Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [61]
Scientists may be anarchists, but they can still have hearts of gold. The development of IVF was motivated not by scientific arrogance, nor by academic ambition, but by a genuinely positive aspect of humanity: empathy. Robert Edwards and his wife had made friends with a couple who were childless. As he watched this couple play with his own daughters, Edwards felt an extraordinary sense of compassion. Relating the story of IVF in his book A Matter of Life, he says, ‘The trees bore fruit, the clouds carried rain, and our friends, forever childless, played with our Caroline, our Jennifer.’ That was Edwards’ spur to change the human experience.
The anarchy lay in Edwards and Steptoe’s defiance of the establishment. In July 2010, the journal Human Reproduction published an extraordinary article. It was an unprecedented analysis of what happened when Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, the researchers who ‘created’ Louise Brown, approached the UK’s Medical Research Council for funding.
Not surprisingly, plenty of religious groups had objected. But the scientific establishment also balked at the request, and not for the most rational of reasons. According to the article in Human Reproduction, one problem was that Edwards and Steptoe were outsiders: ‘Steptoe came from a minor northern hospital, while Edwards, although from Cambridge, was neither medically qualified nor yet a professor.’ The pair were also accused of seeking too much publicity. The review board concluded that they should slow down and try IVF on non-human primates first: someone ought to prove that it works before putting a human foetus through an experience that could go horrifically wrong. ‘I would question the ethics of initiating and maintaining an incipient human life for experimental and scientific purposes,’ was how Tony Glenister, an embryologist at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, had put it. Edwards and Steptoe, true anarchists, ignored the party line and sought private funding for their research.
The concern that test-tube babies would be born with freakish deformities evaporated when Louise Brown came into the world. She was a healthy baby; she is now a healthy adult. She is not a freak. She is not abnormal in any sense. She is entirely unremarkable, in fact: she is now a postal worker in Bristol and has normal, healthy children of her own. But at the time of her birth Louise Brown was a miracle, and Steptoe and Edwards were heroes or villains, depending on your perspective. These days, IVF babies, and the doctors able to create them, are commonplace. Around four million people have been conceived through IVF, with no adverse effects on their health as a consequence. In 2010 Edwards was awarded a Nobel Prize for his achievement (Steptoe died in 1988).
People still ask questions about Edwards and Steptoe’s ethics. Before Louise Brown was born, Edwards had overseen a string of failed efforts to create an IVF baby, each one of which hugely disappointed the parents-in-waiting. Some take the fact that Louise Brown’s parents weren’t explicitly told that his technique had yet to produce a live birth to indicate that Edwards’ desire