The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to 85-year-old Robert Edwards of England, for the development of in vitro fertilization. The Karolinska Institute’s Christer Hoog:

“Robert Edwards, working in the United Kingdom, began his fundamental research on the biology of fertilization during the 1950s. He formulated early a vision to develop an in vitro fertilization method to treat infertility. In this method, an egg will be taken out of a woman, fertilized using sperm in a cell culture dish, and then returned to the woman.”

The first so-called test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in England in 1978.

“Since 1978, an increasing number of children, now approximately four million, have been born thanks to IVF. To briefly summarize the status of IVF today, 1 to 2 percent of all newborns in Europe, and America, and Australia and a number of countries, are conceived through IVF.”

—Steve Mirsky

[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]