On July 25, 1978, weighing in at 5 pounds, 12 ounces, Louise Joy Brown entered the world on videotape, her birth recorded for posterity because she had just become the world's first "test tube" baby. Her parents, Lesley and John, had been struggling to have a child for nine years when they turned in desperation to a little-known procedure called in vitro fertilization.
Reporters from around the world descended on Oldham General Hospital in Greater Manchester, England, trying to catch a glimpse of the first baby conceived outside the womb. So intense was the media and scientific debate surrounding her birth that doctors filmed the Caesarean section that delivered Louise to prove that her mother's fallopian tubes were, in fact, not present.
Brown is now 32, with a child of her own -- 3-year-old Cameron, conceived the old-fashioned way and delivered the same. She has tried to live quietly, working as a postal clerk and then for a shipping company, but she is constantly revisited by reporters who've noted everything from her birthdays, to giving birth, to today's announcement that scientist Robert G. Edwards had received the Nobel Prize for helping develop the laboratory process that gave her life.
"It's fantastic news. Me and mum are so glad that one of the pioneers of IVF has been given the recognition he deserves," Brown said today in a statement released by her and her mother. "We hold Bob in great affection and are delighted to send our personal congratulations to him and his family at this time."
Edwards, 85, a professor emeritus at Britain's University of Cambridge, toiled for years with gynecologist Patrick Steptoe to successfully fertilize an egg with sperm outside the womb and then implant the resulting embryo into the mother's uterus. Steptoe died in 1988. According to the Nobel committee, 4 million children have been born using in vitro (meaning "in the glass") to infertile couples.
Being the first such child has been a mixed blessing, Brown has said over the years.
At times during her childhood, she felt "completely alone,"
the BBC reported in a 2003 profile. "I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal."
At age 4, her parents showed her the
video of her birth, in which a squawling, tiny Louise is pulled from her mother's stomach and held before a camera that captured her being weighed, cleaned and swaddled in a blanket.
"I think it was just in case children at school knew, because children can be quite cruel. I think it was to say I was the same as everybody else, but just a little bit different, she
told Britain's Daily Mail in 2008. She grew accustomed to questions from schoolmates such as "how did you fit into a test tube?" She patiently explained that she was not born in a laboratory.
Edwards, who kept in touch with the Browns and attended Louise's wedding in 2004, was "like a granddad to me," Brown said.
She lives outside Bristol with her husband and son, the Daily Mail reported, declining most interview requests and trying to lead a quiet life.
Within her family, Louise was far from unusual. Her sister, Natalie, was born four years after her, also an IVF baby. In 1999, Natalie became the first "test tube" offspring to give birth (she did so naturally).
But the topic of in vitro fertilization created a frenzy when word spread that Edwards and Steptoe had successfully implanted an eight-celled embryo -- which would grow to become Louise. Religious leaders said conception outside the womb was abnormal, and the
Vatican has long opposed its use. Even scientists questioned the morality of the method.
And despite its current popularity -- an estimated 2 to 3 percent of children are conceived by vitro fertilization in many countries, the
BBC reported today -- controversy surrounding the method hasn't diminished. Much of it now concerns older women who have used it to become pregnant. One of the most notable cases involved a 67-year-old Spanish woman who delivered twins, only to die two years later.
But the Browns have never felt anything but blessed.
"If it wasn't for Bob Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, I wouldn't have this family," said Lesley Brown on her oldest daughter's 30th birthday. "Especially now I've lost my husband." John Brown died from lung cancer in 2006.
"Louise's birthday makes me remember back to when I had her. And looking at all my grandchildren, I think how they wouldn't be here if it wasn't for IVF,'' she told the Daily Mail.
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