Louise Brown was the first baby born through successful in vitro fertilization in 1978.
She was born on 25 July 1978 at Oldham General Hospital in England. Her birth followed work by Robert Edwards, a physiologist, and Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist, who developed methods for fertilizing an egg outside the body and transferring the resulting embryo into the uterus.
IVF provided a new option for some people with infertility, including cases involving blocked fallopian tubes. In the procedure, eggs are collected, fertilized in a laboratory, and an embryo may then be transferred to the uterus. Louise Brown was conceived using a natural-cycle IVF approach rather than the extensive ovarian stimulation common in many later treatments.
She is often called the first “test-tube baby,” but that phrase is informal and misleading: development occurred in a laboratory dish, not inside a test tube. IVF has since produced millions of births worldwide.