Honouring 'Patient 38' - a mother of all IVF mothers?

Abstract

This commentary addresses one aspect of the early history of IVF in Britain. Specific data are re-examined from the recently published, anonymized database of medical records from the Oldham period of research conducted by Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and their team of assistants between 1969 and 1978. By focusing on a reformulation of the ‘scheduled treatment cycles per patient’, attention is drawn to the small, but nevertheless not insignificant, number of subjects who returned to Oldham at least five times or more to undergo innovative procedures and/or receive other experimental treatments over the duration of the research project. These multiple efforts are contrasted with the single or double treatment cycles received by the majority of the infertile women involved, including the only two experiencing live births, Lesley Brown and Grace Montgomery. The re-presented data facilitates new interpretations and raises fresh research questions about the nature of contemporary and present characterisations of the major protagonists in the ‘IVF story’, the identity of those women who originally took part and the origin of and reasons for discrepancies in the records maintained about research subjects.