Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [60]
The pair had had many public disagreements and fallings-out, and anyone familiar with the department would mark the scene as the prelude to a long-overdue showdown. It would be a story to be retold around the water cooler for days, a source of gossip and giggles. But the outcome was far from amusing. We know that Vande Wiele caught up with Shettles before he could get to his lab, because what happened next had repercussions that are still, nearly forty years later, being felt across America.
On a bench in Shettles’ lab sat an incubator set to body temperature, 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the incubator was a small test tube filled with a dark liquid. This was the world’s first attempt at in vitro fertilisation – IVF. Shettles had placed a woman’s egg, her husband’s sperm and a cocktail of blood and water in what he considered to be the perfect conditions for fertilisation to take place. Later that day, the woman, thirty-year-old Doris Del-Zio, was scheduled to have the fertilised egg implanted into her uterus.
It wasn’t to be. Once inside the laboratory, Vande Wiele snatched the test tube from the incubator. Shettles had broken every hospital protocol, he said, laying the hospital open to multiple lawsuits. Ironically, though, it was Vande Wiele’s action that would lead to the courtroom. The following year, Doris Del-Zio filed a $1.5 million claim against him for emotional distress. She claimed that, by exposing the test tube’s contents to room temperature, Vande Wiele had killed her baby. Roe vs Wade, the landmark case that defined abortion law in the United States, was only a year old, and this first, stillborn attempt at IVF became part of the national controversy.
On 12 July 1974, the US Congress imposed a moratorium on the kind of foetal research that Landrum Shettles was doing. The moratorium was technically lifted just over a year later, when Congress mandated that all proposals to research human foetal growth, including human IVF, were to be reviewed by a national Ethics Advisory Board.
In 1979 the EAB finally issued their report on the prospects for human IVF. It was far from a ringing endorsement – hardly a surprise, given the social and political climate in which it had been commissioned. During the review process 13,000 comments had come in from the public, the overwhelming majority of them railing against the technology. Senators and Representatives, too, had issued angry letters arguing that IVF research was immoral and unethical.
The report concluded that ‘IVF research is acceptable from an ethical standpoint, including research that does not involve the transfer of the resulting embryo, if and only if the research is designed to establish the safety and efficacy of IVF and knowledge that cannot be obtained by any other means.’ But here’s the rub. A year earlier, while the EAB committee was deliberating, a Harris and Gallup poll had canvassed public opinion on IVF. Americans now favoured the use of IVF by infertile couples, by a majority of more than two to one. Why this shift? Because science had already rewritten the rules. Louise Brown had been born, and she was a normal, healthy baby.
Her name could hardly be more ordinary, yet it has a lasting resonance in the consciousness of the Western world. And no wonder: Brown was the world’s first test-tube baby. That label paints her as some freakish creation from a Frankenstein laboratory. Indeed, some people had said that her ‘creators’, Robert Edwards and the late Patrick Steptoe, were mad, that they were playing God, and that if they were allowed to continue with their work they would sooner or later create a monster. Their peers simply said that they were destined for failure because they were trying to achieve the impossible. But on 25 July 1978, nine days into the trial of Raymond Vande Wiele, baby Louise was born.
The sense of hope this birth gave to childless couples was almost certainly