The Baby Who Was Born in a Dish and the Experts Who Objected

Louise Brown was born on 25 July 1978 at Oldham General Hospital in England, and she was the first person conceived outside a human body. Her mother, Lesley, had blocked Fallopian tubes and had tried for nine years to conceive. The treatment that changed her life had been developed by the physiologist Robert Edwards and the obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, who had been working on it for years. Their method collected eggs, fertilised them in a laboratory dish and returned the embryo to the mother.

The path was not easy. Reports of the early work say that, among 282 women who entered the programme, doctors attempted 457 egg collections. Only 167 of these led to fertilisation. Twelve embryos were implanted, five produced pregnancies, and Louise was the only live birth.

Many eminent figures opposed the research. Some of them were Nobel laureates, and they called it scientifically worthless, unnecessary and ethically questionable. The objections combined scientific doubt with moral alarm, and the debate was carried on in the press as well as in journals. The Medical Research Council refused to fund it. When Louise was born, about a hundred journalists gathered at the family's door.

Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010. Steptoe had died in 1988, and the prize is not awarded after death, so the man who had worked beside him for years could not share it. By then millions of children had been born through in vitro fertilisation.

The story is often told as the triumph of a technique over its doubters. It can also be told as a reminder that early objections to a technique, however sincere, were often wrong in their prediction of harm. Critics had feared that something would go wrong with the children. The children grew up.