Millions of couples who have overcome infertility and gone on to have healthy, happy kids owe a big debt of thanks to Robert Edwards, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine.
Edwards, of the University of Cambridge, was one of the developers of in vitro fertilization, the reproductive technology that allows egg and sperm to be united in a test tube, then introduced into the womb for a normal pregnancy. The Associated Press has the story.
Edwards’ collaborator in the development of IVF, Patrick Steptoe, died in 1988. (The Nobel can only be awarded to the living.) Edwards is 85.
The Nobel committee said in a statement that “close to 4 million babies have been born thanks to the discovery of human IVF.” Most famous was the first so-called test tube baby, Louise Brown, born in the U.K. in 1978. Elizabeth (Carr) Comeau, the first such baby born in the U.S., in 1981, also garnered a lot of attention, and recently wrote about the birth of her own first child — conceived and delivered “the normal way,” as she puts it.
Edwards had “an exceptionally broad knowledge of the fertilization process, gained through many years of basic research on animal reproductive physiology,” the Nobel statement says. That background helped him in his research on IVF, starting in the 1950s. He eventually settled on the idea of using mature eggs, removed just before ovulation, rather than removing eggs at an earlier stage and allowing them to develop in a test tube. He worked with Steptoe to develop the best way of harvesting eggs at this stage in the reproductive cycle, using the then-novel technique of laparoscopic surgery.
Edwards went on to show that eggs removed this way could be combined with sperm prepared in a test tube could develop into 8-celled embryos and then, later, that eggs fertilized this way could go on to divide further before being implanted in the womb.
The Nobel statement also says Edwards “realized from the onset that IVF research would raise many important ethical concerns that had to be addressed.” With a lawyer, he wrote “a visionary key paper that initiated a debate on many of the complicated issues related to reproductive medicine that lay ahead.” Robert Edwards of Britain won the 2010 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for developing in-vitro fertilization, a breakthrough that has helped millions of infertile couples have children but also ignited an enduring controversy with religious groups.
Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, started working on IVF as early as the 1950s. He developed the technique – in which eggs are removed from a woman, fertilized outside her body and then implanted into the womb – together with British gynecologist surgeon Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988.
On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown in Britain became the first baby born through the groundbreaking procedure, marking a revolution in fertility treatment.
"(Edwards') achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity, including more than 10 percent of all couples worldwide," the medicine prize committee in Stockholm said in its citation.
"Approximately 4 million individuals have been born thanks to IVF," the citation said. "Today, Robert Edwards' vision is a reality and brings joy to infertile people all over the world."
Despite facing resistance from Britain's medical establishment, Steptoe and Edwards spent years developing IVF from early beginning experiments into a practical course of medicine. In 1980, they founded the world's first IVF clinic, at Bourn Hall in Cambridge.
Today, the probability that an infertile couple will take home a baby after a cycle of IVF is 1 in 5, about the same odds that healthy couples have of conceiving naturally. Every year, about 300,000 babies worldwide are born through IVF, according to the European Society of Human Reproduction.
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