Assisted Reproduction at 30
By Pete Shanks,
Cutting Edge News
| 08. 25. 2008
Thirty years ago the assisted reproduction industry was born. From tiny but noisy beginnings, it grew through an occasionally troubled adolescence to maturity. Now it's time for it to become a responsible member of society.
The modern industry's symbolic birth was on July 25th, 1978, when the first "test-tube baby" was born. It was one of the great media launches of all time. Louise Brown, who celebrates her 30th birthday on Friday, is English, but her birth was on the cover of Time magazine before it even happened. As Newsweek said, her first yell was "a cry heard round the brave new world." By late 1978, polls revealed that a remarkable 93% of Americans were aware of her -- and 85% of American women thought infertile couples should have the chance to try in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
"IVF was a gigantic step," according to Alan Trounson, who now runs the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "We didn't realize it at the time; people didn't think it would work that well. We never envisaged that it would expand so dramatically around the...
Related Articles
By Courtney Withers and Daryna Zadvirna, ABC News | 12.03.2025
Same-sex couples, single people, transgender and intersex West Australians will be able to access assisted reproductive technology (ART) and surrogacy, almost a decade after reforms were first promised.
The landmark legislation, which removes the requirement for people to demonstrate medical...
By Rachel Hall, The Guardian | 11.20.2025
Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.
Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility...
By Grace Won, KQED [with CGS' Katie Hasson] | 12.02.2025
In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Area startups are focused on just that. It wouldn’t be the first...
Several recent Biopolitical Times posts (1, 2, 3, 4) have called attention to the alarmingly rapid commercialization of “designer baby” technologies: polygenic embryo screening (especially its use to purportedly screen for traits like intelligence), in vitro gametogenesis (lab-made eggs and sperm), and heritable genome editing (also termed embryo editing or reproductive gene editing). Those three, together with artificial wombs, have been dubbed the “Gattaca stack” by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency company...
