In Vitro Fertilization (“Test-Tube Baby”)

On 25 July 1978, at Oldham General Hospital in the north of England, Louise Brown was born — the world's first "test-tube baby." The name is a little misleading; what had actually happened was that doctors had taken her mother's egg, fertilised it in a laboratory dish with her father's sperm, and then placed the resulting embryo back into her mother's womb. The technique is called in vitro fertilisation, or IVF (in vitro being Latin for "in glass"). It was the result of a decade of work by the gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, the physiologist Robert Edwards and the embryologist Jean Purdy, who tends to be the one the history books forget. The headlines were ecstatic and alarmed in roughly equal measure. Newsweek ran with "a cry heard round the brave new world," a nod to Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopia about industrially produced babies, and the tabloids promised a coming "Frankenstein era." The bioethicist Leon Kass had argued as early as 1972, in the journal The Public Interest, that fertilising a human egg outside the body was "depersonalising and dehumanising," and he kept arguing it through the 1970s and 1980s. The Nobel-winning biologist James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, told a US congressional committee that when the first IVF child was born "all hell will break loose." The Vatican set out its formal opposition in the 1987 document Donum Vitae. In the United States a federal Ethics Advisory Board set up in 1978 did recommend funding IVF research in 1979, but the Board was quietly disbanded in 1980, and the practical effect was a freeze on federal IVF funding that lasted for decades. More than ten million children have now been born through IVF, and the whole episode has become a textbook example of a "playing God" panic going quiet once the thing it was panicking about turned out to be the baby next door.