The New Elizabethans by James Naughtie

Author:James Naughtie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Robert Edwards

Just before midnight on 25 July 1978, in a crowded operating theatre in Oldham General Hospital, a baby gave her first cry, produced a flood of relief in the room, and announced the birth of a new era. She had been delivered by Caesarean section, and the doctors were anxious to see that all was well. She was, after all, the first of her kind.

She was Louise Brown, who would always be known – memorably, though inaccurately – as the first test tube baby. Inaccurately, because it was not in a test tube that she was conceived. The procedure that allowed her mother’s eggs and her father’s sperm to come together took place in a glass petri dish. No matter. Louise Brown was the baby who would not have been born otherwise, and the man who made it happen was Robert Edwards.

As the first baby produced by in-vitro fertilization (IVF), Louise naturally became celebrated, but she was also the subject of a moral debate. Edwards, and his colleague Dr Patrick Steptoe, were in the thick of it. Were the doctors fiddling with nature, making laboratory babies? It was not only the Roman Catholic Church which expressed opposition; public misgivings about babies conceived outside the womb were widespread. Would they be healthy? Might there be long-term side effects that would come back to haunt us? More than three decades later most of those fears have subsided, and there is widespread acceptance of the moral justification for IVF births for parents who find it impossible to conceive children naturally. The same cannot be said for research on embryonic stem cells, which now produces a debate remarkably similar to the one that attended the birth of Louise Brown.

Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2010; Steptoe, who would probably have shared the prize, was dead, and it is generally not awarded posthumously. When Edwards received another big prize, the Lasker Prize, in 2001, the biochemist Joseph Goldstein said in his citation: ‘We know that IVF was a great leap, because Edwards and Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely trinity – the press, the pope, and prominent Nobel Laureates.’

It certainly was a leap. In the last year for which figures are available, 2010, more than 45,000 women had IVF treatment in this country and nearly 13,000 babies were born as a result. Around the world, the number of people who would never have been born without it is around 5 million.

When Edwards began his research all this seemed a distant hope. His interest had been kindled first at the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University, where he had studied for his doctorate in physiology, doing research on mouse embryos. By the time he arrived in 1963 at Cambridge University, where he spent most of his career, other scientists had pioneered in-vitro fertilization in mice, and he began to turn his attention to human embryos in the belief that the procedure was similar from mammal to mammal.

In the late sixties

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.