[Based on an article by the author published in The Tribune (Delhi/Chandigarh) on 2 January 2011] Just after Bob Edwards had set up Bourn Hall near Cambridge to treat infertility cases requiring IVF, the technique for which he received the Nobel Prize last year, he drove me to the then heavily guarded building, and chuckled. All around, he said, were TV cameras poised on the top of the adjoining buildings to record what was happening inside Bourn Hall, and I would become a marked man! Bob had been a celebrity in Britain and elsewhere for some 3 years, not only for having given IVF to the infertile couples but also ignoring the church-going crowd that felt that man had no right to interfere if God had made a couple infertile. He realized that if any organic malfunctioning could be considered a disease, infertility was the most widely prevalent disease around the world, affecting 10 to 15% couples of child-bearing age, and he had given new hope to them. In fact, today, advances based on Bob Edwards’ work between 1970 and 1980 have made it possible for 85% of infertile couples to have a child. So he put all his money in the Bourn Clinic. It was a risk few would have taken, for the success rate of IVF at that time was less than 10%. Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby that he and the late Patrick Steptoe had delivered on 25th July 1978, was their first success after many failures. But Bob Edwards recognized that nothing worthwhile in this world was ever accomplished without taking a risk, believing in oneself, and going that extra mile that others didn’t dare to walk. Bourn Hall became a landmark, and the techniques that Bob had pioneered spawned a host of new, related technologies. Infertility clinics (good or bad) started sprouting around the corner everywhere over the next three decades, especially in India which even today has no regulation to control them. This mushrooming was anathema to the innate sense of ethics and morality in Bob. So when he started his second journal Reproductive BioMedicine Online (the first being Human Reproduction), he asked me to write an article on ethical issues in modern biological technologies, especially ART. It was published in September 2003. IVF and related techniques were by then well accepted. As I wrote, the scope for unethical behaviour and practices by ART practitioners was immense, and was being exploited fully in India. Inspired by Bob, there is now a Bill for accreditation and supervision of ART clinics, ready to be put up to the Indian Parliament. In all that he did, Bob showed that patience, selfconfidence, and a real commitment to the legitimate interests of the people based on strong ethics and highly developed professionalism, pays in the long run. I have watched the modern biological revolution from close quarters since its beginning in 1953, and I believe that there are not many who have during this period succeeded on so many counts as Bob has. However, the fact remains that success is never the outcome of just one individual’s effort and no one is, I am sure, more aware of it than Bob Edwards. The person he would be missing the most at this time, besides Patrick Steptoe, is CR Austin, known to his friends as Bunny. Bunny moved to Cambridge as the Darwin Professor of Animal Morphology in the Physiological Laboratory of the University in the 1960s. Bob joined him there having been with Bunny at the National Institute for Medical Research. It was I believe on the fourth floor of the Physiological Laboratory that he developed the technique of capacitating the human sperm in vitro and then using the capacitated sperm to fertilize a human egg also in vitro what we know today as IVF. I remember many delightful evenings spent at Bunny’s Manor House near Cambridge with Bob and Ruth. It was there that I learnt about Bob’s fascination with fast cars and fast driving, violating every rule of the road, which very few Britishers do. He could persuade me to be driven by him, I think only once! Bob has been a Fellow of Churchill College in Cambridge, and my wife and I remember dining at the College as Bob’s guests in 1986. There was never a dull moment when he was around, and he always livened the dinner table.