Just before midnight on July 25, 1978, at Oldham General Hospital in northern England, a baby girl was born by Caesarean section weighing 5 pounds 12 ounces. She had a head full of fuzzy hair and a strong cry. Her parents, Lesley and John Brown, had been trying to have a baby for nine years. Doctors had told them it was impossible. But the little girl in their arms - they named her Louise Joy Brown - was about to change medicine forever. Louise was the world's first baby born thanks to in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
Two British scientists, Dr. Robert Edwards and Dr. Patrick Steptoe, had spent more than a decade figuring out how to combine an egg and a sperm cell in a small glass dish in the lab, let it grow into a tiny embryo, and gently place it back into a mother's body. They faced years of failure, mockery, and even angry letters telling them to stop. When Louise was finally born, the world went wild. Newspapers called her a 'miracle baby.' The hospital received sacks of fan mail from couples around the world.
IVF has now helped bring more than 12 million babies into the world. Dr. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2010 for the breakthrough. Louise Brown herself grew up to live a totally normal life in Bristol, England, becoming a postal worker and later writing a book about her famous beginnings. She even has a son of her own - conceived the normal way. One late-summer night in a small English hospital opened the door to families that wouldn't have existed without science, kindness, and stubborn doctors.
