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 Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, and Lingling Wei, The Wall Street Journal | 12.13.2025
Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right.
Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental...
By Sarah A. Topol, The New York Times Magazine | 12.14.2025
The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them. They didn’t actually know where House 5 was, only that it was huge...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 12.10.2025
Micah Nerio had known since his early 30s that he wanted to be a father, even if he did not have a partner. He spent a decade saving up to pursue surrogacy, an expensive process where he would create embryos...
By Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 12.08.2025
A huge defense policy bill, revealed by US lawmakers on Sunday, does not include a provision that would have provided broad healthcare coverage for in vitro fertilization (IVF) for active-duty members of the military, despite Donald Trump’s pledge...
