- [Narrator] From cutting edge gene therapies
to designer babies and human cloning,
advances in medicine and genetics are sparking debates
and challenging what it means to be human.
But many of these same arguments began four decades ago,
when for the first time in history,
scientists brought the magic of human conception
out of the bedroom and into the laboratory.
Okay, not like that.
I'm talking about in-vitro fertilization
or IVF for short.
And when it was first proposed, the public panicked,
and many scientists warned that we should
beware the test tube babies.
But today, more than five million IVF births later,
there's seemingly not much to beware about them
at all.
Or maybe these so-called test tube babies
have us right where they want us.
(dramatic music)
Assuming that's not the case,
how did we get it so wrong?
Our story begins in the 1960s with the British biologist
by the name of Robert Edwards.
Edwards and his wife had befriended a couple
who had been unable to have children of their own,
and Edwards wanted to help.
He was good like that.
So, he joined forces with Dr. Patrick Steptoe,
and the duo set out to cure human infertility.
This was the gameplan.
Edwards and Steptoe would retrieve an egg from a woman,
place said egg in a petri dish,
fertilize that egg, and then return the egg
to a mother-to-be so it could finish developing
like any conventional pregnancy.
This, in a nutshell, is in-vitro fertilization.
But as news of Edwards and Steptoe's efforts spread,
it was met by skepticism and serious concern,
not just by the public
but by respected members of the scientific community too.
Some worried that creating so-called Frankenbabies in a lab
would lead us down a path to a dark dystopian future,
like something out of a sci-fi novel.
In fact, James Watson, the famed co-discoverer of DNA,
predicted that all hell would break loose
politically and morally all over the world
if IVF were successful.
Leon Kass and Paul Ramsey, professors at
the University of Chicago and Princeton,
they feared that IVF would lead to
breeding people in laboratories and human cloning.
The British Medical Association took things even further
by directly accusing Edwards and Steptoe
of actually cloning humans.
Edwards would eventually sue them twice for defamation
and win.
So, everyone was coming after these guys,
but they kept going.
And after eight years of experimentation
and fighting off critics,
Edwards and Steptoe made a huge announcement.
They'd succeeded.
A young woman named Leslie Brown
had been impregnated via IVF,
and the first baby ever conceived outside of the womb
was on its way.
A media frenzy erupted.
Reporters from around the world swarmed the hospital
where Leslie was preparing to give birth.
A few even managed to sneak in
disguised as janitors and priests.
What would this baby look like?
Would it be tragically malformed?
Was it a monster?
Nah, it's just a baby.
On July 25th, 1978, Edwards and Steptoe delivered
Louise Joy Brown,
and by all objective measures,
she was super cute and totally normal.
Louise's birth paved the way
for five million healthy IVF babies and counting.
In these days, the procedure is so routine,
it's even been performed live on The Today Show.
For his efforts, Robert Edwards would win
the Nobel Prize in 2010,
and when he did, the Nobel committee was flooded
with personal messages from grateful families.
And it's no wonder.
These families might have been forever incomplete
if Edwards and Steptoe had given up on IVF
in the face of criticism.
Look, new technologies often have risks worth considering,
but as Edwards himself pointed out,
electricity is a good thing,
regardless of its leading to
the invention of the electric chair.
Debates about the next great medical breakthroughs
will have to be settled on their own merits,
but when it comes to IVF,
the millions of families it made whole
and the dire predictions that never panned out,
even some of the brightest minds
appeared to have gotten it wrong.
Or did they?