As the world鈥檚 first IVF baby, Louise Brown, celebrated her 32nd birthday on Sunday, new insights have emerged into why the UK (MRC) refused to fund the work leading to her conception.
An analysis of archived material has revealed that the science funding body viewed in-vitro fertilisation pioneers Patrick Steptoe and as 鈥減ublicity hounds鈥�. The funders also saw the idea of infertility research as irrelevant because curbing population was a global priority. The MRC got in touch with the US National Institutes of 午夜福利1000集合 to explain why it was not funding the work.
The MRC鈥檚 funding referees also had ethical concerns, including the possibility that babies born through IVF would be abnormal. This resulted in a demand that Steptoe and Edwards demonstrate the safety of the technique first in monkeys.
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The documents reveal that neither Steptoe, a gynaecologist then based in Oldham, UK, who helped pioneer laparoscopy, nor Edwards, at the time a medically unqualified physiologist at the University of Cambridge, was seen as part of the medical establishment.
Edwards and Steptoe applied to the MRC for funding in February 1971, two years after they had demonstrated they could fertilise human eggs in the lab. Edwards later said that he was devastated when told on 28 April that the application had failed. Instead, he and Steptoe obtained private funding, which eventually led to the birth of Louise Brown on 25聽July 1978 (New Scientist, 3聽August 1978, p聽325). Since then, an estimated 4.3聽million IVF babies have been born.
鈥淥ur research provides a fuller understanding of what happened at the birth of the IVF revolution,鈥� wrote lead author of the account, of the University of Cambridge.
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