IVF and New Technology

Abstract

Human IVF began in the late 1960s when Robert Edwards in Cam- bridge, England, first fertilized human eggs with human sperm in the labora- tory(1). Dr Edwards had made contact with a gynaecologist, Dr Patrick Step- toe, who had pioneered the use of laparoscopy in Britain, recognising that Steptoe's procedures allowed hu man eggs to be obtained from the ovaries. After that there were eight or nine years of frustration before the first pregnancy was achieved in 1976: the frustration was worse when that first pregnancy turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy(2). The first baby, named Louise Brown, was not born from IVF until 1978(3), nine years after human IVF embryos had first been described, and this shows just how difficult the technology was to de- velop. For IVF to be successful every part of the clinical and laboratory pro- cedure must be exactly correct; but on the other hand if everything is correct then we now know that it will work, and it will work immediately, and it will work predictably.