Robert Edwards Creator Of IVF Dies At 87

Robert Edwards is known as "the father of IVF" and he
certainly has a big family.
Louise Brown, born in 1978, was the first test-tube baby.
Since then, more than five million children have been born
through IVF.
In vitro fertilisation has completely changed the prospects
for couples unable to have children.
Fertilising an egg with sperm outside the body and
implanting the resulting embryo means infertility is no
longer a certain barrier to starting a family.
The technique sparked a huge ethical debate in 1978 and
attracted media attention around the world.
Born in Yorkshire in 1925 into a working-class family, Prof
Edwards served in the British army during World War II
before returning home to study first agricultural sciences
and then animal genetics.
Building on earlier research, which showed that egg cells
from rabbits could be fertilised in test tubes when sperm
was added, Edwards developed the same technique for
humans.
In a laboratory at Cambridge in 1968, he first saw life
created outside the womb in the form of a human
blastocyst, an embryo that has developed for five to six
days after fertilisation.
"I'll never forget the day I looked down the microscope and
saw something funny in the cultures," Edwards once
recalled.
"I looked down the microscope and what I saw was a
human blastocyst gazing up at me. I thought, 'We've done
it'."
"Bob Edwards is one of our greatest scientists," said Mike
Macnamee, chief executive of Bourn Hall, the IVF clinic
founded by Prof Edwards with his fellow IVF pioneer Patrick
Steptoe, a gynaecological surgeon.
Prof Martin Johnson, one of his first students, said: "Bob
Edwards was a remarkable man who changed the lives of so
many people.