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‘The Life poll: science and sex’. The striking cover illustration introduced a special section, ‘Science, sex and tomorrow’s morality’, which opened in dramatic tones: ‘Radical new techniques in biology promise (or threaten) a near-future world of reproduction that is artificially assisted or even sexless and of babies grown in glass wombs in the laboratory’. The first part contained an adapted version of the book ‘The second genesis’ by Life science editor Albert Rosenfeld. Illustrated with photographs of children and traditional life, it warned of the unpredictable consequences of in vitro fertilization (‘the second genesis’) but also of sexual freedoms and changes in the family life. But, the second section showed that many American, especially women, did not share Rosenfeld’s fears. In ‘the Life poll’, conducted by Louis Harris and Associates Inc. on a nationwide cross-section of 1,600 adults, 61% of women (55% of men) believed that an ‘in vitro child would feel love for family’ and 39% of women (32% of men) approved of egg implantation.
Life, vol. 66, no. 23, 13 June 1969, cover and pp. 37–55. 35 x 27 cm.
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Magazine science. The covers of the mid-twentieth century illustrated magazines, especially Life, Time and Look, tell us much about how views of reproductive technologies changed between the late 1960s and the late 1970s. This 1969 Life cover was published hard on the heels of the Nature article reporting the Edwards-Steptoe success with in vitro early development. The picture of a fetus with the umbilical cord and placenta, in a Petri dish, is juxtaposed with a photo of a mother with a baby. Compare this with the 1978 Time cover marking the birth of Louise Brown, with the test-tube in the centre and no mother in sight. We see a set of parallel reformulations: of the embryo, from part of the maternal body towards an autonomous being created at the moment of fertilization, and from a human figure towards a cell or collection of cells. Technologies of assisted conception have also changed from extensions of the ‘natural’ reproductive process to laboratory-based procedures.
The first ‘test-tube baby’
In vitro fertilization depended on collaboration between physiology and obstetrics and the careful management of publicity.
In the late 1960s, the Cambridge reproductive physiologist Robert Edwards teamed up with the Oldham gynæcologist-obstetrician Patrick Steptoe to capture eggs from ovulating women and fertilize them in vitro. They thus overcame the lack of live human eggs, which had plagued reproduction researchers since Rock and Menkin’s early attempts at Boston’s Free Hospital. Laparoscopy, of which Steptoe was the British pioneer, allowed intervention into the abdominal cavity through just two small holes: one for the camera and one for the surgical instrument. Edwards and Steptoe worked from the first successful in vitro early development (1969) to the first embryo implantation (1976).
But in contrast to the trust in science that had been dominant in the postwar era, many in the 1970s were suspicious and worried. The American bioethicist Leon Kass typically called these interventions a ‘slippery slope’ leading to a Brave New World nightmare, ‘the full laboratory growth of a baby from sperm to term’. Radical feminists feared men controlling reproduction and coercing women into motherhood. The researchers carefully administered the publicity around the birth of the first ‘test-tube’ baby, Louise, to Lesley and John Brown on 25 July 1978. Depictions abounded of reproduction and development in vivo and in vitro.
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Robert Edwards and colleagues in their Cambridge laboratory. This photograph shows Robert Edwards with his team in the Marshall Laboratory of Reproduction of the Cambridge Department of Physiology. Robert Edwards is standing behind the reproductive biologist Barry Bavister, then a graduate student. The person in the background is another reproductive biologist, Richard Gardner, then also a graduate student. The identity of the fourth man is unknown. The photograph was taken in the media frenzy after the landmark publication by Edwards, Bavister and Steptoe in Nature on 15 February 1969. The abstract, echoing James Watson and Francis Crick’s already famous understatement about DNA from 1953, stated simply: ‘Human oocytes have been matured and fertilized by spermatozoa in vitro. There may be certain clinical and scientific uses for human eggs fertilized by this procedure.’
Photographed on 1 March 1969.
Getty Images.
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Robert Edwards and colleagues in their Cambridge laboratory, 1969
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| Publicity. Faced with much criticism and doubt, Edwards and Steptoe managed their relationship with the media carefully. Each new publication was followed by interviews and press conferences. When Lesley Brown’s pregnancy became public, many commentators were critical and many embryologists nervous that any problem would set their science back. The Browns sold their story to the Daily Mail, which through July 1978 ran emotional reports building up excitement for the ground-breaking event. Louise Brown’s birth at Oldham General Hospital in Lancashire was filmed by the governmental Central Office of Information, but in full secrecy because media interest was so high and the dispute over the rights so intense. This photograph, showing Steptoe (right), the technical assistant Jean Purdy (middle) and Robert Edwards holding the newborn Louise Brown, has been so widely reproduced that it came to symbolize this landmark event.
Getty Images.
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A publicity photograph of the ‘test-tube’ baby-makers with Louise Brown, 1978
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