In-vitro pioneer wins Nobel Prize

Robert Edwards, the inventor of the “test-tube baby,” has been awarded medicine’s top prize.

When Edwards first devised a way to impregnate human embryos outside of the body, he faced opposition from religious groups, the media, and even government officials. He must be feeling vindicated today, after the Nobel committee announced this morning that it will award him the $1.5 million prize in the field of medicine or physiology. The first test-tube baby was born in 1977 and since then four million children have been born using techniques Edwards developed at Cambridge University with a now-deceased colleague named Patrick Steptoe. Edwards is 85 years old and reportedly too ill to speak publicly. Steptoe died in 1988.