Sir Robert Edwards (1925–2013): Creator of the Greatest Happiness

‘‘Give me children; else I am as dead’’. The desperate cry of Rachel to her husband Jacob, whose life is meaningless whilst she remains sterile, rings down the ages [1], a cry still heard in both developed countries and less affluent ones. Until recently, this pain has been largely ignored or belittled, as it was by Jacob. Sir Robert Edwards, who died last week, understood it. The plight of infertile couples gave his work crucial meaning. In vitro fertilization (IVF) was not only one of the greatest medical advances of the 20th century, but it also had a profound effect on attitudes towards infertility. Before the birth of Louise Brown, the first ‘‘test-tube’’ baby in 1978, infertility caused great shame. Childless couples would not talk of their plight, often not admitting it even to family. It was a deeply corrosive ‘‘stigma’’ with a powerful effect on every aspect of their lives. IVF changed that. Robert Edwards, together with gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, who died 25 years ago, pioneered a revolutionary treatment that resulted in the birth of millions of healthy children. And the immense publicity given to this truly iconic development meant that many sufferers came out of ‘‘hiding’’. Ordinary people began to understand the devastating effect of involuntary childlessness. Professor Sir Robert Edwards died April 10, 2013, at age 87. He is survived by his wife Ruth, whom he married in 1956, and by five daughters and twelve grandchildren. He was a Yorkshireman, one of three brothers, born in Batley, United Kingdom. His father, Samuel, worked on the railways and his mother, Margaret, in the local mill. Eventually the family moved to Manchester, where Edwards gained a scholarship to Manchester Central High School. Edwards never forgot his working class origins or denied his roots. He campaigned for the UK’s Labour Party and was elected as a local councillor long after he had achieved his extraordinary success as a pioneering scientist. After conscription in 1943, he entered University College of North Wales in Bangor, where he studied agriculture and zoology. In 1951, he joined the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh, where his research began under the guidance of Professor C.H. Waddington, mostly concerned with sperm function. His doctorate, a study of developing mouse embryos, was an important step. After a spell at Caltech in Pasadena, he joined the staff at Mill Hill in London, pursuing his interest in the control of ovulation. He had published work on the induction of ovulation some years earlier, and in 1963 published a study with Everett Wilson [2]. This study reported that the treatment of mice with pregnant mares’ serum and human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) resulted in larger litters with smaller pups, many of which died. Years later, the induction of ovulation became a critical procedure for IVF, and problems concerning multiple birth and prematurity still remain. Edwards soon moved to the University of Glasgow where he studied in vitro culture of rabbit eggs, and then to Cambridge. There, funded by the Ford Foundation and working with Chris Polge, he studied the maturation of eggs from various mammalian species in vitro [3]. It isn’t entirely clear from this paper if he thought about human IVF treatment, but he emphasized that these techniques would become useful in studying human fertil-