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The World's First IVF Baby Turns 35 Today

In 1978, Louise Brown proved that people who couldn't conceive conventionally could still be parents.
Photo of Embryo via Wikimedia Commons

First off, “test-tube” baby is a misnomer—Louise Brown grew in a uterus and came out via the old-fashioned C-section, 35 years ago today. The only thing that happened in a Petri dish was the conception.

And since 1978, over 5 million people have come into the world via in vitro fertilization. The procedure has become increasingly common in the United States and Great Britain, as people delay starting families in the interest of their careers or because of financial concerns.

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Louise Brown has been a reluctant celebrity since nine months before she was born, when the rapacious British media caught wind of the procedure and wanted to find Brown’s mother. “We were concerned that she would lose the baby, the fetus, because the press were chasing Mrs Brown all over Bristol where she lived,” recalled Robert Edwards, one of the researchers who helped design the procedure, for which he would win the 2010 Nobel Prize. "So secretly [fellow researcher] Patrick Steptoe hid the mother in his car and drove her to his mother's house in Lincoln–the press didn't know where she was.

Brown insists that she had a normal childhood that—aside from media attention at major birthdays—has lead to a normal life. She lives in London with her husband and their son who was conceived in the usual way, and says she rarely thinks about being the first IVF baby.

IVF too has become fairly normal, although it remains an expensive procedure—costing somewhere more than $5,000 per cycle—where usually three embryos are implanted in the mother. Currently only around 37 percent of cycles lead to live births, so it’s not unusual for couples to need several cycles to conceive. Cheaper treatment could open IVF to people in places where it has not yet reached, like Libya, which Motherboard covered in a video last year.

In Belgium, the United States and Great Britain, research is being done to find less expensive techniques, but concern over birth abnormalities have dogged IVF since the beginning. At least one study has found a slightly higher risk of intellectual disabilities among twins and triplets who were conceived via IVF—but it was a very slightly higher risk—47 people out of 100,000 IVF births versus 40 people of 100,000 in the control group.

Here, two days after a baby was born famous, it seems worth tipping the Internet hat to a woman who conceived famous, and has spent the rest of her life proving just how normal the source of her fame is. Happy birthday, Louise Brown.