Father of IVF paved way for other breakthroughs
Professor Sir Robert Edwards, who developed the in vitro fertility ( IVF) treatment that led to the birth of the first ‘‘ test- tube’’ baby, Louise Brown, in 1978, has died. He was 87.
In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work.
It was during the 1950s that Edwards began to think that he might be able to extend work he had been doing preparing eggs for fertilisation in animal species to treat women with blocked Fallopian tubes.
‘‘ It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory,’’ he recalled. ‘‘ We could do this in animals increasingly . . . this was the way to go in the human species.’’
Early attempts to fertilise eggs from ovarian tissue — using his own sperm — proved fruitless, and Edwards soon found that immature eggs, extracted from ovaries, would not develop for long.
But a chance meeting with Patrick Steptoe, an Oldham gynaecologist, suggested an answer to the problem. Steptoe had been routinely encountering ripe eggs in his pioneering work on laparoscopy ( keyhole surgery). The two men agreed to collaborate.
Working together they gave patients small doses of hormones to produce more than one ripe egg, working out the best time to harvest eggs for fertilisation. The embryos ‘‘ grew beautifully’’ in a Petri dish for up to three days. But Edwards was keen to reach the five- day stage, when the embryo is a so- called blastocyst and is ready to implant in the womb.
In 2008, Edwards recalled the moment in 1969 when he first created a fertilised human embryo. exactly who was in charge, whether it was God himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory.’’
He had no doubt about the answer: ‘‘ It was us. The Pope looked totally stupid. Now there are as many Roman Catholics coming for treatment as Protestants.’’
Before Patrick Steptoe died in 1988, Edwards was able to tell him that one thousand babies had been conceived at their clinic.
Worldwide about one in 10 couples are infertile and, until IVF, doctors could do little to help. By the time Edwards learned of his Nobel Prize in 2010, more than 4.3 million children had been born using IVF techniques, accounting in some countries for between 2 and 3 per cent of all births.
After all, said Edwards: ‘‘ The most important thing in life i s having a child. Nothing is more special than a child.’’
Robert Geoffrey Edwards was born into a working- class Yorkshire family on September 27, 1925. He was educated at Manchester Central High School and, after service in the Army from 1944 to 1948, took a degree in biological sciences at the University of Wales, Bangor.
Edwards’ breakthrough was critical for many other important medical advances, including pre- implantation genetic diagnosis for diseases, and for the derivation of the first human stem cells. He was knighted in 2011.
He married, in 1956, Ruth Fowler, also a geneticist and the granddaughter of the New Zealand physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford, also a Nobel Prize winner. They had five daughters.