Nobel Merit in IVF

The opposition Robert G Edwards first faced for his work is a sign of how wrong even the well meaning can be about science.

The opposition Robert G Edwards first faced for his work is a sign of how wrong even the well meaning can be about science.

Perhaps it is good to be occasionally reminded how quickly human society accepts scientific advances, how quickly the extraordinary becomes commonplace. By a rough estimate, there are four million individuals who would never even have been conceived without the work of the 2010 Nobel Prize winner in medicine Robert G Edwards, professor emeritus at Cambridge, who has been awarded for the ‘development of in vitro fertilisation’ . Today, as we struggle with ethical issues related to medical technology that range from stem cells to cloning, the debate that preceded the widespread acceptance of IVF is revealing. 

The first test tube baby Louise Joy Brown was born on 25 July 1978, but not before widespread condemnation by religious leaders in the West over man’s attempt to ‘play God’. Religious leaders were not the only ones; the field of bioethics was born, with people from varied backgrounds pitching in with philosophical insights into what should be permitted. Among them were men such as Leon Kass, later to head George W Bush’s council on bioethics that was to clamp down on funding stem cell research, who first argued that the risk of an abnormal infant was too great to allow IVF, a claim that turned out to be completely unfounded. He then argued against funding IVF thus:  “Gonorrhea and pelvic inflammatory disease are perhaps the leading causes of tubal obstruction in women—they account for probably a third of the cases. It would be curious if, with the aid of federal support, we had a programme of petri-dish babies before we had a vaccine against gonococcus. That strikes me as bizarre.” Kass is a humanist, a man of vast classical learning, but he was as wrong then as he has been on stem cell research since. 

As far as new developments in science are concerned, between what is possible and what is acceptable, we will always have to struggle for the right answers, and sometimes the news will be good, as is the case with IVF.

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Hartosh Singh Bal