Last month the IVF industry celebrated the centenary of the birth of Sir Robert Edwards on 27 September, the British scientist who won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for developing in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
The accolades came thick and fast: “one of the greatest scientists who ever existed”; a life lived with “kindness, morality, respect and dignity”; “an IVF Visionary” …
And that’s the way that most people think about IVF – medicine’s gift of gurgling bundles of joy and smiling mums. But IVF is far more revolutionary than that, as Edwards knew very well.
Edwards was born in 1925 in Yorkshire and began working in human reproduction in the mid-1950s. By 1969 he and his associate Dr Patrick Steptoe had provided the first compelling evidence that fertilisation could take place outside the human body.
At the time, the scientific establishment – to say nothing of the churches – was strongly opposed. The reaction of the British Medical Association was so extreme that Edwards twice sued it for defamation. Eminent scientists described his work as immoral and described him as a self-publicist.
But Edwards was adept at public relations. When Louise Brown was born on 25 July, 1978, criticism stopped. As Edwards triumphantly put it, “Most ethical disagreements have been vaporised” by the existence of millions of IVF babies.
Edwards knew exactly what would happen once IVF became popular and he tried to smooth a path for it.
On the medical side he predicted sex selection, embryonic stem cell research, children for lesbians and single women, posthumous reproduction and genetic engineering. On the legal side he foresaw debates about over-population, gender imbalance, the personal identity of clones, and the need for government regulation.
What were the ethical principles which inspired him?
First, there should be no limits on scientific research as long as it does no harm. Science could not and should not be limited by ethics.
For him, science was an assault on the Christian world view. In 2003 he told the London Times: “[IVF] was a fantastic achievement, but it was about more than infertility. It was also about issues like stem cells and the ethics of human conception. I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory.”
And what he discovered was this – “It was us.”
In principle nothing should be out of bounds, even eugenics. His 1999 remarks are widely quoted: “Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”
Second, the ethical norm for medicine (he was not a medical doctor) was the “clinical imperative.” Whatever satisfies a patient’s desires must be done. In 2004 he wrote: “Clinical imperative is a powerful doctrine … any unwarranted restriction of scientific and clinical research must be rejected if it restricts the access of their patients to the most recent scientific advances.” This, obviously, can justify almost any medical procedure, from frontal lobotomies to female genital mutilation.
The fulsome praise heaped upon Edwards skips over some sticky questions, even for those who are not opposed to IVF.
Edwards’ patients were not properly informed about the dangers of the procedure. (There were no animal trials for IVF. Edwards did not seem to worry about the higher rate of disabilities among IVF children. They were just collateral damage of the “clinical imperative.”)
Similarly, there is little discussion in Edwards’s papers about the psychological welfare of IVF children. What about the genetic orphans created through anonymous sperm donation? What about children of gay parents who will grow up without a mother or a father?
His blithe indifference to the social consequences of IVF was staggering.
In 2013 an Australian bioethicist, Robert Sparrow, set out a blueprint for “in vitro eugenics” in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Generations of people can be created in Petri dishes, making it possible to eliminate unsatisfactory genes. Dr Sparrow calculated that two to three generations of human beings could be produced in a single year – rather than the 60 or so years that the pace of natural reproduction requires. “In effect,” he wrote, “scientists will be able to breed human beings with the same (or greater) degree of sophistication with which we currently breed plants and animals.”
Is this chilling scenario the fault of the genial, baby-kissing professor who was Robert G. Edwards? It certainly is. There have been few scientists who envisaged the future more clearly and worked harder for it.
