3 November 2018 | NewScientist | 55IN NOVEMBER 1968, we reported on the latest attempts at
in vitro fertilisation. It had so far only been successful in
rabbits, and seemed very far from reality in humans.
The prospect was clearly a concern, however, as we felt
the need to provide reassurance in the first sentence of our
story: “Anyone haunted by the vision of ‘test-tube babies’
should visit a laboratory where research is being carried
out,” we said. They would “instantly realize that the
scientists involved have not the smallest desire to replace
the double bed by laboratory glassware (they are, after all,
human like the rest of us)”.
If the vision of eminently human scientists wasn’t
enough, the visitor would also be struck, we said, by the
extraordinary difficulty of recreating any stage of the
reproductive process outside the mammalian body.
“All attempts so far have been little more than
sophisticated cookery.”
The heart of our story was that, for the first time,
mouse eggs had been successfully fertilised in a glass dish.
Around 20 per cent had divided in two – the first stage of
development. Of these, 32 had been implanted in mice and
nine had developed into normal fetuses. Combined with
other work growing fertilised mice eggs in the lab up to
the eight-cell stage, this knowledge would shed light on
the physiology of mammalian reproduction, we wrote.
Knowledge was apparently the primary reason for the
research. Until then, all we knew about fertilisation had
come from invertebrates such as sea urchins, since in
these animals it normally takes place outside the body.
“The only way of studying the process in mammals is to
remove it from deep inside the body of the female and
study it under the microscope on a slide,” we wrote.
There was no sense of how IVF might be useful for people
in our story. It wasn’t for another 10 years, in July 1978,
that the first baby conceived through IVF, Louise Brown
(pictured above) was born. Since then, more than 8 million
children worldwide have been conceived in this way.
Julia Brown ■To delve more into the New Scientist archives, go to
newscientist.com/article-type/old-scientist/0 YEARS AGO
New Scientist was haunted by test-tube babiesBRIAN BOULD/ANL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
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