Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards: Brave New Baby Doctors

Tall and silver-haired, with softly reassuring blue eyes, Dr. Patrick Christopher Steptoe looked as if he’d just stepped out of a Marcus Welby rerun. In fact, the kindly doctor was a medical revolutionary. On July 25, 1978, as hundreds of reporters descended on the sleepy English mill town of Oldham, the 65-year-old obstetrician delivered the world’s first “test-tube baby,” a healthy, 5-lb. 12-oz. girl aptly named Louise Joy Brown. Conceived in a lab dish, or in vitro, from the egg and sperm of a working-class couple who had tried for years to have a child, she seemed as miraculous as any baby in 2,000 years.

The astonishing feat brought instant celebrity to Steptoe and his partner, Robert Edwards–as well as a barrage of criticism. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups denounced it as playing God, and even scientists like James Watson, unraveler of DNA, were worried about tinkering with a process as sacrosanct as procreation. But the debate faded as it became clear that the brave new world of babymaking that Steptoe had ushered in was providing a desperately sought service.

Today such artificially assisted pregnancies are commonplace (an estimated 300,000 have taken place in the past 20 years) and are only one of many options available to would-be parents–from using frozen embryos and surrogate mothers to picking the number, sex and genes of their babies. These innovations have freed women from the tyranny of their biological clock, triggered an explosion of multiple births, even made the sex act irrelevant in conception–all the while setting the stage for still more unsettling spectacles to come, such as human cloning.

Steptoe, who witnessed many of these changes before his death at 74, in 1988, was an unlikely revolutionary. Born to a church organist father and social-service worker mother in rural Oxfordshire, he decided at an early age to pursue medicine over music. During World War II, he was captured by the Italians after his ship was sunk and got himself tossed into solitary for helping other prisoners escape. Setting up a practice in obstetrics and gynecology after the war, he raised professional eyebrows by pioneering a newfangled fiber-optic device called a laparoscope to perform minimally invasive abdominal surgery. In 1966, to help women with blocked Fallopian tubes, a major cause of infertility, he teamed up with Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist who had developed a way to fertilize human eggs in the lab.

Edwards had worked only with eggs obtained from ovaries removed for medical reasons. Steptoe realized that with a laparoscope he could siphon eggs directly from infertile women. If the eggs were retrieved at just the right time and then fertilized in vitro, they could be transferred into the uterus, thereby circumventing the sometimes perilous journey down the Fallopian tubes.

For more than a decade, Steptoe and Edwards performed dozens of in-vitro experiments–paid for in part by Steptoe’s earnings from legal abortions–but none of the 30 or so pregnancies lasted more than 10 weeks. Finally, the pair decided that instead of waiting four or more days while the fertilized egg underwent about 100 divisions, they would implant it after just 2 1/2 days, at the eight-cell stage. The daring strategy worked–and just short of nine months later, while all the world seemed to be watching, Steptoe delivered Baby Brown by caesarean section.

–By Frederic Golden