FERTILE GROUND
Test tube babies. It was a startling term when the world first heard it – conjuring up visions of wee humans growing inside cylinders. Some people weren’t just startled, but outraged. What physiologist Robert Geoffrey Edwards and obstetrician Patrick Steptoe were working towards in the late 1960s – the fertilisation of an egg outside of a woman’s body – was deemed ‘unnatural’, science meddling in God’s work. One British magazine, Nova, said test tube babies were the biggest threat since the atom bomb.
And then it happened. The ‘meddling scientists’ produced a healthy baby.
Lesley Brown had suffered years of infertility before undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF), where an egg was removed from one of her ovaries and combined in a lab dish with her husband’s sperm to form an embryo. This was transferred to her uterus a few days later.
On July 25, 1978 she delivered a little girl, Louise, at Oldham General Hospital in the UK. Louise was the first IVF baby in history – and the
