Centenary of the birth of IVF pioneer Sir Robert Edwards

Saturday 27th September marks the centenary of the birth of Sir Robert Edwards, who with colleagues Patrick Steptoe and Jean Purdy oversaw the conception and birth of the world’s first IVF baby in 1978.⁽¹⁾ It was a breakthrough in reproductive medicine which would bring immeasurable benefits to people with infertility and whose demographic importance today is greater than ever.

Now, from various reports published by this journal, we can confidently say that the global impact of IVF continues to grow in terms of children conceived and the extent of its use. There are few causes of infertility which today are not amenable to treatment while the procedure itself and its related techniques have become simpler, more widely available and more successful.

The Nobel Prize awarded to Sir Robert in 2010 was for ‘the development of human IVF therapy’, ‘a milestone in modern medicine’. The Nobel announcement said at the time that around ‘4 million individuals’ had so far been born following IVF, but even then that would be a marked underestimate.
 

How many IVF babies?

We are confident to put the total of IVF births so far at 20 million.⁽²⁾ The latest published data from national registry records calculated that ‘up to 13 million or more infants’ had been born in the 40 years since the first 1978 (ie, by 2018).⁽³⁾

Numbers of IVF births continue to grow, with recent national records suggesting an annual total of around 500,000. The reproductive scientist Roger Gosden and colleagues calculated in this journal that, with reasonable annual increases from a base of 400,000 babies a year, ‘an estimated 394 million people alive at the end of this century’ will owe their lives to IVF. These people would comprise 3.5% of global population.⁽⁴⁾

The provision and uptake of IVF is largely dependent on funding. In countries with state-supported treatment (for example, Denmark, Belgium, Australia) the proportion of IVF children in any classroom might be as high as 10%, while in Britain (with a mixed private and public funding system) the proportion is around 3%.

However, the greatest advance in IVF has been as an effective route to parenthood for many who previously had not had the chance. Professor Nick Macklon, co-chief editor of Reproductive Biomedicine Online, said: ‘Were Edwards alive today he would take genuine pleasure in our progress in improving not just the effectiveness and availability of IVF but the experience it offers patients. Treatments are now shorter, less demanding and have fewer side effects and complications than before. These changes continue to develop and improve IVF, and today lie behind the remarkable increase in uptake of IVF worldwide.’
 

The population crisis

The world has entered a new demographic chapter, with few countries in the world now unaffected by falling fertility rates and declines in the number of children born (to well below replacement level of 2.1 children per woman).

The reasons are complex but common to most is a personal wish to defer first pregnancy to a later maternal age. The latest official data from the UK (England & Wales for 2024) showed that fertility rate fell to an all-time low of 1.41 children per woman - while the average age of new parents increased to 33.8 years for fathers and 30.9 for mothers. (Fertility rates have fallen to around 1.6 in the USA and to 1.2 in Spain and Italy,)

With older maternal age comes an unavoidable increased risk of age-related infertility, usually after the age of 35 as the number and quality of eggs in the ovary decline. IVF or any other technique cannot replace or improve these eggs, but IVF may help some women with age-related infertility.

However, IVF alone cannot solve the population crisis but it may play a part alongside other policies designed to encourage childbirth. State funding of IVF may be justified by the economic return contributed throughout life by each child born. China, for example, as fertility rates plunge, has widened access to IVF, and introduced public insurance coverage and subsidy in some regions.

Commenting, RBMO co-chief editor Juan Garcia Velasco said that the strategic use of IVF techniques might offer one approach to addressing this demographic challenge. ‘By supporting individuals and couples who wish to have children but face medical or age-related barriers to natural conception, IVF can help unlock latent fertility potential, said Professor Velasco. ‘While not a structural substitute, IVF can form part of a wider population response, enabling more people to achieve their desired family size, improving birth rates at the margins and reinforcing societies’ resilience against the pressures of ageing populations.’

The potential impact of IVF will go further than Sir Robert Edwards or any of the IVF pioneers can ever have imagined. It will extend to the creation of many millions of people and may even address the world’s population crisis in providing a route to pregnancy which otherwise was beyond reach; reasons indeed to celebrate the centenary of Sir Robert’s birth.
 

Notes

1. Robert Edwards was born in Batley on 27 September 1925 and died in Cambridge on 10 April 2013. The world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978 in Oldham, where her mother had been treated.
2. A past and present editor of this journal calculated the 20 million total from national registry figures reported by the International Committee for Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technologies, the most recent for the year 2018. Fauser BJCM, Macklon N. The contribution of private and public centres to innovation in fertility care: acknowledging the past and preserving the future. Reprod Biomed Online 2025; 51. doi:10.1016/j.rbmo.2025.105052.
3. Estimating IVF births has always been a challenge, simply because national records of treatment cycles were either incomplete or non-existent - and only complete where details of each treatment cycle were required by law (as in the UK). No national records were published from China until 2020 but thereafter China became by far the world’s most active user of IVF.
4. Faddy MJ, Gosden MD, Gosden RG. A demographic projection of the contribution of assisted reproductive technologies to world population growth. Reprod Biomed Online 2018; 36: 455-458. doi:10.1016/j.rbmo.2018.01.006

 

* For more information on this press release please contact:
Duncan Nicholas, RBM Online Development Editor
dev.editor@rbmonline.com 

 

---

---