The Baby Who Was Born in a Dish

At 11:47 on the night of July 25, 1978, a baby girl took her first breath in an operating room in Oldham, England — and nothing about how babies are made would ever be the same.

She weighed five pounds and twelve ounces. She was delivered by caesarean section. And she was the first human being in history conceived outside a mother's body.

The newspapers called her a "test-tube baby." Her name was Louise Joy Brown.

Lesley and John Brown of Bristol had spent nine years trying to have a child. Doctors discovered that Lesley's fallopian tubes were blocked — and in the 1970s, that diagnosis was a dead end. There was simply no treatment. No procedure. No hope. Just the word no, dressed up in medical language.

Then a doctor at a local health clinic told Lesley about two men running a strange, secret experiment: Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist, and Robert Edwards, a scientist, working with embryologist Jean Purdy. They believed they could take an egg from a woman's ovary, unite it with sperm in a laboratory dish, and place the tiny embryo back into the womb. They had already attempted the procedure in more than 280 women. Not one had carried a baby home.

On November 10, 1977, Lesley Brown became their next volunteer. An egg was drawn from her ovary. In a glass dish — not a test tube, as it turned out — it met her husband's sperm. Jean Purdy was the first person to watch the little cluster of cells begin to divide: a human being taking its first steps not in a body, but in a laboratory.

The embryo was transferred to Lesley's womb. And this time — this time — it held.

Word of the pregnancy leaked, and the Browns found themselves at the center of a global storm. Reporters camped outside the hospital. Religious leaders warned of grave consequences for humanity. Scientists argued over the ethics of it all. Doctors even filmed the delivery to document Lesley's damaged tubes, so no one could ever claim the birth was a hoax.

But when the screaming, perfect baby girl arrived, the debate suddenly had a face. The doctors themselves had chosen her middle name — Joy — because, as Louise later recounted, they said her birth could bring joy to many people.

The Browns went on to have a second daughter, Natalie, also through IVF, in 1982 — the world's 40th IVF baby. In 2006, Louise gave birth to her own son, conceived naturally, easing the lingering worry over whether IVF babies could have children of their own. Robert Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2010 for the pioneering work he had done with Steptoe and Purdy.

Today, in-vitro fertilization is routine medicine, and millions of babies have been born through it worldwide. Couples who once had no options now have a path. And it all began with one brave family in Oldham who said yes to an experiment everyone said couldn't work.

No verified public-domain photograph of this event was available; this story is presented without an image.