Test-tube baby pioneer Professor Sir Robert Edwards dies

 

The IVF pioneer whose work led to the world's first "test tube baby" has died at the age of 87.

Professor Sir Robert Edwards was knighted in 2011, five decades after he began experimenting with IVF.
His work led to the birth of "test-tube baby" Louise Brown at Oldham General Hospital in 1978.

The University of Cambridge, where Prof Edwards was a fellow, said his work "had an immense impact throughout the world".
In a statement, the university said: "It is with deep sadness that the family announces that Professor Sir Robert Edwards, Nobel Prize-winner, scientist and co-pioneer of IVF, passed away peacefully in his sleep after a long illness."

'We've done it' 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.

'Remarkable man' "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.
Professor Martin Johnson, one of his first students, said: "Bob Edwards was a remarkable man who changed the lives of so many people.

"He was not only a visionary in his science but also in his communication to the wider public about matters scientific in which he was a great pioneer.

"He will be greatly missed by his colleagues, students, his family and all the many people he has helped to have children."
Professor Peter Braude, Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Kings College London, said: "Few biologists have so positively and practically impacted on humankind.

"Bob's boundless energy, his innovative ideas, and his resilience despite the relentless criticism by naysayers, changed the lives of millions of ordinary people who now rejoice in the gift of their own child."
Edwards was too frail to pick up his Nobel prize in Stockholm in 2010, leaving that job to his wife Ruth, with whom he had five daughters.
However, he remained a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, until his death.
His work was motivated by his belief, as he once described it, that "the most important thing in life is having a child."
"Nothing is more special than a child," he said.