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How it began....

On a Tuesday evening, July 25, 1978, at 11:47 P.M., the world's first human test-tube baby was born.  Louise Brown was a beautiful, normal, five-pound, twelve-ounce girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. Dr. Robert Edwards and Dr. Patrick Steptoe, in a little clinic near Manchester, England, were responsible for this giant step forward into the "brave new world." Dr. Edwards's first statement upon seeing the child was, "The last time I saw the baby it was just eight cells in a test tube. It was beautiful then and it is still beautiful now."  The child's mother, Leslie Brown, and father, John Brown, had been married for nine years and were unable to have children.  The problem was that the wife's tubes were so badly destroyed by scars and inflammation that surgery could not help her.  Her ovaries and her uterus were normal, however, and all that was required was to take an egg from her ovary, mix it with her husband's sperm in a test tube, and then transfer the two-day-old embryo into her womb to grow for the next nine months into a full-term baby.

This achievement was the culmination of twelve years of painstaking research by the two doctors. Doctors Steptoe and Edwards courageously ushered in a new era that makes it possible today for virtually any couple to have a baby.

How does it work?

In classic in vitro fertilisation, sperm and eggs are mixed in a culture dish, put in an incubator, and the eggs are allowed to fertilise.    Two days later the fertilised eggs or embryos are replaced in the woman's uterus.   The laboratory technology for this in vitro fertilisation is so good that with the exception of men with extremely poor-quality sperm, there is very little difficulty for most infertile couples to obtain fertilisation in a test tube.  The only stumbling block to the wider success of in vitro fertilisation is not any difficulty in getting fertilisation to occur, but rather in getting the transferred embryos to implant in the uterus and result in a pregnancy.  Thousands of fertilisation were accomplished in IVF laboratories around the world bypassing all the hurdles presented by infertile couples, but when those precious embryos were replaced in the uterus, only a small percentage of them were able to "implant" and become babies.

(text above are extracted from "How to get pregnant with the new technology by Sherman J. Silber, M.D.)