Reproductive BioMedicine Online (2013) 26, 513–515

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OBITUARY

Professor Sir Robert Edwards – NobelLaureate (1925–2013)

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Robert Geoffrey Edwards, ‘‘Bob’’to his colleagues and friends, wasone of the truly giant figures ofthe 20th Century. As a scientist,his farsightedness, energy and rig-our in the field of human reproduc-tion brought about the mostsignificant advance in the historyof treatment of infertility andmade him a Nobel Laureate. As acampaigner, Bob’s compassion,humour and strongly held princi-

ples led him tirelessly to promote public awareness of thiscommon source of human misery. He was blessed with inex-haustible energy. As well as doing experiments and keepingabreast of the scientific literature in such diverse fields asimmunology, embryology, genetics and endocrinology hefound time to engage in local politics and give much thoughtto the ethical implications of his work. He also felt verystrongly that he had a duty to engage with the public inexplaining what he was trying to achieve.

Bob was born in 1925 in the Yorkshire mill town of Batley,the middle of three sons. His father spent much time awayfrom home labouring on the Settle to Carlisle railway, whilehis mother was a machinist in a local mill. The three boyswere bright and, on relocation of the family to Manchesterfrom where his mother originated, all obtained scholarshipsto attend the Central Boys’ High School there. Given hismother’s annoyance when the eldest declined to take uphis scholarship, Bob and his younger brother had no optionbut to do so. He was not the first Nobel Laureate this schoolproduced as James Chadwick received the Prize for Physicsin 1935 for discovering the neutron.

On leaving school in 1943 Bob’s education was inter-rupted by a 5-year stint in the army. A surprise to all of uswho got to know him well and, I suspect an equal surpriseto Bob, was his being deemed suitable for training as an offi-cer. However, he found his strong egalitarian principlesill-suited him to life in the Officers’ Mess. Aside from theopportunity to travel, an obvious highlight during this period

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was his being granted 9 months’ compassionate leave tohelp run a sick friend’s farm in the Yorkshire Dales. Thisexperience, coupled with earlier childhood visits to thisexceptionally beautiful part of the country, engenderedhis life-long love of the Dales, which he continued to visitwith his family whenever the opportunity arose.

On being de-mobbed in 1948, Bob resumed his educationby enrolling to read Agricultural Science at the UniversityCollege of North Wales at Bangor, taking whatever holidayjobs were available to support his studies. While choice ofthis subject was clearly driven by his farming experiences,he soon became disillusioned with the course, finding itutterly devoid of scientific rigour. His switch to the ZoologyDepartment was made too late to salvage more than a passdegree. This mortifying experience might have altogetherblighted his academic prospects were it not for ProfessorConrad Waddington’s foresight in accepting him to do adiploma in genetics at Edinburgh University. Bob once againtook whatever casual work he could find to fund his diplomacourse and, following its successful completion, wasaccepted to do a Ph.D. at Edinburgh under the supervisionof Alan Beatty. For this, Bob focussed on early embryonicdevelopment from a genetic perspective with particularemphasis on the possibility that birth defects might arisethrough errors in partitioning of chromosomes during eggmaturation prior to fertilisation. It was during theseextraordinarily productive years that Bob, in collaborationwith Ruth Fowler, demonstrated that eggs could be inducedto mature according to a predictable schedule in adult miceby appropriate hormone treatment. Before his Edinburghdays were concluded, Bob married Ruth, a granddaughterof one of his great scientific heroes, Lord Rutherford of Nel-son, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908. Fol-lowing a year at the California Institute of Technology Bobwas recruited by Sir Alan Parkes to the Experimental BiologyDivision of the National Institute for Medical Research at MillHill on a five-year appointment to investigate the prospectof an immunological approach to contraception. While helong retained an interest in immunology, its application tobirth control seemed unpromising then as it still does now.

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Hence Bob found his attention drawn once more to the sub-ject of egg maturation, with the situation in the humanholding particular interest. When knowledge that a memberof his staff was engaged on work in this contentious areareached Sir Charles Harington, the Director of the Institute,he ordered it to cease. Bob had no choice but to obey thisedict, especially since Alan Parkes was no longer there todefend him, having been appointed to the newly establishedMary Marshall and Arthur Walton Chair of ReproductivePhysiology at Cambridge in 1961. However, Parkes did offerBob a post in his new laboratory, but as this was for a yearhence, he spent the intervening one in Glasgow, commutingback and forth weekly to North London where Ruth and theirgrowing family were based. The attraction of Glasgow wasJohn Paul, an acknowledged expert in tissue culture withwhom Bob, together with Robin Cole, made the first forayinto deriving stem cells from early embryos of both rabbitand mouse. This was done almost two decades before fur-ther such attempts were made and well before techniquesbecame available for critically assessing the developmentalstatus of the resulting cell lines.

Bob joined the Marshall Laboratory in 1963 on a Fellow-ship from the Ford Foundation of America, and continuedto work in or near Cambridge for the rest of his life. Itwas during his early days in Cambridge that human egg mat-uration and its anomalies, and achieving human fertilisationin vitro, really came to dominate his interest. It was also atthis time that he showed that cells could be taken from veryearly rabbit embryos to accurately determine their sexwithout jeopardising their continued normal developmentto birth. This study offered proof of principle for preimplan-tation genetic diagnosis, an approach that was not appliedto early human embryos until more than two decades later.This, like Bob’s efforts to isolate stem cells from earlyembryos, is a testimony to the extraordinary farsightednessthat pervaded his work. However, in order to advance hishuman work without a medical qualification he needed topersuade at least one clinician that his aims were notcompletely barmy. While several obstetricians willinglyprovided fresh ovarian material as a source of eggs, Bobneeded help of a more invasive nature to enable him toexpose sperm placed in special chambers to the environ-ment of the uterus. This measure was assumed, mistakenlyas it turned out, to be required for making sperm competentto fertilise eggs. It did, however, serve in 1967 to focusBob’s attention on the work of Patrick Steptoe, an obstetri-cian based in Oldham, Lancashire, who was engaged indeveloping the vitally relevant ‘keyhole’ surgical techniquescalled laparoscopy. They met and started collaborating in1968, and it was with the help of Barry Bavister, a graduatestudent in the Marshall Laboratory, that Bob and Patrickwere then able to provide the first compelling evidence thathuman fertilisation could take place outside the body. Pub-lication of this study in Nature in February 1969 marked thebeginning of a very arduous and taxing first nine years of col-laboration between Bob and Patrick which, aided by JeanPurdy, a state registered nurse who had recently joinedBob as his assistant, was directed single-mindedly to devel-oping in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) as a treatment forinfertility.

One source of their difficulties was Bob’s very stronglyheld view that scientists had a responsibility to inform and

engage with society at large about their work. He thus tookevery opportunity to contribute articles to both the broad-sheet and tabloid press to explain what he was trying toachieve, a measure that engendered extraordinary hostilityfrom many quarters, including from within both the medicaland scientific communities. The reaction of the British Med-ical Association was notably extreme, prompting Bob to sueit successfully for libel on several occasions. Scientific crit-ics, including at least two Nobel Laureates, either declaredhis work to be immoral or branded him a self-publicist, tothe extent that he felt marginalized by his peers. However,Bob was not alone in feeling ill-used because the medicalfraternity ruled at that time that there was little merit inthe laparoscopic techniques that Patrick was engaged indeveloping.

There is little doubt that the hostility towards the pairhardened their resolve to attain their goal, the path towhich was also beset by a range of technical and strategicchallenges. To optimise the plethora of variables necessaryto obtain viable embryos reproducibly through IVF in themouse required very large numbers of eggs, somethingutterly unattainable in the human. Bob, aided by Jean andhis mobile laboratory, made endless trips betweenCambridge and Oldham as and when Patrick had volunteersfrom whom to recover eggs. He used these precious speci-mens to try to generate embryos for replacement in thewomb. After many blind alleys and reverses, the finalreward for both of them and the couples they strove to helpwas the birth at 11.47 pm on July 25 1978 of a healthy girlweighing 5lb 12oz. Louise Brown’s arrival marked the begin-ning of a positive change, albeit a slow one, in attitude toBob and Patrick’s work. Nowadays, of course, IVF andrelated forms of assisted conception in vitro are so com-monplace as to hardly raise comment in most quarters.

However, Bob’s difficulties did not end with the birth ofLouise Brown because on Patrick’s retirement from Oldhamthey were unable to find suitable accommodation withinCambridge University to continue their work. In the absenceof any public funding, either then or at any time before orlater, their work had to stop for three years while theyraised private money to purchase and equip Bourn Hall inCambridgeshire with the necessary clinical and laboratoryfacilities. Bob, never idle, took the opportunity affordedby this hiatus to write a formidable tome entitled ‘Concep-tion in the Human Female’ which one of his former scientificcritics hailed as the best textbook on obstetrics published inthe 20th Century.

Although Patrick seemed generally to have beenregarded by the media as the senior partner in their collab-oration, possibly because he was medically qualified, heopenly acknowledged that his role was one of facilitatorand that the scientific impetus came from Bob. This was alsoclear to staff of Bourn Hall Clinic to whom they were knownas ‘‘Steppy’’ and ‘‘The Boss’’.

Bob can also be regarded as one of the founders ofReproductive Bioethics, an academic subject that enjoysgreat prominence to today, but that hardly existed in 1971when he co-authored a paper devoted to ethics and law thatwas quite remarkable in its scope and insight. He was alsovery active on the international scene as one of thefounders of the European Society for Human Reproductionand Embryology and its journals, which he edited for many

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years until he felt obliged to resign on failing to persuade hiscolleagues to embrace the latest electronic methods of pub-lication. He then set up a new journal entitled ReproductiveBioMedicine Online with emphasis on rapid publication andthe airing of controversies. The many contributions he madeto this journal during his ten years as editor testify to hisextraordinary breadth of interests and deep knowledge ofscientific literature.

When attempting to solicit more appropriate recognitionfor Bob from people of authority in UK science, I was all toooften confronted with the unhelpful response that he was‘controversial’. This made me wish to grab their collarand shake them for not having the wit to appreciate thatno one who achieved what he had in the climate that thenprevailed could possibly have been otherwise. The NobelPrize for Physiology or Medicine is commonly shared, isnot infrequently contentious, and is often given for cleverscience, which might possibly benefit mankind at some timein the future. None of these qualifications applied to Bob’saward of the Prize in 2010, by which time well over fourand a half million babies had been born as a result of his pio-neering work. The only sad note is that this ultimate recog-nition of the value of his work was not made earlier when hewas in good enough health to collect it personally inStockholm.

Bob will be remembered by all those he supervised,worked with or helped as a remarkable individual, blessedwith extraordinary farsightedness, energy, humanity, com-passion and humour. He will be sorely missed. He is survivedby his wife Ruth and five daughters, Caroline, Jenny, Sarah,Meg and Anna, and twelve grandchildren.

Professor Sir Richard Gardner, FRS, one of Professor SirRobert Edwards’ first research students.

Further reading

Gardner, R.L., Johnson, M.H., 2011. Bob Edwards and the firstdecade of Reproductive BioMedicine Online. ReproductiveBioMedicine Online 22, 103–121.

Johnson, M.H., 2011. Robert Edwards: the path to IVF. Reproduc-tive BioMedicine Online 23, 245–262.

Johnson, M.H., Franklin, S.B., Cottingham, M., Hopwood, N., 2010.Why the Medical Research Council refused Robert Edwards andPatrick Steptoe support for research on human conception in1971. Human Reproduction 25, 2157–2174.

Theodosiou, A.A., Johnson, M.H., 2011. The politics of humanembryo research and the motivation to achieve PGD. Reproduc-tive BioMedicine Online 22, 457–471.