In Vitro Fertilization, 1974

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

When The New York Times first mentioned in vitro fertilization, the paper might have been reporting on a casually uttered lie.

The article appeared on July 16, 1974. A British physician, Dr. Douglas Bevis, gave a presentation on embryo implantation, work that had been going on in animals for some time. After his talk, during a question-and-answer session, he said that three test-tube human babies had already been born, and that he had “learned about the births through exchanges with colleagues in ‘chit-chat.’ ”

The remark was greeted with disbelief. Fertilizing an egg in a test tube (actually, the less evocative petri dish) had been accomplished with animals, but no one knew of any human egg that had been fertilized artificially and successfully implanted in a woman, much less any baby born from the procedure. Dr. Bevis offered few details, either to colleagues or to reporters.

The next day, The Times printed an article with the headline “Doctors Dubious on Births Report,” and three days later another one reported that Dr. Bevis was giving up research into embryo implants because he was “ ‘sickened’ by the publicity given to his announcement.” That September The Times Magazine published “The Embryo Sweepstakes,” an article that suggested Dr. Bevis’s claims might be fraudulent; it also described the work of two British doctors, Patrick C. Steptoe and Robert G. Edwards, who did seem close to achieving the feat. Dr. Bevis, who died in 1994, never spoke about the issue again.

Except for a few incidental mentions, some of which confused in vitro conception and artificial insemination, the subject disappeared from The Times until July 15, 1978, when the paper reported on Page 45 that “the first authenticated birth of a baby whose embryo derived from fertilization and culturing in a laboratory, expected soon in Britain, will open the way for a new era in the control of human reproduction.”

The article described in some detail the procedures that Dr. Steptoe and Dr. Edwards had used with Lesley and John Brown (who was misidentified as Gilbert Brown) that would lead to the birth of their daughter, Louise, the first test-tube baby. The Times reported Louise’s birth on July 26, 1978, and the birth of the first American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Carr, three years later.

Dr. Steptoe died in 1988. On Oct. 5, 2010, a front-page article began, “The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded this year to Robert G. Edwards, an English biologist who with a physician colleague, Dr. Patrick Steptoe, developed the in vitro fertilization procedure for treating human infertility.”

There are about four million in vitro babies alive worldwide, and 58,000 are born each year in the United States.