Medics pay visit to hospital home of IVF ‘miracle’
A GROUP of medics have marked the anniversary of a major IVF breakthrough with a visit to the Oldham hospital where the ‘miracle’ took place.
The academics and researchers from the University of Manchester and St Mary’s Hospital travelled to Dr Kershaw’s Hospice in Royton 40 years to the day after the egg that produced the world’s first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was successfully fertilized.
Louise was born among a flurry of worldwide interest at Oldham Royal in July 1978. But it was on November 11, 1977, that the groundbreaking procedure to successfully fertilize the egg from her mother Lesley outside the body took place – at what was then Dr Kershaw’s Cottage Hospital.
Daniel Brison, Prof of Embryology at the university who led the visit, told the M.E.N.: “It is undoubtedly one of the medical innovations of the 20th Century.
“Around six-million babies have been born worldwide through IVF since then, bringing joy to millions of couples.
“All this took place in a little building at Dr Kershaw’s Cottage Hospital, which was not exactly a worldleading scientific facility.”
Louise’s birth was the result of 12 years of research by Oldham gynaecologist Dr Patrick Steptoe and Cambridge researcher Bob Edwards.
Along with Mr Edwards’ assistant Jean Purdy, they established a research facility at the site in 1971 but did not achieve their goal for some years.
A blue plaque marking the trio’s pioneering work was unveiled at the hospice in 2015.
Louise’s parents Lesley and John had failed to conceive naturally for nine years before they decided to take part in the groundbreaking and, at the time, controversial treatment.
The anniversary of the conception came at the end of National Fertility Awareness Week, which highlighted the issues which one-in-six couples face.