A British physiologist and pioneer in reproductive medicine, Robert G.
Edwards, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing in-vitro
fertilization.
Edwards, 85, a former professor at the University of Cambridge in England,
will get the 10 million-kronor ($1.5 million) prize, the Nobel Assembly said
today in Stockholm. He won the Albert Lasker award for clinical medical
research in 2001. His research partner, Patrick Steptoe, died in 1988.
Edwards, who along with Steptoe created the first test tube baby in 1978,
conducted his reproductive research in the face of opposition from church
and government. He has now left Cambridge, a spokesman for the university
said. His health is frail and he isn’t available for interviews, said Mike
Macnamee, chief executive of Bourn Hall, the Cambridge clinic where Edwards
and Steptoe first performed IVF. Macnamee, who joined Edwards’s research
team in the early 1980s, said the two scientists were “pushing back
frontiers.”
“The work at Bourn Hall in those heady days was directed at making the
treatment more widely available and the patients were well aware that they
too were making history,” Macnamee said in an e-mailed statement. “There
are now over 4 million IVF babies worldwide as a result of the techniques
developed in Cambridge.”
Army Service
Edwards, who was born in Leeds, served in the British army in Jordan, Egypt
and Iraq before earning an undergraduate degree in zoology and agriculture
from the University of Bangor, Wales. He did postgraduate work at the
University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Animal Genetics.
As a young researcher, Edwards began work on mice reproduction. He studied
fertilized eggs collected from female mice, which tend to ovulate at night,
according to the Lasker citation. After three years of midnight visits to
the lab, he found a way to coax the animals to ovulate during daytime,
according to the citation. He also developed a way to prod dormant eggs to
mature outside the female’s body.
Edwards began working on humans by persuading gynecologists to give him
slices of human ovaries from women who underwent surgery. In 1969, he
published a paper in which he described having achieved fertilization
outside a woman’s body. He joined forces with Steptoe, who collected
ripened eggs directly from women’s ovaries.
Louise Brown
Edwards worked on fertilizing them in the lab. In 1972, they started trying
to place the eggs in the womb of infertile women. On July 25, 1978, Louise
Brown, the first test tube baby, was born using the procedure developed by
Edwards and Steptoe.
Last year’s Nobel prize in medicine went to Elizabeth Blackburn, a
professor at the University of California in San Francisco, Carol Greider
from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and Jack
Szostak of Harvard Medical School in Boston, for research on cell division.
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and
literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish
inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established
in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.
An economics prize was created in 1969 in memory of Nobel by the Swedish
central bank. Only the peace prize is awarded outside Sweden, by the five-
member Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.
