James Owen Drife

Susan Bewley

Fiona Kisby Littleton

In January 1979, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe delivered a lecture detailing the ten-year clinical and scientific research programme that led to the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby born utilising IVF. This thoroughly-researched book provides both a full annotated transcript of the lecture as well as recorded reminiscences from those who attended, detailing the contemporary understandings of the event. An essay on the lecture's historical context adds fresh insight into the biographies of Edwards and Steptoe and highlights sources from print and broadcast media that have received scant attention in earlier publications. Current and future implications of the advances in IVF since the first procedure are also explored, examining future medical and scientific possibilities as well as ethical issues that may arise. A foreword by Louise Brown herself places this remarkable leap of science in a personal context, one that so many families have since experienced themselves.

The Edwards and Steptoe Lecture of 1979

Presenting the First Test-Tube Baby

"Unparalleled in British medical history James Owen Drife charted his reactions to the medical world in which he worked and published them, initially in World Medicine and then the British Medical Journal (BMJ). This book is sometimes painfully frank, at other times disturbing or very funny but always entertaining. It provides an important insight on the life and times of a doctor working in the NHS."

James Owen Drife

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