Sperm being injected into an oocyteWIKIMEDIA, COURTESY: RWJMS IVF LABORATORYThe researcher who pioneered human in vitro fertilization (IVF) died yesterday (April 10) after a long battle with illness. He was 87. His work, which led to the birth of more than 5 million babies, won him the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
“I have always regarded Robert Edwards as like a grandfather to me,” Louise Brown, the world’s first ever infant born through IVF, told the BBC. “I am glad that he lived long enough to be recognized with a Nobel Prize for his work, and his legacy will live on with all the IVF work being carried out throughout the world.”
Edwards created a human blastocyst, the ball of cells that forms early in the development of an embryo, outside the womb for the first time in his Cambridge University laboratory in 1968. Ten years later, Brown was born after a fertilized egg was implanted in her mother’s uterus.
In the 24 hours since his death, tributes to Edwards’s work have been pouring in. Mike Macnamee, ...
