This morning, news spread faster than a sperm can swim (0.2 meters per hour, in case you were wondering) that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Robert Edwards of Britain for his work pioneering in vitro fertilization (IVF).
The European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology, an organization Edwards helped found, issued a press statement today citing figures that about 300,000 babies are born each year thanks to IVF treatment. But getting to this point was not easy. Edwards had to figure out how to isolate woman’s eggs, among many other challenges.
His collaborator, Patrick Steptoe, offered particular expertise in capturing these mature eggs by using laparoscopic techniques (also know as ‘keyhole’ surgery because of the very small incision required). Steptoe died in the late 1980s, and since Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, was not named in today’s announcement. Perhaps equally heartbreaking: he died a week before he was scheduled to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Edwards received a Lasker Award for his work in 2001, and on the occasion wrote a commentary for Nature Medicine. In his piece he writes: “Ethicists decried us, forecasting abnormal babies, misleading the infertile and misrepresenting our work as really acquiring human embryos for research. They announced that IVF did not cure infertility, as women remained infertile after having an IVF baby.”
But Edwards had a counter-argument to these criticisms: “My response was to put forward spectacles, false teeth and heart transplants.”
It was not only the medical establishment that had a tough time coming around to appreciate IVF. Edwards goes on in the piece to describe his ongoing struggles with some members of the church and the media. His fight was an uphill one. “I had to issue eight libel actions in the High Court of London on a single day, which is when ethics becomes very practical. I won them all, but the work and worry restricted research for several years.”
Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, was born in 1978. A paper published just last month, in the journal Human Reproduction, contends that the UK’s Medical Research Council, which “gave infertility a low priority compared with population control […] rapidly converted to enthusiastic support” after the few healthy births from IVF. Now, with today’s Nobel Prize announcement, it’s even clearer that Edwards truly delivered.
Image of Robert Edwards with Lesley Brown and Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”, and Louises’s son Cameron courtesy via the Bourn Hall Clinic and Nobel Foundation