The World's First "Test-Tube Baby" Was Conceived in a Petri Dish. She Had Her Own Child Naturally.

On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown was born by torchlight in a Victorian workhouse hospital in Oldham, England, the first human conceived outside a body. The press warned of "baby farms" and "1984 six years early." She grew up to conceive her own son naturally, and more than twelve million IVF babies have followed.

At 11:47 p.m. on July 25, 1978, a healthy girl let out a lusty yell in a guarded room at Oldham and District General Hospital, a cluster of Victorian buildings that had begun life as a Dickensian workhouse. She was delivered by caesarean section under torchlight, the lights kept low so the glow would not tip off the reporters massed at the gates. She weighed five pounds twelve ounces. Her middle name, Joy, was chosen by the surgeon who delivered her, Patrick Steptoe, who said her birth would bring "joy and hope to childless people around the world".

She was Louise Joy Brown, the first person in history conceived outside a human body. Her parents, Lesley and John Brown, had tried for nine years to have a child. John drove a van for British Rail; they lived in Bristol. Lesley's fallopian tubes were blocked beyond repair, and after a sympathetic nurse sent them to Steptoe in 1976, he found only "mere remnants" of the tubes and removed them, which also meant she could never conceive naturally. Steptoe, an Oldham gynecologist, had been chasing this problem for a dozen years with Robert Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist. They had never produced a live birth. Edwards reckoned he had driven more than 50,000 miles between Cambridge and Oldham, once with a rabbit riding along as a traveling receptacle for an egg under study.

The breakthrough was timing. Working with Lesley's natural monthly cycle rather than forcing one, Steptoe retrieved a single ripe egg on November 10, 1977, at a sleepy clinic called Dr. Kershaw's Cottage Hospital. Edwards fertilized it with John's sperm in a glass dish, a Petri dish, not a test tube, though the label "test-tube baby" would stick. The embryologist Jean Purdy was the first to watch the cells divide. Two and a half days later, when the embryo had reached eight cells, they placed it back in Lesley's womb. "The last time I saw her, she was a beautiful eight-celled embryo," Edwards said. Steptoe, at the birth, was simpler: "She came out crying her head off. A beautiful, normal baby."

The reaction was panic. "We could get baby farms, mass-produced kids, 1984 six years early!" exclaimed Derek Jameson, editor of the London Daily Express. Bishops and ethicists demanded the work be stopped. Britain's Medical Research Council had already refused to fund it, questioning its safety and, some said, worrying about overpopulation. The Nobel assembly later noted that "several religious leaders, ethicists, and scientists demanded that the project be stopped," while others gave it their support.

The fear aged fast. Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing IVF (Steptoe had died in 1988 and Purdy in 1985, and the prize is not awarded posthumously), and even then the Vatican's bioethics spokesman called the award "completely out of order," blaming Edwards for "a large number of freezers filled with embryos." But the monsters never came. Louise Brown grew up, married, and in 2006 had a son of her own, Cameron, conceived naturally. Her sister Natalie, the world's 40th IVF baby, had already become the first person conceived by IVF to give birth, also naturally, in 1999. The family line the Browns had been so desperate to start continued with no laboratory at all. More than twelve million people have now been born through IVF, and as the bioethicist Arthur Caplan later put it, the moment Louise was held up, "all her parts were there, and she smiled, and that ended the ethics criticism."

Also on this day

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In 1909, Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel by airplane for the first time, a 37-minute flight from Calais to Dover that won him the Daily Mail's 1,000-pound prize while his rival slept.
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