Following the lead given by Steptoe and Edwards, we abandoned ovarian stimulation and began our work on in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1979 using the natural cycle. It rapidly became evident that a major programme handling large numbers of patients could never be run in this way. It was far too cumbersome and expensive to run urinary assays every 3 h or carry out oocyte retrievals at 2 o'clock in the morning; we would have had no staff left by doing that. Despite our initial successes with the natural cycle we kept trying different methods of stimulation, at first with clomiphene and then with various combinations of clomiphene and human menopausal gonadotrophin (HMG) and then with HMG alone, all in an effort to make the process more reliable. However, our implantation rates remained very low and we finally decided to replace more than one embryo even though we were fearful of the multiple pregnancies typical of ovarian stimulation in those days. We started witl! two, and then three, and then four embryos and inevitably, and we thought at the time happily, our pregnancy rates started to rise. This success helped us to overcome the criticism of having an unsuccessful programme with very poor pregnancy rates which had been a powerful argument for our antagonists to use to try and shut the IVF programmes down. The inevitable price of multiple embryo transfer was paid by the patients who had to accept the many multiple pregnancies that we produced. The first National perinatal statistics report on IVF was published by the National Perinatal Statistics Unit in Sydney, Australia in 1986. It reported a perinatal mortality associated with IVF of 60 per 1000 which was five times higher than the perinatal mortality for the population generally. It was even higher in gamete intra-Fallopian transfer (GIFT). We were known in the neonatal units around the world as being 'bad news'. We produced many multiple pregnancies, many premature babies and a very high perinatal mortality. Needless to say the costs to either the patient or the State were very high. These results really marked the end of the honeymoon of IVF for us and they were the trigger which stimulated our Governments to legislate for very tight control over IVE