A Nobel for Edwards: Children of the Reproductive Revolution

Chuck Donovan / October 05, 2010

No stranger to controversial choices, the Nobel Committee has awarded its 2010 Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Robert Edwards of Cambridge University, who, along with the late Australian Dr. Patrick Steptoe, developed in vitro fertilization.

In terms of impact, the award is fitting. In vitro fertilization techniques isolated the earliest stages of embryonic human life from the female body and, since 1978, allowed for the conception and birth of more than 4 million children to infertile couples.

The Nobel Committee chose to focus, understandably, on these results. But other aims and consequences of Edwards’s techniques have created severe ethical dilemmas. As Edwards worked to develop procedures and culture media that could sustain human life, many of his research subjects died, including embryos conceived using his own sperm. In addition to refining the success rate and safety of his techniques, Edwards developed techniques for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that would allow parents to identify genetic diseases before taking the developing human being from the petri dish to the womb. The same techniques increasingly allow scientists to select embryos on the basis of their sex or other desired physical characteristics, practices that remain controversial. (more…)