Obituary

Sir Robert Edwards 1925- 2013

‘‘ I’ll never forget the day I looked down the microscope and saw something funny in the cultures . . . what I saw was a human blastocyst gazing up at me. I thought: ‘ We’ve done it’.’’

When news of Edwards and Steptoe’s achievement spread, their peers, many of them scarred by the experience of Thalidomide, were hostile.

In 1971 the Medical Research Council refused to fund their studies. The doctors were only able to continue their work thanks to a private donation from America. Even so, there were many occasions when they were on the verge of giving up. Letters of support from childless couples begged them to continue.

By 1977 the two men had endured five years of failure.

But in November that year they successfully implanted a blastocyst of just eight cells into the womb of Lesley Brown who, with her husband John, had being trying to conceive a child for 15 years.

The birth of Louise Brown on July 25, 1978 caused a sensation, but not all the coverage was positive. The Vatican called Louise’s birth ‘‘ an event that can have very grave consequences for humanity’’ because it divorced the conjugal sexual act from procreation.

Edwards never shrank from confronting his critics. The creation of a human embryo in the laboratory, he explained later, was ‘‘ about more than infertility. I wanted to find out