From “Frankenstein” to Families: The History of IVF

In the 1970’s and 80’s, the news fueled fears about in vitro fertilization. Instead, the technology helps parents achieve their dreams.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has done an incredible amount of good. Over ten million children have been born with the help of IVF worldwide, and the procedure is more common right now than it has ever been. In 2022, 2.6% of babies born in the US were conceived through assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, while in many European countries the number is over 5%. If you know twenty parents, chances are one of those families would not have existed without IVF.

So many people need IVF that it has defenders across the political spectrum, and many countries have bipartisan support for making it as accessible as possible. For the one in six couples who struggle with infertility, IVF is often their last hope when other techniques like intrauterine insemination fall short.

One of our readers shared what IVF meant to her:

“IVF was not an easy decision, and it’s not an option for everybody, for many reasons. But when I see my child grow, when I hear her laugh, when I hug her, I know that every step was worth it.”

It’s a feeling that today many parents recognize.

But IVF wasn’t always seen this way. In the 1970’s, when pioneering biologists like Robert Edwards first developed IVF, the media told sensationalist, science-fictional stories of where it might lead, while scientific authorities downplayed IVF’s value and exaggerated its risks.

In the end, families ignored the pressure. IVF didn’t lead to chaos or a science fiction dystopia. It let millions of couples build lives without the spectre of infertility. And as new reproductive technologies develop, we expect them to do the same.

A time when medical researchers believed infertility should not be treated

It’s hard to imagine today, but in the 1960’s and 1970’s, very few researchers worked on infertility. A small number of visionaries understood its importance and tried to find solutions, including Landrum Shettles in the US and the team of Robert Edwards, Jean Purdy, and Patrick Steptoe in the UK. These pioneers were often looked down on by their colleagues, who didn’t appreciate just how many couples struggled with infertility, or just how much those struggles can impact a family.

In 1971, when Edwards, Purdy, and Steptoe applied for funding to develop IVF, they were told that the work was of low priority. Edwards recalled in particular that the committee had a “belief that infertility should not be treated because the world was overpopulated”. They viewed any new procedure to treat infertility as experimental, and imposed additional restrictions beyond those they applied to research they considered more important, like contraception.

Later in 1971, Edwards published an essay in the journal Nature, based on a talk he had given a few years earlier. In it, he argued that overpopulation should not be a reason to deny infertile parents the opportunity to have children. He emphasized the suffering that an inability to have children can cause,

“The desire to have children must be among the most basic of human instincts, and denying it can lead to considerable psychological and social difficulties,”

and argued that the medical profession had a duty to help,

“Infertility seems to be a clinical defect to be remedied if possible by medical attention. It cannot be a rational basis for denying on ethical or other grounds the right of some couples to have children.”

Addressing that era’s worries about overpopulation, he wrote,

“Social concern for overpopulation is now widespread. Our view is that a campaign against overpopulation should be directed to all parents generally and not enforced on a selected few.”

Despite the passionate arguments of people like Edwards, the number of researchers working to cure infertility remained small, and bias against them from the rest of the medical research community remained widespread. Edwards’ colleagues at Cambridge even tried to dissuade other researchers from working with him due to his research focus. Martin Johnson, who chose Edwards as his PhD advisor in 1966, recalls “the other staff members took me to one side and asked why was I going to waste my time on research with that charlatan, who worked on stuff ‘down there’ and spoke to the press.”

A Fascinated Public

Those conversations with the press were unusual in other areas of medical research at the time. But for the IVF pioneers, it was important to keep the public informed. And the public, in turn, was fascinated.

In 1971, Look Magazine published an article about the work of US IVF researcher Landrum Shettles, describing him as developing a “test-tube baby”. The name stuck, despite the fact that in vitro fertilization used a petri dish, not a test tube. A 1974 article in the New York Times went further, alluding to the science fiction novel “Brave New World” and quoting James Watson, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, who said that as a consequence of IVF, “All hell will break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.”

Edwards complained that these speculations were “dramatically doom-lit and gaudily coloured by science-fiction fantasies and visions – fantasies of horror and disaster, and visions of white-coated, heartless men, breeding and rearing embryos in the laboratory to bring forth Frankenstein genetic monsters.” He saw it as his duty to talk to the press and correct the misconceptions, arguing that the technology he was developing was going to be used to benefit ordinary families.

It is striking, looking at the 1974 New York Times article, to see how much of what they treated dramatically then is ordinary today. The article talks not only about IVF, but about the possibility of surrogate mothers, egg donors, and parents choosing sperm donors based on their health, rather than choosing at random as people were obliged to do back then. At the time, all of these were viewed as scary possibilities that would test the limits of ethics and bring us closer to disaster. Instead, they now support millions of families all over the world.

IVF Becomes a Reality

Edwards, Purdy, and Steptoe had to walk a long road until they were ready to help their first family. Without funding from the UK’s Medical Research Council, they were supported by private foundations, in particular a Californian heiress named Lillian Lincoln Howell. Their first patients were sworn to secrecy for their own protection, and the hospital even faced a bomb threat.

But in 1978, shortly before Steptoe was due to retire, the team succeeded, and helped Lesley and John Brown have their first child, Louise Joy Brown.

Soon, the team was receiving hundreds of letters, as couples wrote hoping for the chance for treatment. Lucy Daniel Raby was one of those early patients.

“It was all new and a bit sci-fi,” said Raby. “We were the early pioneers, and part of this exciting experimental process. I didn’t have a second thought about it once I knew it was the only way I could get pregnant. We were lucky that it was available.”

Over time, IVF has become more and more reliable, and more prospective parents gained access. Doctors and researchers came to understand just how much good it could do, and the practice expanded.

Saving more families

Edwards died in 2013, the last of his team. He lived long enough to see in vitro fertilization go from scary media stories to a vital part of fertility treatment. In 2010, just three years before his death, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Finally, the world recognized just how much good IVF had done.

Edwards’ ambition was to cure infertility, but infertility is still with us today. While medical researchers in the 1970’s were worried about overpopulation, now fertility rates are falling around the world. The movie Joy, a dramatization of the development of IVF, suggests that Edwards’ collaborator Jean Purdy had endometriosis. While we can’t know that with certainty, endometriosis can interfere with fertility in ways that IVF can’t address, disrupting the ovarian environment or making it difficult to carry a child. There are better treatments now than in Purdy’s day, but many women with endometriosis still can’t have children.

At e184, we’re working to change that. We are developing in vitro gametogenesis, the next step after in vitro fertilization: not merely uniting an egg and sperm in a clinic, but creating eggs or sperm using cells from a patient’s body, so that even women who have difficulty ovulating can have children. And we are working towards ectogenesis, technology that can support a fetus outside of the womb, so that women who have difficulty carrying a pregnancy, or cannot carry a pregnancy at all, can still have a child on their own terms.

Right now, some are afraid of these technologies, just as some were afraid of IVF in the 1970’s. But the history of IVF is reassuring. Far from a science-fiction dystopia, IVF did exactly what its developers proposed, and exactly what families around the world asked for: it helped parents have children. The technologies we build will do the same.

In an upcoming post, we’ll talk about the pressures parents face now, and how our new technologies will address them. Like Edwards, we want to stand up for your right to have children. We’d love to hear from you about the barriers you’ve faced, and what it could take to overcome them. You can contact us at stories@e184.com to tell your story.

We are hiring biologists, geneticists, physicists, bioinformaticians, materials scientists, and engineers who want to work on the questions that will define the next chapter in human biology. If that sounds like you, send us an application: