The birth of IVF, and the name left off the plaque

By Nick Peplow·Founder and editor

Last reviewed 26 September 2026· How this site is researched

Every person I have sat with in a fertility clinic is standing on the far side of something that took about a decade to work out, and was widely considered a bad idea while it was happening. The waiting room, the scan, the phrase "day five blastocyst": all of it descends from a small team in the north of England who spent years failing in public.

There were three of them. Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist in Oldham. Robert Edwards, a physiologist in Cambridge. And Jean Purdy, who is the reason I wanted to write this, because her name is the one that fell off.

Two men, two hundred miles apart

Steptoe was working with laparoscopy at a time when British surgery was sceptical of it. A telescope through a small incision, a look directly at the ovaries, and, crucially, a way to retrieve an egg without opening the abdomen. It is the direct ancestor of the egg collection people have today, though that is now done through the vaginal wall with ultrasound and sedation rather than a laparoscope.

Edwards had spent years on the other half of the problem: what an egg does after it leaves the ovary, how to get it to mature, how to get it to fertilise outside the body. He had the laboratory. Steptoe had the eggs.

They began working together towards the end of the 1960s. The geography was absurd. Edwards drove between Cambridge and Oldham repeatedly over the years that followed, several hours each way, because the clinical work had to happen where Steptoe's patients were.

Jean Purdy

Purdy was a nurse who had trained in Cambridge and joined Edwards as a research assistant around 1968. Calling her an assistant undersells it. She did much of the embryology, ran the laboratory side of the clinical work, kept the records of what was tried and what it did, and travelled to Oldham alongside Edwards for years. She is a co-author on the group's papers.

Edwards was clear about her standing. When a commemorative plaque was proposed at Kershaw's Cottage Hospital in Oldham, where much of the work was done, it named him and Steptoe. He objected in writing, more than once, and argued that Purdy belonged on it. He did not win that argument at the time. Those letters came to wider attention decades later through historians working on the archive, and the fuller version of the story has only really circulated in the last ten years or so. A plaque naming her was eventually installed in Oldham, long after her death.

She died in 1985, reported as a result of melanoma, at 39. Steptoe died in 1988. When the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the work in 2010, Edwards received it alone, because the prize is not awarded posthumously. The committee's citation acknowledged his collaborators. A citation is not the same as a name on the prize, and the two people who were not there to collect it had been the ones in the operating theatre and at the microscope.

A decade of persistence

What gets compressed out of the retelling is how long this took.

Between the first attempts and Louise Brown there were something like a decade of cycles. The number of embryo transfers that did not produce a baby is usually reported as more than a hundred, and I would treat any precise figure with caution, because the published accounts do not all count the same things. What is not in doubt is the shape of it: year after year of eggs that did not fertilise, embryos that did not implant, and patients who went home with nothing.

There was a pregnancy in 1975 that raised hopes and then proved to be ectopic, implanted outside the uterus and not survivable. I think about the woman that happened to, who is not named in most accounts of this history and who did not choose to be part of a famous experiment. The patients in those years were volunteering for something with no track record, and almost all of them got nothing out of it.

The institutional response was not encouragement. The Medical Research Council declined to fund the work in the early 1970s, with concerns raised about safety and about the ethics of the whole enterprise. Funding came instead from private and charitable sources. There was significant opposition from religious figures, from parts of the scientific establishment, and from a press that had already decided what to call the result. The phrase "test-tube baby" was a headline, not a description; there is no test tube involved and never was.

Some of the objections were serious and deserved answering. Would a child conceived this way be normal? Nobody could know in advance. That is the uncomfortable centre of the story, and it is why the team's caution about what they told patients matters as much as the technique.

Oldham, July 1978

Lesley and John Brown had been trying to conceive for years. Lesley's fallopian tubes were blocked, which in 1977 meant there was essentially nothing to offer her. They were referred to Steptoe.

The cycle that worked was a natural one. No stimulation drugs, no bank of follicles to choose from: a single egg, collected at the right moment, fertilised in the lab and put back. Modern IVF does almost the opposite, growing many eggs at once precisely because one is such a thin margin.

Louise Joy Brown was born on 25 July 1978 at Oldham General Hospital, by caesarean section, late in the evening. She weighed somewhere around five and a half to six pounds. The delivery was done under conditions closer to a security operation than a birth, because the press had found out, and the family were under pressure that no first-time parents should have to manage.

She was healthy. That single fact answered more of the objections than any argument could have.

A second birth followed within months, in Glasgow in January 1979, which mattered enormously: it showed the first was not a fluke. Steptoe, Edwards and Purdy went on to establish Bourn Hall in Cambridgeshire in 1980, the first clinic of its kind, and that is where IVF stopped being an experiment and started being a treatment.

Elsewhere, and unacknowledged

The history is not tidy. In Kolkata, Subhash Mukhopadhyay reported a birth from a comparable technique in October 1978, a few months after Louise Brown. His work was dismissed by the authorities of the day, he was denied the chance to present it, and he died in 1981. Recognition came later and posthumously, and the details of exactly what he achieved are harder to verify than the Oldham case because so little was published at the time. Accounts differ on how much weight to give it. I do not think it takes anything away from the Oldham team to say plainly that it happened, and that he was treated badly.

What it left us

Millions of people have been born through IVF since. Louise Brown has spoken publicly over the years and has had children herself, conceived without help, which quietly closed off one of the loudest early fears.

The technique has changed almost beyond recognition. Stimulated cycles, ultrasound-guided collection, ICSI for male factor, blastocyst culture, vitrification and the routine frozen transfer are all later additions. What has not changed is the need for patience. Not every cycle works, and the step from a good-looking embryo to a baby is still the part that takes time, which is why planning for more than one attempt makes sense.

That is the part of 1978 I find most inspiring. The people who built this kept going for ten years, were straight with their patients while they did it, and changed what is possible for millions of families.

This is history, not medical advice. For how IVF works now, see the IVF guide and the IVF hub.