In early 2009, the world was shocked by the birth of octuplets to Nadya Suleman, an unemployed single mother. At first, the excitement swirled around whether so many babies could be born safely (physicians actually thought there were only seven; number eight was a surprise), and then the focus shifted. The babies had been born via in vitro fertilization to a single woman with no financial resources who was then revealed to already have six children. The ethics of the fertility specialist Dr. Michael Kamrava were called into question. Professionals and the public wanted to know why this procedure was performed on a woman who was unmarried, already had six children, and had no visible means of support.

As the story deepened, medical eyebrows were raised by additional information. Suleman said Kamrava implanted her with six embryos for each of her six pregnancies--an apparent violation of national guidelines that specify no more than two embryos for a healthy woman under 35. In her last pregnancy, two of the six embryos split to create eight babies.

While national attention continues to focus on this mother of 14, few remember how recently it was that the actual process of implanting embryos was in itself highly controversial. The first test tube baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born on July 25, 1978 after great struggle. In the early 1970s, infertile couples had few options other than adoption. Not much was known about helping women become pregnant.

Finally, two British physicians had a breakthrough. Robert Edwards (1925-) served in the British army and was 26 before he applied to a graduate program in genetics at Edinburgh University. He became increasingly interested in the development of the embryo. His initial studies involved working with mouse embryos. He then went on to study immunology and fertility. In 1962, he asked to experiment with human eggs. However, the director of the agency where he was working told him not to pursue it--it was wrong. Edwards continued at Cambridge University, working with the eggs of cows, sheep, and monkeys, but he rarely had access to human eggs. In a case of what turned out to be beginner's luck, he managed to fertilize (with his own sperm) one human egg, but it was not to be possible again for years. . .

In 1966, Edwards met Patrick Steptoe (1913-88) a gynecologist who worked in Oldham, England. Steptoe was a pioneer in his own right and had spent years creating a laparoscopic method for doing gynecological surgery. Edwards explained to Steptoe his need for mature eggs from a woman's ovary in order to continue his experiments, and Steptoe was willing. The drive between Cambridge and Oldham was 165 miles, but Edwards repeatedly made the journey for years, looking for an answer. By the end of 1968, Steptoe and Edwards successfully fertilized some human eggs and followed their development through several cell divisions. As word of their work leaked out, they were chastised by the Catholic Church. The archbishop of Liverpool declared that what they were doing was morally wrong, and others wrote of the frightening specter of how this information might be used, worrying about selective breeding, eugenics, and cloning. . .

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