Louise Brown, born in England in 1978, was the world's first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization.
Louise Joy Brown was born by planned Caesarean section at Oldham General Hospital on July 25, 1978. Her parents, Lesley and John Brown, had tried to conceive for nine years, but Lesley's blocked fallopian tubes prevented natural fertilization. Doctors Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards developed the IVF treatment, with embryologist Jean Purdy also making essential contributions.
In IVF, an egg is fertilized outside the body and the resulting embryo is transferred to the uterus. Brown was sometimes called the first “test-tube baby,” but fertilization occurred in a Petri dish rather than a test tube. Her birth proved that IVF could overcome some forms of infertility and helped establish a treatment now used worldwide.
Brown weighed 5 pounds 12 ounces at birth. Her younger sister Natalie was also conceived through IVF and later became the first person conceived by IVF to give birth herself, in 1999. Edwards received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of IVF; Steptoe and Purdy were not eligible because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.