Nobel Prize For IVF Founder

IVF, or in vitro fertilization, is all over the news these days, and there’s hardly a person who doesn’t know about assisted conception.

But it wasn’t always this way. It used to be that infertile couple either had to adopt or just never have children. With up to ten percent of all couples being infertile, this is was a lot of people not being able to fulfil their dreams of parenting.

Thanks to Dr. Robert Edwards this all changed in the 1970s. After more than twenty years of experimentation, the first test tube baby was born in 1978 and Dr. Edwards has been busy ever since.

He has now received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for 2010.

The Nobel Assembly has said:

• This discovery represents a monumental medical advance that can truly be said to confer the “greatest benefit to mankind”. Human IVF has radically changed the field of reproductive medicine. Today, 2% to 3% of all newborns in many countries are conceived with the help of IVF and many individuals that turn to an infertility clinic can be helped.

I think it’s great that he got this prize after such an amazing career. It’s people like this who break boundaries and push through controversial ethical issues that allow science to progress — and reproductive science is definitely an area of controversy.