Robert Edwards

Robert Edwards was a British physiologist who, with the gynecologist Patrick Steptoe and the embryologist Jean Purdy, developed in vitro fertilization (IVF): fertilizing a human egg outside the body and transferring the resulting embryo to the womb. Their work led to the birth of Louise Brown, the first person born through IVF, on 25 July 1978. Edwards received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work; Steptoe and Purdy had both died by then and, since the Nobel is never awarded posthumously, were not eligible for the prize alongside him, a fact Edwards and IVF historians have pointed to since as an incomplete account of the discovery's true authorship.