Robert Geoffrey Edwards#

Robert G. Edwards CBE FRS was born 1925 in Manchester.

After finishing Manchester Central High School, he served in the British Army. He studied agriculture at the University of Wales from 1948 to 1951 and attended the University of Edinburgh from 1951 to 1957. He received his Ph.D. in 1955. He then worked for a year as research fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) before joining the staff at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, England, in 1958.

Although Robert Edwards took a position at the University of Glasgow in 1962, he moved to Cambridge University the following year. In 1965, he served as visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins University, and in 1966 at the University of North Carolina. Later, he returned to Cambridge, where he became a member of Churchill College and Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology in 1969, a position he held until 1985.

In the early sixties, Robert Edwards began his studies of human fertilization. In 1968 he was able to achieve fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory and started his colaboration with Patrick C. Steptoe (1913 – 1988), a gynecologic surgeon from Oldham. Robert Edwards developed human culture media to allow the fertilization and early embryo culture, while Steptoe utilized laparoscopy to recover ovocytes from patients with tubal infertility. Eventually, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) became a technology that revolutionized the treatment of infertility although it was first met not only with considerable hostility and opposition from churches, governments, and the press, but also from the scientific community.

On 25 July 1978, Louise Brown, the first in-vitro baby was born at the Oldham General Hospital and made medical history: with the means of in-vitro fertilization, millions of infertile couples worl-wide now saw a possibility of becoming parents.

Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe founded the Bourn Hall Clinic to advance their research and a training center for future fertilization specialists. Steptoe died in 1988. Edwards has continued a career as a scientist and an editor of medical journals.

Robert G. Edwars has received a number of awards and honours. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984, received the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award by the Lasker Foundation "for the development of in vitro fertilization, a technological advance that has revolutionized the treatment of human infertility." in 2001. In 2007, he was ranked 26th in The Daily Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses.

In 2010, Edwards was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of in-vitro fertilization.