IVF pioneer wins Nobel Prize in medicine

Robert Edwards (pictured) of Britain won the 2010 Nobel Prize in medicine for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF). Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, started working on IVF as early as the 1950s. He developed the technique – in which eggs are removed from a woman, fertilized outside her body and then implanted into the womb – together with a British gynecologist. On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown in Britain became the first baby born through the groundbreaking procedure, marking a revolution in fertility treatment. Since then, some 4 million people have been born using the technique, the Nobel medicine prize committee said – a rate that is up to about 300,000 babies worldwide a year, according to the European Society of Human Reproduction.