LONDON: Robert Edwards, a British Nobel prize-winning scientist known as the father of IVF for pioneering the development of “test tube babies”, died yesterday aged 87 after a long illness, his university said.
Edwards, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2010, started work on developing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the 1950s, and the first so-called test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978 as a result of his research.
Since then, more than five million babies have been born around the world as a result of the techniques Edwards developed together with his late colleague, Patrick Steptoe. Edwards, who has five daughters and 11 grandchildren, said he was motivated in his work by a desire to help families.
“Nothing is more special than a child,” he was quoted by his clinic as saying when he won his Nobel prize. Edwards began his work on fertilisation in 1955, and by 1968 had managed to fertilise a human egg in a laboratory. He then started to collaborate with Steptoe.
In 1980, the two founded Bourn Hall, the world’s first IVF clinic, in Cambridge, eastern England, where gynaecologists and cell biologists around the world have since come to train.
Mike Macnamee, chief executive of the clinic, said Edwards was “one of our greatest scientists”, whose inspirational work had led to a breakthrough that had enhanced the lives of millions of people worldwide.
IVF is a process by which an egg is fertilised by sperm outside the body in a test tube, giving rise to the term “in vitro” or “in glass”. Experts say that today, as many as 1 to 2 percent of babies in the Western world are conceived through IVF, a method designed to help infertile couples or those who have trouble conceiving naturally but who want to have children of their own.
Reuters
