IVF 30 Years On
By Olga Craig,
Telegraph [UK]
| 06. 16. 2008
When the first test-tube baby was born, it wasn't just the beginning of a new life but of a whole new approach to infertility. Olga Craig talks to some winners and losers in the IVF lottery and asks where do we go from here?
A single word, splashed across the front page of a national newspaper, said it all: superbabe! In a photograph below, swathed in a soft blanket, was the baby whose birth had healed the heartache of her childless parents and brought hope to millions of infertile women: Louise Joy Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, who was born in Oldham General Hospital minutes before midnight on July 25 1978.
Delivered by caesarean section and weighing just 5lb 12oz, little Louise was the daughter of John and Lesley Brown, a Manchester couple. She was conceived by in vitro fertilisation, during which her mother's eggs were fertilised by her father's sperm in a test tube and she became, to her parents' delight, the first child to be born using the procedure pioneered by the British fertility experts Robert Edwards...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...