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.
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“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.]
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