Today (April 10, 2013) is the anniversary of Nobel Prize-winning British biologist Robert Geoffrey Edwards, who invented the in vitro fertilization method.
Robert Geoffrey Edwards was born on September 27, 1925, in Manchester,
England. He attended Manchester Central High School on Whitworth Street in
central Manchester. He later served in the British Army. He completed his
undergraduate studies in biology at Bangkok University. He received his
doctorate in 1955 from the Institute of Animal Genetics and Instrumentation at
the University of Edinburgh. A postdoctoral researcher at the California
Institute of Technology, he joined the National Institute of Medical Research
at Mill Hill a year later.
Robert Edwards has been involved in research into the invention of
artificial insemination since the 1960s. His experiments with pioneer physician
Patrick Steptoe (1913 - 1988) led to the development of the first test-tube
baby in 1978. After many attempts, Leslie Brown was born on July 25, 1978, to a
British woman named Louise Brown through artificial insemination. Following the
birth of that first child, it is estimated that approximately 5 million babies
worldwide have been born through artificial insemination in the last 35 years.
The method of infertility invented by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe
was well received in the world. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in
Medicine. However, the Catholic Church opposed artificial insemination. It is
the position of the Catholic Church that it is immoral for a man to attempt to
conceive artificially without respecting the natural law of God. Also, if fertilization is to be successful, several other embryos must be developed in
preparation for it. Many embryos that are not injected into a woman's uterus
must be preserved in the laboratory. Unused embryos may be destroyed. Pointing
to all this, the Catholic Church at the time opposed artificial insemination.
That protest continues today. Robert Geoffrey Edwards, who invented the method
of in vitro fertilization, passed away on April 10, 2013, in the United Kingdom.
Source By: Wikipedia.
Information: Ramesh, Assistant Professor of Physics, Nehru Memorial
College, Puthanampatti, Trichy.
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