Working with Dr. Patrick Steptoe, Dr. Edwards essentially changed the rules for how people can come into the world. Conception was now possible outside the body — in a petri dish.
Yet, like so many pioneers of science, Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe achieved what they did in the face of a skeptical establishment and choruses of critics, some of whom found the idea of a “test tube baby” morally repugnant. Denied government support, the two men resorted to private financing. And they did their work in virtual seclusion, in a tiny, windowless laboratory at a small, out-of-the-way English hospital outside Manchester.
It was there, after outwitting a crowd of reporters, that they delivered their — and the world’s — first IVF baby, Louise Brown, on July 25, 1978. Her parents, John and Lesley Brown, had tried for nine years to have a child — a period that virtually coincided with Dr. Edwards’s research.
Dr. Edwards first had the idea for in vitro fertilization in the 1950s, and after beginning his research in earnest in the late 1960s, he stayed with it for nine years, through trial and error, disappointment and triumph.
He was a colorful physiologist who courted the press and vigorously debated his critics, and he was unflagging. Several times a week he drove three to four hours from his academic office in Cambridge to pursue the work at Oldham General Hospital (now the Royal Oldham Hospital). It was there that he and Dr. Steptoe finally succeeded in fertilizing an egg, growing it briefly in a petri dish and transferring it to a woman’s uterus to produce a baby.
Dr. Edwards’s motivation — his passion, in fact — was not fame or fortune but rather helping infertile women, said Barry Bavister, a retired reproductive biologist who worked with him. “He believed with all his heart that it was the right thing to do,” Dr. Bavister said.
During the frustrating years before that first IVF birth, Dr. Edwards was undaunted by critics who said he might be creating babies with birth defects — undaunted even by the qualms of some of his own graduate students. One, Martin Johnson, wrote that he and a fellow graduate student, Richard Gardner, “were very unsure about whether what Bob was doing was appropriate, and we didn’t want to get too involved in it.”
Dr. Johnson added that when he saw “bigwigs of the subject” who were “lambasting into Bob” and telling him not to continue, “you had to say: ‘Well, what’s going on here? Can one man be right against this weight of authoritative opinion?’ ”
In 1971, Dr. Edwards’s application for research support from the British government was turned down, in part because a committee reviewing his application thought it would be more prudent to perfect the method in primates before jumping to humans.
Then there was Dr. Edwards’s personality. Committee members wrote that they were uncomfortable with his “tendency to seek publicity in the press, television and so on.”
Finally, the committee thought that the hospital where Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe worked was insufficiently equipped.
The two men obtained private funds and continued their work.
In a paper published a decade ago in Nature Medicine, Dr. Edwards explained that he first got the idea for human IVF when he was a Ph.D. student at Edinburgh University. He was working with mouse embryos and testing hormone preparations that induced female mice to ovulate. Years later, he asked gynecologists if they would give him ovarian tissue that they had removed from patients for other reasons. Dr. Edwards sought to induce the eggs in the tissue to mature. Then he would fertilize them and transfer them to infertile women to produce pregnancies.
“Some gynecologists approached about this project candidly responded that they thought the idea preposterous,” Dr. Edwards wrote. But one, Dr. Molly Rose, who had delivered two of Dr. Edwards’s five daughters, said she would do it.
The immature eggs, though, would not mature. Dr. Edwards had assumed it took 12 hours for the process; that was what another research group had said. He finally succeeded, he wrote in 1972, when, after “after two disappointing years,” he let the eggs grow for as long as 25 hours. Then, he wrote, “a joy unbounding,” the eggs matured.
What followed, however, was failure after failure to achieve the steps needed for an actual pregnancy.
The first hurdle was trying to get a human egg to be fertilized by human sperm in the lab. Dr. Edwards tried repeatedly for several years, to no avail. Meanwhile, Dr. Bavister, working next door to Dr. Edwards’s lab, had developed a solution to nourish hamster sperm while he fertilized hamster eggs.
“One day,” Dr. Bavister recalled, “Bob said, ‘Barry, why don’t we try your hamster medium with human eggs?’ ” It worked. Dr. Bavister said he could still recall his first glimpse of that fertilized human egg in the microscope. “It was unbelievable, like ‘Eureka!’ ” he said.
The problem, it turned out, was that the solutions Dr. Edwards had been trying were too acidic. The hamster egg solution was slightly less acidic, which allowed sperm to burrow into the egg.
The next step was to get the embryos to start to grow and divide in a petri dish so that they could be transferred to a woman’s uterus.
Many did not develop, and those that did did not survive long. Even after Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe managed to get the eggs to grow to the point where they could be transferred, no pregnancies resulted. They made over 100 attempts, but no woman got pregnant, except one, who had an ectopic pregnancy, with the embryo in her fallopian tube instead of her uterus.
“Most sensible scientists would have given up,” Dr. Bavister said. “But they plugged on and plugged on.”
Dr. Joseph D. Schulman, an American physician who later founded the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., worked with Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe in 1973 and 1974 and wrote of those frustrating times:
“Although we tried week after week though most of the winter and spring, with one, two or three infertile patients a week, no pregnancy resulted. We extensively debated the causes of failure, of which the informed scientific imagination would provide many.”
Dr. Edwards, “never the most patient of men, was becoming increasingly irritable,” Dr. Schulman wrote.
It is still not clear why it took so long to achieve success, Dr. Schulman said. Dr. Edwards decided that it was a hormone he was giving women to induce ovulation that was making the uterus inhospitable. He elected to do without the drug and rely instead on the one egg that a woman naturally produced each month.
There were only three remaining patients. Dr. Steptoe could not retrieve any eggs from the first two. One woman did not get pregnant. Another had a tubal pregnancy that could not be carried to term. Then he tried his method with Mrs. Brown.
The night Mrs. Brown was to give birth to the world’s first IVF baby, the press descended on the Oldham hospital. Dr. Edwards left the hospital that afternoon and told reporters that nothing was happening yet and that they could go home. He and Dr. Steptoe sneaked in the back entrance that night, and Dr. Steptoe delivered the baby by Caesarean.
It was Dr. Steptoe’s decision to do a Caesarean, Dr. Bavister said, adding, “If the baby was abnormal, they sure did not want the press in the delivery room.” In fact, he said, if the baby had been abnormal, that would have spelled the end of IVF. The method had succeeded only with rabbits at that point, so it was a huge leap of faith for Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe to try it with humans.
But after the birth of Louise Brown, Dr. Edwards was triumphant. He and Dr. Steptoe founded an IVF center, Bourn Hall Clinic, in Cambridge.
The Roman Catholic Church denounced the Nobel committee for awarding Dr. Edwards his prize, arguing that human life should begin only through intercourse and not artificially. The Vatican said Dr. Edwards “bore a moral responsibility for all subsequent developments in assisted reproduction technology and for all abuses made possible by IVF.”
In 2011, Dr. Edwards was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II “for services to human reproductive biology.”
Robert Geoffrey Edwards was born into a working-class family in Batley, Yorkshire, on Sept. 27, 1925. He joined the British military during World War II, then studied biology at the University of Wales in Bangor. He received a Ph.D. in physiology in 1955 from Edinburgh University in Scotland.
He is survived by his wife, Ruth Edwards, along with their 5 daughters and 12 grandchildren, Cambridge said.
Dr. Bavister said the most moving tribute to Dr. Edwards was in a message posted on the Nobel Web site after Dr. Edwards had received the prize. It was from a man who had been born through IVF. “Dr. Edwards, thank you for my life,” it said.
SOURCE
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McCANDLISH PHILLIPS, TIMES REPORTER WHO EXPOSED A JEWISH KLANSMAN
John Orris/The New York Times
McCandlish Phillips in 1966. He left his journalism career in 1973 to spread the Gospel.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: April 9, 2013
- McCandlish Phillips, a former reporter for The New York Times who wrote one of the most famous articles in the newspaper’s history — exposing the Orthodox Jewish background of a senior Ku Klux Klan official — before forsaking journalism to spread the Gospel, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jaan Vaino, a friend.
Even in a newsroom that employed Gay Talese, David Halberstam, Richard Reeves and Ada Louise Huxtable, Mr. Phillips, who was with The Times from 1952 to 1973, stood out.
He stood out as a tenacious reporter and a lyrical stylist — an all-too-rare marriage on newspapers then — and in his hands even a routine news article seldom failed to delight.
Consider Mr. Phillips’s 1961 account of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, an annual millstone for the city’s general-assignment reporters:
“The sun was high to their backs and the wind was fast in their faces and 100,000 sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who would hold with them, matched strides with their shadows for 52 blocks. It seemed they marched from Midtown to exhaustion.”
In his 2003 memoir, “City Room,” Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of The Times, called Mr. Phillips “the most original stylist I’d ever edited.”
Mr. Phillips stood out in other ways. About 6 feet 5 inches tall and not much more than 160 pounds, he was often described as a latter-day Ichabod Crane — “the man of the awkward gait and the graceful phrase,” his editors called him.
An evangelical Christian, he kept a Bible on his desk and led prayer meetings for like-minded colleagues (there were none when he joined the paper, he noted ruefully) in a conference room off the newsroom.
He refrained from smoking, drinking, cursing and gambling, each of which had been refined to a high, exuberant art in the Times newsroom — the last of these to such a degree that at midcentury the newspaper employed two bookmakers-in-residence, nominally on the payroll as news clerks.
Mr. Phillips’s most renowned article appeared on Page 1 on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1965, under the headline “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” It was a rigorously reported profile of Daniel Burros, a 28-year-old Queens man who was the Grand Dragon of the New York State Ku Klux Klan, a chief organizer of the national Klan and a former national secretary of the American Nazi Party.
Mr. Burros, the article went on to document, was also a Jew — a former Hebrew school student who had been bar mitzvahed at 13.
The article remains a case study in a reporter’s perseverance in the face of intimidation. It is also a case study in the severe, unintended consequences that the airing of fiercely guarded truths can have for the guardian: despite threatening to kill Mr. Phillips if the article went to press, Mr. Burros, in the end, killed only himself.
John McCandlish Phillips Jr. was born in Glen Cove, N.Y., on Long Island, on Dec. 4, 1927. His father was a traveling salesman, and young Johnny, as he was known, would attend 13 grammar schools across New York, Ohio and Massachusetts.
After graduating from Brookline High School, near Boston, he forwent college for reporting and editing jobs on small New England papers. From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Phillips served with the Army at Fort Holabird, in Baltimore, and it was there, he said, that he attended the church service at which he was born again.
Mr. Phillips joined The Times as a copy boy in November 1952, later working as a clerk on the city desk and in the Washington bureau. In 1955, he was made a cub reporter and consigned to prove his mettle in the paper’s Brooklyn office, then a dank, decrepit outfit near Police Department headquarters in the borough’s nether regions.
His account of life there, written for Times Talk, the newspaper’s house organ (“It is impossible to tell a plainclothes detective from a mugger here. You just have to wait to see what they do”), so delighted the newspaper’s management that his sentence was commuted to service in the main newsroom.
In October 1965, The Times received a tip about Mr. Burros’s Jewish upbringing. Assigned to pursue it, Mr. Phillips, aided by newsroom colleagues, spent days reconstructing his life, scouring school, military, employment and police records; amassing photographs; and interviewing neighbors and associates.
The one thing they lacked was an interview with Mr. Burros: efforts to reach him had been unsuccessful. Finally, on a return visit to South Ozone Park, the Queens neighborhood in which Mr. Burros lived, Mr. Phillips glimpsed him on the street — “a round, short, sallow young man who looked a little like a small heap of misery,” he would later write in Times Talk.
He approached Mr. Burros, and they went into a luncheonette. The conversation, which ranged over Mr. Burros’s brilliant scholastic record — he had an I.Q. of 154 — and his rise to power in the Klan, was cordial.
Then, nearly 20 minutes into the interview, Mr. Phillips raised the subject of Mr. Burros’s Jewishness.
“If you publish that, I’ll come and get you and I’ll kill you,” Mr. Burros said. “I don’t care what happens to me. I’ll be ruined. This is all I’ve got to live for.”
By the time the two men parted, Mr. Phillips later wrote, Mr. Burros had threatened his life half a dozen times.
Mr. Phillips returned to the newsroom, and The Times arranged for round-the-clock bodyguards. He wrote his article, detailing Mr. Burros’s religious upbringing, his early fascination with far-right ideologies and his advocacy of genocide for Jews and blacks. On the day the article was published, Mr. Burros committed suicide.
The article cemented Mr. Phillips’s reputation as one of the city’s most esteemed reporters. He spent his remaining years at The Times primarily in the paper’s Metropolitan section, where his portfolio included the About New York column.
Mr. Phillips became known in particular for his coverage of the city’s vaunted, vanishing institutions, as in this 1969 article about the closing of the original Lindy’s delicatessen, which began:
“What kind of a day is today? It’s the kind of a day that if you wanted a slice of cheesecake at Lindy’s, you couldn’t get it.”
Near the end of the article, he wrote, with plain-spoken, impeccable logic:
“The locusts stripped the place of menus and ashtrays and other mementos. There were conflicting claimants to possession of the last bagel. As a souvenir, a bagel is not much good. It is perishable and it also lacks proof. Anyone can hold up a bagel and say, ‘This is the last bagel from Lindy’s.’ ”
Mr. Phillips resigned from The Times in late 1973 for a life in religion.
In 1962, he had helped found the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a Pentecostal congregation in Manhattan. Its tenets, as Ken Auletta wrote in a 1997 New Yorker profile of Mr. Phillips, include the belief that “pornography, drugs, abortion and any form of fornication (including premarital sex and homosexuality) are sins.”
In the early 1970s, the New Testament Missionary Fellowship made headlines after the kidnapping or attempted kidnapping of several of its congregants by their families. The families maintained that the group had trained the congregants to repudiate them.
After leaving The Times, Mr. Phillips lived, in Mr. Auletta’s account, a contented if threadbare existence, preaching the Gospel on the Columbia University campus, near his home, and managing the fellowship’s affairs. The fellowship, which has long since ceased to incur unfavorable notice, is still extant, based in Upper Manhattan.
Mr. Phillips, who never married, is survived by a sister, Janet DeClemente.
He published several books, including “City Notebook” (1974), a collection of his articles from The Times, and “What Every Christian Should Know About the Supernatural” (1988).
Over the years, Mr. Phillips was asked whether he felt responsible for Mr. Burros’s suicide. He felt “a vague sense of sadness,” he said, but no guilt.
His stance — the view from the prospect where his faith and his journalism converged — was encapsulated in a remark he made to Mr. Gelb.
On the afternoon of Oct. 31, 1965, Mr. Gelb phoned Mr. Phillips to tell him, very gently, that Mr. Burros had shot himself.
“What I think we’ve seen here, Arthur,” Mr. Phillips replied, “is the God of Israel acting in judgment.”
SOURCE
People of all ages take the time to appreciate books and their authors on World Book and Copyright Day.©iStockphoto.com/ Ekaterina Monakhova
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BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 