You already know that the first child born via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was Louise Brown in 1978. She was the result of research that went back to the 1940s. Dr. John Rock (who would later develop the birth control pill) was determined to cure infertility, and hired Miriam Menkin to perform experiments in fertilizing a human egg with sperm.
Week after week, Menkin followed the same routine: chase eggs on Tuesday, mix with sperm on Wednesday, pray on Thursday, look into the microscope on Friday. Every Friday, when she looked in the incubator, all she saw was one cell – an unfertilised egg – and a bunch of dead sperm. She did this 138 times. Over six years.
Until that fateful Friday in February 1944, when she opened the incubator door, and screamed for Rock. “As usual he was at the other end of town in the hospital getting a real baby for a mother,” she recalled later, in a talk to a classroom of schoolchildren. “We telephoned him… When he saw what was in the dish, he became pale as a ghost.”
The story of how that first IVF came about is fascinating, but Menkin's story is a sad one. She was a brilliant scientist who earned several degrees, but couldn't get into medical school, probably because of strict limits on the number of women admitted at the time. Instead, she married a medical school student and worked to pay his tuition. Menkin's husband was also the reason she later had to leave Rock's laboratory and her fertility work. Read the story of the first in-vitro fertilization and the woman who accomplished it at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting