Front rooms
Start here: the story in four steps
New to the museum? This short walk takes about ten minutes, and it begins on the night it all came true.
- 1A baby girl is bornOldham, 25 July 1978. Louise Brown arrives, and the world changes.
- 2Meet the foundersRobert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe, Jean Purdy and Subhas Mukherjee, and the years it took.
- 3See it happenFilm of the birth, and photographs from the laboratory and the clinic.
- 4Read their wordsThe letters and papers in which they told the world, from 1969 onwards.
The rooms of the museum
Each room tells one part of the story, from rabbits in Victorian England to the frozen embryos of today.
Coming soon: Stories.The families at the heart of it all, in their own words, including those for whom IVF did not work, who are the larger number.
About the museum
The IVF Museum is a non-commercial, online museum that celebrates the people who made in-vitro fertilisation possible. It sells nothing. It exists to remember, and to say thank you.
Its stories are built from the original papers, letters, notebooks and photographs, many of them held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. The details of every source sit quietly at the end of each room, for anyone who would like to look.
The IVF Museum is supported by an unrestricted educational grant from IVF Store, a supplier to IVF and andrology laboratories. Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Est. 2026.
