I love the obituaries. Today there is an amazing one.
ROBERT G. EDWARDS, 1925-2013
Changing Rules of Conception With the First ‘Test Tube Baby’
Robert G. Edwards, who opened a new era in medicine when he joined a colleague in developing in vitro fertilization, enabling millions of infertile couples to bring children into the world and women to have babies even in menopause, died on Wednesday at his home near Cambridge, England. Dr. Edwards, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough, was 87.
Dr. Edwards, a flamboyant and colorful physiologist who courted the press and vigorously debated his critics, and with his colleague, Dr. Patrick Steptoe, essentially changed the rules for how people can come into the world. Conception was now possible outside the body — in a petri dish.
Gina Colata tells the sprawling British story of audacious science. The one where a couple of doctors, with little official support and many cast aspersions, never gave up on the idea that there could be another way to conceive a human life.
They were right. In vitro fertilization is a fact of humanity five million times over. It’s neither my job nor wont to consider the morality or ethics of this fact. I just know that it was a remarkable human life, ended just yesterday, that helped make it so. Worth reading about it today.