1978 after over a hundred failed transfers, and the reaction included accusations of playing God and predictions of deformity. Jean Purdy, the nurse and embryologist who was the third member of the team, was written out of the early credit and has been restored to it since. Edwards received the Nobel Prize in 2010. Over twelve million people have been born by IVF.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2013 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: physiologist, physician
