Birth of Louise Brown: First Baby Conceived by In Vitro Fertilization

When Lesley and John Brown came to the clinic in 1977, they had been trying for a child for nine years. Lesley Brown had blocked fallopian tubes, and failed operations on them in 1970 were followed by their removal in August 1977; her only path to pregnancy was an egg fertilized outside her body and returned to her uterus. That idea had been pursued for years by Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist at Oldham and District General Hospital, and Robert Edwards, a physiologist at Cambridge.

Edwards had spent the 1960s working out how to mature human oocytes in culture and establishing the conditions under which fertilization could occur in vitro. Steptoe contributed the laparoscopic technique to retrieve eggs without open surgery. About a hundred attempts in the early 1970s produced only short-lived pregnancies, and the first pregnancy that took hold, in 1976, was ectopic and had to be ended. They concluded that the hormones given to ripen eggs were disturbing implantation, changed the protocol, and began timing egg collection from each woman's own hormone levels.

Lesley Brown's egg was retrieved on November 10, 1977. The embryo was returned to her uterus at the 8-cell stage two and a half days later; late in the pregnancy she developed pre-eclampsia. Louise Joy Brown was born by caesarean section in Oldham on July 25, 1978, at 38 weeks and 5 days, weighing 2,700 grams. Steptoe and Edwards reported the birth in a short letter to the Lancet on August 12, 1978.

The work had been debated for years, a debate Edwards himself started: some religious leaders, ethicists and scientists demanded that it stop, while others supported it. The Medical Research Council had declined to fund the project, and a private donation kept it going. Edwards and Steptoe then founded Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, the first IVF center, which recorded 1,000 births by 1986. Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010; Steptoe, who died in 1988, was not eligible for consideration.

Embryo freezing, preimplantation genetic testing and intracytoplasmic sperm injection did not exist in 1978; they were added in the following decades, while ovarian stimulation protocols were reworked at Bourn Hall. By 2010, about four million people had been born after IVF. Louise Brown and other early IVF children have since had children of their own.