Robert Edwards Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for Pioneering In-vitro Fertilization
Robert G. Edwards has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work with in vitro fertilization (IVF), the Nobel committee announced Monday. The procedure allows a human egg to be fertilized outside of the body and then reintroduced to the female. It can now be completed with just a single implantation, thus avoiding multiple births. Edwards, a professor emeritus at Cambridge University, began research on the problem of infertility in the 1950s. The first "test-tube baby," Louise Brown, was born in 1978, an event that the Nobel expert panel called "a paradigm shift." Since then, approximately 4 million babies have been born worldwide via IVF, many of whom now have children of their own. [More] In vitro fertilisation - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine -...