A (Nobel) Moment To Celebrate IVF

You probably know several wonderful young people who wouldn't be here if not for the medical wonder of IVF, or in vitro fertilization. I do. At last count, about four million children worldwide had been conceived as "test-tube babies." So I felt my heart lift in the pre-dawn morning when I saw that the Nobel prize in medicine had gone to a developer of IVF, Robert G. Edwards. And the story of his work makes for some good reading in the Nobel press release here. Funny to think that the practice used to be ethically controversial...

IVF began in Britain with the famed baby Louise Brown. but in the United States, the first family to have an IVF baby was here in Massachusetts, and we recently celebrated our own landmark: the country's first test-tube baby, Elizabeth Carr — now Comeau — who grew up to be a journalist, gave birth to a child of her own — the low-tech way — and wrote about it in the Globe here.