IVF creator wins Nobel Prize for medicine

THE woman who was the world’s first test-tube baby said yesterday it was “fantastic” that a British scientist who helped bring her into the world had been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize in medicine for developing in-vitro fertilisation, a controversial breakthrough that ignited sharp criticism from religious leaders but helped millions of infertile couples in the last three decades have children.

Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, started working on IVF as early as the 1950s. He developed the technique – in which egg cells are removed from a woman, fertilised outside her body and then implanted into the womb – together with British gynaecologist surgeon Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988.