First ‘test tube’ baby Louise Brown became the smiling poster child for IVF
She was dubbed the world’s first “test tube baby” because petri dish baby didn’t have quite the same ring.
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Louise Joy Brown was known as the world’s first “test tube baby”, but people still like to point out there were no test tubes actually involved in the process of bringing her into the world. She was conceived in a petri dish, but “petri dish baby” didn’t quite have the same ring.
When Brown was born, 40 years ago today by planned caesarean section, it brought her parents enormous joy (hence her name) and made world headlines. The little girl represented a major breakthrough in the field of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the process of using the eggs and sperm of parents (or donors) and artificially kicking off pregnancy outside the body before implanting the fertilised egg into the womb.
At the time it was like something out of science fiction, recalling Aldous Huxley’s babies born from glass jars in his 1931 novel Brave New World. But it has since become almost routine, with estimates of more than eight million children being born using IVF.
Brown’s birth brought hope to millions of couples struggling to conceive, although not everyone was happy about this triumph of science over nature.
In prehistoric and ancient times fertility and conception were not well understood.
If a couple were unable to conceive it was thought that they needed to perform rituals or ceremonies to bring about conception. Some of these involved giving offerings to gods or goddesses of fertility, hoping that they would soon be blessed with children.
Over ensuing centuries people tried all manner of folk remedies for infertility, many involving removing parts of virile animals and working them into some kind of potion, others as harmless as boiling catnip and drinking it on an empty stomach.
A Jewish thinker in the second century AD discussed the ethics of a woman becoming accidentally inseminated by artificial means, citing the legend of a man putting his sperm into bathwater and a woman being coerced to bath in the water. There are also accounts of Arabs using artificial insemination as early as the 14th century in the breeding of horses, but it was not until the 17th century that a sperm was first seen under a microscope bringing about a greater understanding of what role semen might have in conception.
Successful experiments were first performed with dogs in the 18th century and in 1790 Scottish surgeon John Hunter inseminated a woman with her husband’s sperm, resulting in a pregnancy.
Nearly a century later, in 1884, American physician Dr William Pancoast inseminated a woman whose husband was infertile. He performed the procedure under anaesthesia, telling the woman it was a routine examination. He then used semen donated by one of six medical students observing the procedure. The woman gave birth to a child nine months later, but Pancoast only told the husband and the truth was not revealed until years later when one of the students wrote up the case. Pancoast kept the success of his experiment secret because of fierce opposition from church groups to interference in the process of reproduction.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1937, physician John Rock discussed the possibility of bypassing a woman’s blocked fallopian tubes by extracting eggs and fertilising them “in vitro”.
The next year sperm was successfully frozen for the first time and in 1955 came the first successful case of frozen sperm being used to inseminate a woman. However, there were ethical hurdles to be overcome — in 1954 an Illinois court ruled that using donor sperm was technically adultery.
In the ’60s doctors seemed to be close to making a breakthrough in the field of in vitro fertilisation.
One of the forerunners was British physician Dr Robert Edwards. In laboratory experiments observed eggs undergo the early stage of fertilisation, but it was not until 1968, when he met British doctor Patrick Steptoe, who had expertise in laparoscopy, that he was able to solve the problem of “capacitating” sperm, allowing them to properly mature, and to make the process progress further.
Their collaboration culminated in the 1977 fertilisation of eggs extracted from Lesley Brown, who had been trying with her husband John to conceive for nine years.
Steptoe and Edwards consulted with the couple and Lesley and John agreed to try the cutting- edge procedure, not knowing that it was only experimental and had never yet been successful.
On July 25, 1978, Louise was born to the Browns. The baby became a celebrity and the world has watched her grow up. At four her parents underwent IVF again to give Louise a sister, Natalie. Natalie gave birth to a daughter in 1999. Louise had her first child in 2006. Neither needed IVF.
Originally published as First ‘test tube’ baby Louise Brown became the smiling poster child for IVF
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