IVF pioneer wins medicine Nobel prize

British scientist Robert Edwards, whose work led to to the birth of the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’, has won this year’s Noble Prize for Medicine.

That baby was born in 1978: Louise Brown

His in-vitro fertilisation techniques have been used in four million births since.

The prize was announced by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which praised Edwards for what it called a “milestone in modern medicine.”

Edwards began his research in the 1950s amid protests from the church, governments and the media.

He believed fertilisation outside the body could represent a possible treatment of infertility.

Studies with animals had shown egg cells could be fertilised in test tubes when sperm was added, giving rise to offspring.

The procedure failed on a number of attempts but the first succesful IVF birth came in 1978.

Edwards developed the technique with his late colleague Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist who died in 1988.

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