In-Vitro Pioneer Wins Nobel Prize
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.”
Edwards won the Lasker Award for clinical medical research in 2001.
Photo: Associated Press