午夜福利1000集合

IN NOVEMBER 1968, we reported on the latest attempts at in vitro fertilisation. It had so far only been successful in rabbits, and seemed very far from reality in humans.

The prospect was clearly a concern, however, as we felt the need to provide reassurance in the first sentence of our story: 鈥淎nyone haunted by the vision of 鈥榯est-tube babies鈥� should visit a laboratory where research is being carried out,鈥� we said. They would 鈥渋nstantly realize that the scientists involved have not the smallest desire to replace the double bed by laboratory glassware (they are, after all, human like the rest of us)鈥�.

If the vision of eminently human scientists wasn鈥檛 enough, the visitor would also be struck, we said, by the extraordinary difficulty of recreating any stage of the reproductive process outside the mammalian body. 鈥淎ll attempts so far have been little more than sophisticated cookery.鈥�

The heart of our story was that, for the first time, mouse eggs had been successfully fertilised in a glass dish. Around 20 per cent had divided in two 鈥� the first stage of development. Of these, 32 had been implanted in mice and nine had developed into normal fetuses. Combined with other work growing fertilised mice eggs in the lab up to the eight-cell stage, this knowledge would shed light on the physiology of mammalian reproduction, we wrote.

Knowledge was apparently the primary reason for the research. Until then, all we knew about fertilisation had come from invertebrates such as sea urchins, since in these animals it normally takes place outside the body. 鈥淭he only way of studying the process in mammals is to remove it from deep inside the body of the female and study it under the microscope on a slide,鈥� we wrote.

There was no sense of how IVF might be useful for people in our story. It wasn鈥檛 for another 10 years, in July 1978, that the first baby conceived through IVF, Louise Brown (pictured above) was born. Since then, more than 8 million children worldwide have been conceived in this way.