̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - IVF

Giving life to research

zs332 — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 09:24:32 +0000

A special online symposium will celebrate the archive of IVF pioneer, Sir Robert Edwards, and seek ways that this extraordinary archive can be used by researchers of today.

̽��ֱ��archive of Professor Sir Robert Edwards, IVF pioneer, reveals his personal struggles: for recognition of an unsung female colleague and fair access to treatment for all

ehs33 — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 23:01:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��private papers of IVF pioneer, Professor Sir Robert Edwards, opened to the public at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Churchill Archives Centre on Monday 10 June 2019.

Robert Edwards worked for over a decade on the research that led to the success of in vitro fertilisation to treat infertility. ̽��ֱ��big breakthrough came with the birth of the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown in 1978. Thereafter he established the world’s first IVF clinic, Bourn Hall in Cambridgeshire, in 1980. Throughout he worked alongside medical doctor, Patrick Steptoe, and clinical embryologist Jean Purdy. Since then it has been estimated that six million babies have been born through IVF all over the world.

Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010 for the development of in vitro fertilisation, and was knighted in 2011. Neither award can be made posthumously, so acknowledgment came too late for Purdy and Steptoe who died in 1985 and 1988 respectively - but the discovery was a team effort.

Newly released letters from Edwards’ archive show his personal battle as he repeatedly fought for official recognition of Jean Purdy’s equal contribution towards the discovery of IVF. Her work as a woman in science has gone largely unrecognised when compared to Edwards and Steptoe.

In correspondence released between Edwards and Oldham Health Authority in the lead up to the unveiling of an official plaque to mark the birth of Louise Brown, Edwards argues numerous times for the inclusion of Jean Purdy’s name to sit alongside his own and that of Patrick Steptoe.

He writes arguing for fair recognition and states that Jean Purdy ‘travelled to Oldham with me for 10 years and contributed as much as I did to the project. Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself.’ Unfortunately his repeated appeals fell on deaf ears and Oldham Health Authority did not take on board his request and her name went unrecognised on the official plaque.

Purdy joined Edwards in 1968 and worked closely with him, travelling to California in 1969 to undertake key research on follicular fluid. She continued to be instrumental in enabling the continued trials of IVF and in locating and organizing the adaptation of Bourn Hall as the world’s first IVF clinic. Meanwhile, as letters reveal, the National Health Service repeatedly declined to support IVF work, despite the numerous ways Edwards presented the case.

In a letter dated November 1974, Edwards writes to the Department of Health pointing out, ‘Our major concern is to help the many patients who could benefit by the rapid development of this method, for it could avoid many operations now carried out, which could become unnecessary.’

Again in Oct 1981 he writes to the Local Health Authority questioning the ethics and legality of withholding treatment because of lack of financial support: ‘…these patients have paid their contribution to the NHS and, now they want treatment, they are not being allowed to receive it. I cannot allow this situation to rest as it is, especially since, at long last you have been advised that it is professionally accepted that our approach offers the only hope of conception for some women… I cannot see any excuse for excluding one group of patients from the correct form of treatment.’

Cambridgeshire Health Authority replied to Edwards’ appeals for support, ‘Our current allocation is insufficient to maintain the service that we already provide. There is, therefore, no way in which the Health Authority can meet the expense of NHS patients attending your clinic.’

With the ethics and funding of IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies still open for discussion today - such as the cut in NHS funding for IVF treatment- the Edwards archive could add valuable context to the debate.

̽��ֱ��papers will be invaluable for researchers in the history of science, but also in the history of ethics, social implications of medical developments, and political and media history. Edwards engaged with the ethics of IVF and there is a wealth of information in the archive on these matters.

̽��ֱ��cataloguing of the Edwards' papers has been generously funded by Wellcome.

Sir Robert Edwards' archive catalogue is available online

Researchers can book an appointment at Churchill Archives Centre to view the papers.

Robert Edwards Archive

IVF trio with Louise Brown and her mother at 1st Birthday

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Families with a difference: the reality behind the hype

amb206 — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Over the past 40 years the family has altered in ways that few people imagined back in the days of the Janet and John reading books in which mummy baked and daddy mowed the lawn. In the 1970s, the ‘nuclear’ family (heterosexual married couple with genetically related children) was in a clear majority. Advances in assistive reproductive technologies, a rise in numbers of single parent and step families resulting from divorce, and the creation of families by same-sex couples and single people have changed all that. Today ‘non-traditional’ families outnumber nuclear families in the UK and many other countries.

When it comes to family, everyone has opinions – but they are just opinions. In her new book, Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms (published 12 March 2015), Professor Susan Golombok charts the remarkable changes that have taken place in the context of the empirical research that has sought to answer a series of contested questions. Are children less likely to thrive in families headed by same-sex parents, single mothers by choice or parents who conceived them using assisted reproductive technologies? Will children born to gay fathers through egg donation and surrogacy be less likely to flourish than children conceived by IVF to genetically related heterosexual parents?

Golombok’s contribution to family research goes back to 1976 when she responded to an article in the feminist magazine Spare Rib by conducting an objective study of the development of children of lesbian mothers. Spare Rib had revealed that, both in the UK and USA, lesbian mothers in child custody disputes invariably lost their cases to their ex-husbands. Courts argued that it was not in children’s best interests to be raised by lesbian women, not least because their gender development would be skewed. Golombok, and other researchers, have shown in successive studies that boys are no less masculine and girls no less feminine than boys and girls with heterosexual parents.

In 2006 Golombok was appointed director of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Family Research – a research centre known for its focus on family influences on child development. Modern Families brings together for the first time the growing body of research into the wide range of family forms, undertaken not just in the UK but also in the USA and around the world. Most strikingly, these studies show, again and again, that it is the quality of relationships that matters most to the well-being of families, not the number, gender, sexual orientation or genetic relatedness of the parents, or whether the child was conceived with the assistance of reproductive technology.

These findings fly in the face of the media hysteria that greeted the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978. Societal attitudes have since moved on. However, deep-seated assumptions of what is ‘right and proper’ continue to colour notions of what a family ‘should’ be in order to raise a well-balanced child. Real families are complex. Golombok is careful to be even-handed in her unpacking (family type by family type) of the issues, the arguments and the relevant research in a field that, by virtue of its human intimacy, demands a high level of sensitivity and diplomacy.

She also addresses the fact that research into so emotionally charged a field is bound to be imperfect. Parents willing to take part in research are more likely to be those who are functioning well than those who struggle. “It is important to study new family forms to find out what they are really like. Otherwise, all we have is speculation and assumption, usually negative, which simply fuel prejudice and discrimination and are harmful to the children involved,” she says.

Some findings are counterintuitive, others less so. One of the arguments most famously used against same-sex parenting has been that children may lack models on which to base their own gender identity and behaviour. In a study of play preferences, lesbian mothers chose a mix of masculine and feminine toys but their children chose toys and activities that were highly sex-typed. It seems that parents have little influence over the sex-typed toy and activity preferences of their daughters and sons.

In studies of children born through assisted reproduction, their mothers have consistently been found to show more warmth and emotional involvement, and less parenting stress, than natural conception mothers.

“Contrary to the expectation that parents of children born through assisted reproductive technologies would experience difficulties in parenting, research has found them to be highly committed and involved parents, even in donor-conceived families where one or both parents lack a genetic relationship with their children,” says Golombok.

“A key factor in the positive functioning of children in new family forms appears to be that they are very wanted children. Parents in new family forms often struggle to have children against the odds. Many experience years of infertility before becoming parents; others become parents in the face of significant social disapproval; and still others surmount both hurdles in order to have a child.”

When surrogacy hit the headlines in 1985 with the case of Kim Cotton, the furore about the payment made to her by the intended parents of the child she was carrying led the UK to outlaw commercial surrogacy. Although attitudes to surrogacy have softened, it remains the most controversial form of assisted reproduction. Studies report that relationships between intended parents and surrogate mothers are generally both enduring and positive. Children born through surrogacy sometimes form relationships with the surrogate’s own children.

Modern Families offers a measured appraisal of the broader issues that are likely to prove increasingly salient (and debated) as reproductive technologies offer novel routes to the conception of a healthy child and society’s understanding of what constitutes ‘family’ is increasingly extended. Last month’s approval in the UK for the use of a technique called mitochondrial replacement has rekindled accusations of scientists ‘playing God’. Perhaps, in time, society will be more accepting of techniques like mitochondrial replacement, developed primarily to avoid a child being born with a devastating medical condition.

Two generations ago, same-sex parenting was widely vilified as ‘against nature’. Today, same-sex couples and single people are considered alongside heterosexual couples as prospective adoptive and foster parents. “Attitudes towards same-sex parent families in the UK have changed enormously over a relatively short period of time. In less than half a century we have moved from a situation in which lesbian mothers were ostracised, and gay men were at risk of imprisonment, to a time where same-sex couples can marry, adopt children jointly, and become the joint legal parents of children born through assisted reproductive technologies,” says Golombok.

“But it’s important to remember that these laws are far from universal. Lesbian and gay relationships remain a criminal offence in some countries of the world with lesbian and gay people still living in fear of their lives.”

Families aren’t self-contained units. How do parents handle the prejudice they and their children are almost bound to encounter and how do children cope with what are perceived as ‘differences’? Sometimes the attitudes of the wider world make things hard. While children of same-sex parents are just as likely to flourish as those with heterosexual parents, children with lesbian or gay parents have to ‘explain’ their families in a way that their peers don’t. ̽��ֱ��need to explain can be burdensome.

“It’s stigmatisation outside the family, rather than relationships within it, that creates difficulties for children in new family forms,” says Golombok.

Children born through egg or sperm donation grow up with a realisation that they have a biological mother or father who may not live with them. ̽��ֱ��research covered in Modern Families shows that the question of disclosure – informing children conceived through donated gametes about their genetic parentage – is a foggy one.

Legislation that took effect in 2005 gives anyone conceived with donated gametes after that date the right to have, at the age of 18, access to information about the identity of their donor via records held by the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). Not until 2023 will it begin to be apparent how many donor-conceived young people might seek information about their donors from the HFEA. If adoption law is any guide, the numbers will not be insignificant.

As the legislation stands, young people will not know that they have been donor conceived unless they have been told – and only those with this knowledge will have any reason to seek access to the information held about their donor. This situation puts the onus firmly on the parents to make the decision about disclosure. Interestingly, although many parents profess the intention of bringing their children up with the knowledge that they were donor conceived, significant numbers of parents never find the right moment to broach the subject.

Golombok says: “Parents fear that telling children about their donor conception will jeopardise the loving relationship that has developed between the child and the non-genetic parent. However, our research has shown this fear to be unfounded. Parents who are open with their children when they are young – before they reach school age – say that their children accept this information and are not distressed by it. Finding out in adolescence or adulthood appears to be more difficult to accept.”

Modern Families is a timely reminder that every family is different – and that families are both fluid and flexible. There is more variation within family types than between them. Many of the newer routes helping people to fulfil their desires to have a family are still in their infancy. Progress is never smooth – and, quite rightly, innovations in conception are bound to be, and need to be, a matter for public debate. Research by Golombok and her colleagues, at Cambridge and beyond, provides a firm and informed basis for discourse to take place.

Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms by Susan Golombok is published on 12 March 2015 (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press).

Top two inset images from Flickr Creative Commons

Families come in many guises. Some parents are same-sex; others are single by choice. Growing numbers of children are conceived through assistive reproductive technology. What do these developments mean for the parents and children involved? Professor Susan Golombok’s book, Modern Families, examines ‘new family forms’ within a context of four decades of empirical research.

It’s stigmatisation outside the family, rather than relationships within it, that creates difficulties for children in new family forms.

Susan Golombok

Cover image from Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

Professor Robert Edwards awarded Nobel Prize

bjb42 — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edwards, born in 1925, was educated at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bangor and the ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh. In 1963, he joined the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge as the Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology, and a member of Churchill College.

Edwards began work on fertilisation in 1955, and began his partnership with Dr Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist surgeon, in 1968. Although the first successful human test-tube fertilisation took place by 1970, research did not result in a successful pregnancy for ten years. During this time, Edwards supervised students at Churchill College.

By the late 1970s, funding for Steptoe and Edwards' project was running out, and their work met with scepticism, resistance and set-backs. But in 1978, a breakthrough resulted in a healthy pregnancy and the birth of the first ever 'test tube baby', Louise Brown.

Edwards and Steptoe went on to found the first IVF clinic at Bourn Hall, Cambridge, in 1980. Before Dr Steptoe died in 1988, Edwards, now a Professor of Human Reproduction at Cambridge, was able to tell his seriously ill colleague that one thousand babies had been conceived at the clinic.

In 2001 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award for the development of in vitro fertilization. Now aged 85, Edwards is a Pensioner Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. Over four million children have now been born as a result of IVF.

Professor Azim Surani, former graduate student of Professor Edwards and current Marshall-Walton Professor of Physiology and Reproduction at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said:

"I am delighted that Bob Edwards's work has been finally recognised with the much-deserved award of Nobel Prize in Medicine. I was one of his PhD students in early 1970's when Bob together with Patrick Steptoe was in the middle of his pioneering research on early human embryos, which eventually led to the birth of Louise Brown. Bob had to work very hard towards achieving his objective in the face of many obstacles, considerable opposition and lack of support from the establishment.

"Bob's work has been critical for many other important medical advances, including preimplantation genetic diagnosis for diseases, and for the derivation of the first human pluripotent stem cells, which hold great promise for advances in medicine in the future. For myself, Bob was a highly inspirational and generous supervisor, and I am delighted and proud to have been one of his PhD students."

Professor Bill Harris, Head of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said:

"We are absolutely delighted that the pioneering work on the basic cell biology of mammalian fertilization done by Bob Edwards when he was in our Department has been duly recognized by the Nobel Committee for the huge step forward in reproductive medicine that it has proved to be.

"This is a perfect example of how basic science can have enormous, beneficial impact on modern medicine. Louise Brown, born in 1978, and thousands of other happy, healthy and successful human beings all owe their very existence to the remarkable breakthrough achieved by Bob."

Dr Alan Findlay, Fellow of Churchill College and longstanding friend and colleague of Professor Bob Edwards, said:

"This is great news. I just wish it had come sooner. Bob braved tremendous difficulties in the early days of the research that led to IVF. He had to make weekly journeys from Cambridge to Oldham- in the pre-motorway era! - where Patrick Steptoe, one of the few obstetricians willing to collaborate with him, was using keyhole surgery to collect eggs from ovaries. Leaders of the medical and scientific establishments were highly sceptical. Bob has engaged vigorously and constructively in debates on the ethical implications of his work. ̽��ֱ��greatest reward for him has been the joy that his work has brought to millions."

Sir David Wallace, Master of Churchill College, said:

"I am thrilled for Bob, who has given us yet another wonderful reason to celebrate this year the 50th anniversary of the Founding of the College."

̽��ֱ��work of Bob Edwards is featured in the forthcoming exhibition 'Science and Technology at Churchill College Cambridge: the first fifty years' which opens at the College on 11 October with a lecture by Lord Winston. Use the link above right for further details.

Image not for duplication. Credit: Bourn Hall

Professor Robert Edwards, Pensioner Fellow at Churchill College and Emeritus Professor of Human Reproduction at the ̽��ֱ��, was today awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

I am delighted that Bob Edwards's work has been finally recognised with the much-deserved award of Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Professor Azim Surani

Bob Edwards

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes