Twenty places where IVF was imagined, tested, fought for and finally achieved: laboratories, hospitals, a country house near Cambridge and a cottage hospital in Royton.
I
The places behind the story
Every discovery happened somewhere. Some of these places are famous. Others are a cottage hospital, a district general hospital and, twice, a private house.
The road was not always smooth, and the places that held the work back are part of the story too; you will find them in section IV. But the places that carried it forward were mostly small and unfashionable, and they deserve to be remembered: a cottage hospital in Royton, a district general hospital built out of a workhouse, a private institute in Massachusetts, and Bourn Hall, near Cambridge.
Each label tells you what the place was, what happened there, and what it is now.
Two places are marked untraced, and both matter more than that word suggests. The site of the first mammalian embryo transfer in history, and the laboratory in which the second IVF birth in the world was achieved, are both unlocated. Neither has a plaque. One of them was somebody's home.
II
The places
Region I
Britain
Nine places, from a family home in Prestwich where embryo transfer began, to the cottage hospital in Royton where the science of human IVF was done.
IN·011931Repurposed
Dr Kershaw's Cottage Hospital
Royton, Oldham, Lancashire
A small cottage hospital on the northern edge of Oldham, built from the legacy of Dr John Kershaw, a local general practitioner, for the people of Royton. Before 1969 it took, in John Webster's words, patients with “bad chests” who “maybe just needed a bit of rest.” It had a small tiled operating room that was barely used.
Dr Kershaw's Hospice, formerly Dr Kershaw's Cottage Hospital, Royton, 2011.Place of Conception by Peter Thwaite, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons.
What happened hereFrom 1971 this was the laboratory. Steptoe, Edwards and Purdy adapted it as the dedicated egg-collection and culture facility, and it is where the science that mattered was done. Sister Muriel Harris, theatre superintendent at Oldham General, equipped the theatre on £250 Steptoe handed her — scavenging an operating table from Bolton and an anaesthetic machine from wherever she could find one. A loose sheet in the Edwards papers headed All patients ever admitted to Dr Kershaw's for oocytes lists 89 patients across 130 cycles, 1971–74. Edwards' own verdict, in a letter of 1981: “Kershaw's was the centre of the scientific work, which was to prove decisive in the end.”
Two details are often mixed up. Louise Brown was neither conceived nor born at Kershaw's — the November 1977 cycle and the July 1978 birth were both at Oldham General. And the famous photograph of Jean Purdy assisting at an egg collection was taken at Oldham General, before Kershaw's opened.
The Kershaw's clinical notes no longer exist. The anaesthetist Dr Finlay Campbell wrote to Edwards on 16 October 1978: “Alas, the ones [records] at Kershaw's have disappeared.” By whom, or why, is not known.
What it is nowDr Kershaw's Hospice. After roughly fifty years as a cottage hospital, the medical director Naru Hira launched an appeal and the hospice opened in 1989, paid for by local donations and the residue of Kershaw's original legacy. It provides free specialist palliative and end-of-life care for adults in Oldham, from the same buildings, and is a registered charity (no. 1105924). Two plaques are on the wall. The first, put up by the health authority around 1980, names Steptoe and Edwards and calls everyone else “their supporting staff.” The second, a Society of Biology blue plaque unveiled on 13 March 2015, names all three.
About the sources
Hospice's own history; Charity Commission register (1105924); Companies House (05221414, incorporated 3 September 2004 — the current legal entity postdates the 1989 opening by fifteen years, so we do not write “registered charity since 1989”); The National Archives Discovery (Oldham Archives B-UDR 8/1, board minutes from 13 August 1930); Johnson & Elder, The Oldham Notebooks I, II, V and VI (2015), read in full. Plaque date 13 March 2015 confirmed against a contemporaneous report published the day of the unveiling and against Andrew Steptoe's eyewitness account in Human Fertility; see §VI.
IN·021851Operating
Oldham and District General Hospital
Rochdale Road, Oldham, Lancashire
A workhouse. Construction began in 1848 at Northmoor on the west side of Rochdale Road, to designs by Travis and Magnall of Manchester, and finished in 1851 at a cost of £13,305. Sick wards were added in 1877. It became Westwood Park Poor Law Institution in 1915; on the founding of the NHS in 1948 the infirmary at the north of the site became Boundary Park General Hospital and the rest its Annexe. The last forty residents of the old workhouse left in 1957.
The Royal Oldham Hospital, successor to Oldham and District General Hospital, 2011.David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons.
What happened hereThe clinical base, from 9 January 1969. Laparoscopic egg collection, most treatment cycles, the embryo transfers, and from 1975 the hormone assays. Louise Joy Brown was delivered here by caesarean section on 25 July 1978.
It was also, after the Ford Foundation, the programme's largest identified funder — and that is the part usually left out. The hospital and its management committee carried costs the Medical Research Council had refused; its staff worked unpaid and out of hours on top of full duties. Edwards and Steptoe thanked the hospital and the regional boards in seventeen of the twenty-three papers they published in the period. Johnson and Elder are blunt about what that cost: “It took particular courage for the administrative staff in Oldham to support the work when the views of both the MRC, and by inference the DHSS, were so negative.”
What it is nowThe Royal Oldham Hospital, on the same ground, run by the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (formed 1 October 2021). Large-scale demolition and rebuilding began in 1981 and the hospital was reopened under its present name on 1 December 1989. Almost nothing of the workhouse survives; the entrance clock mechanism does. On 9 March 2022 a plaque went up honouring Jean Purdy and Sister Muriel Harris — the two women left off the plaque Edwards had complained about in 1992.
About the sources
Higginbotham, workhouses.org.uk, compiled with Oldham Local Studies and Archives, for the site's name chain; Northern Care Alliance's own pages for the trust and the 2022 plaque; Johnson & Elder (2015) for the clinical detail, the funding and the quotation. The exact inscription of the 2022 plaque we could not obtain.
IN·031602Operating
Bourn Hall
Bourn, Cambridgeshire
A small country house built in 1602 for John and Frances Hager, standing inside the moated earthworks of an eleventh-century ringwork castle. Remodelled 1817–19 by John Adey Repton for the fifth Earl De La Warr, using masonry salvaged from the demolition of Haslingfield Hall. Red brick over a timber frame, a seventeenth-century staircase with enriched turned balusters, Tudor Revival interiors. Listed Grade II* on 31 August 1962; the grounds are separately a registered park and garden.
Bourn Hall Clinic, 2018.Amy.waddell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What happened hereThe first IVF clinic in the world, opened in 1980 by Edwards, Steptoe and Purdy after Steptoe's NHS retirement. It exists because Cambridge would not house them: the offer was an ancient operating theatre on the third floor of Old Addenbrooke's and a shed on the ground floor for the laboratory. Purdy found the property in estate agents' listings.
It nearly died before it opened. Associated Newspapers, owner of the Daily Mail, bought the hall and paid for the conversion, then withdrew in April 1979 — too risky, and too likely to be attacked by rival papers — and prepared to sell. Alan Dexter refinanced it through ICFC, later 3i, and Steptoe and Edwards bought the house themselves. The clinic opened in portakabins while the conversion continued, and Muriel Harris came down from Oldham as Matron in Charge to set up the theatres and wards inside them.
What it is nowStill a fertility clinic, still in the house — one of only two places in this wing where the same work goes on in the same building. Bourn Hall Clinic treats NHS and private patients and appears on the HFEA's public register as centre 100. Ownership has moved a long way from its founders: Mobeus Equity Partners held it from 2013–14, and a deal closing around the turn of 2020–21 sold it for about £15m to Triangle Healthcare Partners of Toronto with Bulldog Capital Partners. A plaque unveiled in July 2013 for Louise Brown's thirty-fifth birthday names Steptoe and Edwards. It does not name Purdy, who found the building.
About the sources
Historic England, National Heritage List entries 1162529 (Grade II*), 1000613 (park and garden) and 1014238 (scheduled ringwork), read individually; the clinic's own site; Companies House (Bourn Hall Limited, 01897182); Science Museum Group; Cambridge Independent. Present ownership rests on the company's own announcement and trade press — Companies House persons-with-significant-control data could not be read, so we mark it partial. The opening year 1980 is solid; the specific day, 28 September, has one source.
IN·041914Repurposed
The Physiological Laboratory & the Marshall Laboratory
Downing Site, University of Cambridge
The University's physiology building on Downing Street, given by the Drapers' Company in 1914. The Marshall Laboratory was not a building and not an institute. It was seven smallish rooms at the top of the Physiological Laboratory, backing onto Downing Place — eventually shared between three research groups. This is worth stating plainly, because the name suggests something much grander than it was.
What happened hereEdwards arrived in 1963 as a Ford Foundation research fellow and worked here for the rest of his career. Human eggs and embryos from Oldham were driven down and examined in these rooms, which makes the Oldham programme a three-site operation rather than the two-site one it is usually described as. Alan Parkes was here from 1961; on his retirement the laboratory's leadership went to Colin ‘Bunny’ Austin, who brought in John Marston, David Whittingham and Matthew Kaufman, and under whom Barry Bavister worked out the culture medium.
Cambridge passed Edwards over twice in the same year. He applied for Parkes' chair on 6 January 1966 and failed; it went to Thaddeus Mann, who then declined to move into the building at all. The headship of the Marshall laboratory went to Austin. Edwards built his group inside shared rooms he had been refused the running of.
What it is nowThe 1914 building still stands on the Downing Site and houses the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, formed on 7 March 2006 by merging Anatomy and Physiology. The Marshall Laboratory no longer exists. It was never a constituted unit — it was a cluster of rooms and a habit of calling them something — and it appears nowhere in the University's present structure. Of its two associated chairs, the Charles Darwin Professorship of Animal Embryology survives in the same department, held by Austin, then Ronald Laskey, and from April 2026 by Caren Norden.
About the sources
Johnson, “Robert Edwards: the path to IVF,” Reproductive BioMedicine Online 23(2) 2011 (PMC3171154), read in full, for the seven rooms, the 1966 application and the succession; University of Cambridge and departmental pages for the building, the 2006 merger and the Darwin chair. That the laboratory was named for F. H. A. ‘Tibby’ Marshall (1878–1949) is a reasonable inference from the associated chair and is flagged as such in §VI — no source we found says it.
IN·051914Gone
The National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill
The Ridgeway, Mill Hill, London NW7
The Medical Research Council's flagship institute, founded in 1914. The Mill Hill building — a nine-storey cruciform block by Maxwell Ayrton, architect of the original Wembley Stadium — was begun in 1937, requisitioned by the Women's Royal Naval Service during the war, and occupied by the MRC in 1949–50. For most of a century it was the most important medical research institute in Britain.
What happened hereThis is where the work was banned. Edwards joined in 1958 at Alan Parkes' invitation, working mainly on immunological contraception and pursuing egg maturation in what he called evening and weekend flirtations. Then, in Johnson's account: his “quest for human eggs, and his dreams of IVF and studying the genetics and development of early human embryos, had reached the ears of the then Director of the Institute, Sir Charles Harington FRS (1897–1972), who banned any work on human IVF at NIMR.”
The timing made it worse. Parkes, who might have protected him, had left for Cambridge in 1961, and the Cambridge post Parkes offered had no money attached until 1963. Edwards left Mill Hill in 1962 and spent a stopgap year in Glasgow with John Paul, where he and Robin Cole did rabbit blastocyst stem cell work roughly twenty years ahead of the field. Johnson's verdict: by the time he left, “he had encountered a taste of the opposition to come.”
What it is nowIt is a housing estate. NIMR was merged into the Francis Crick Institute in April 2015 and its staff moved to St Pancras from 2016. The Ayrton building was never listed — a local campaign to have it listed failed, and Barnet's own conservation appraisal had called it out of keeping with the area for its “inappropriate height, scale and prominent siting.” The developer's marketing showed the cruciform block retained and converted. It was demolished. Demolition began around mid-2018 and the site is now Ridgeway Views, a Barratt London development of about 460 homes.
About the sources
Johnson 2011 (PMC3171154) for the ban, citing Edwards & Steptoe, A Matter of Life (1980), p. 48; Francis Crick Institute's own founding-institutes page for the 2015 merger; London Borough of Barnet planning brief for the Ayrton building, its dates and its unlisted status; Barnet Society and Housing Design Awards for the demolition and the scheme. The ban's ultimate source is Edwards' own memoir — we found no MRC minute or NIMR record confirming it independently, and we say so.
IN·06founded ?Gone
The MRC Experimental Embryology and Teratology Unit
Carshalton, Surrey; then St George's Hospital Medical School, Tooting
A Medical Research Council unit working on mammalian embryology, embryo freezing and teratology, headed by David Whittingham — whom Austin had recruited to the Marshall Laboratory in Cambridge in the late 1960s.
It is not where the embryo-freezing work was done, and this label said it was. Whittingham's first successful freezing and thawing of mouse embryos (Nature, 1971) was done at the Physiological Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The definitive demonstration with Stanley Leibo and Peter Mazur (Science 178:411–414, 1972) was done at the Biology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which he visited from Cambridge. He moved to the MRC's Carshalton site around 1982 — roughly a decade later — and the unit there moved on to St George's around 1989–90.
What happened hereEmbryo freezing and its licensing. The unit applied for and held a licence to offer IVF services under the Voluntary Licensing Authority, with an inspection on 8 July 1985 and a review visit on 24 May 1990 — that is, it was one of the bodies that went through the regulatory system in the years before the HFEA existed.
What it is nowGone. Its exact founding and closing dates have been lost. What can be bracketed is this: author affiliations place it at the MRC Laboratories, Carshalton from at least 1984 to 1990, and at St George's, Cranmer Terrace, London SW17 from 1989–90 continuously to 1997, with a single trailing paper in 2000. Whittingham finished his career as Emeritus Professor of Experimental Embryology at St George's. St George's itself merged with City, University of London on 1 August 2024 and is now the School of Health & Medical Sciences of City St George's, University of London.
About the sources
The National Archives Discovery, MRC file FD 7/3336 (1984–1991), which supplies the licence application and the two VLA visits — and which is closed until 1 January 2067; affiliation analysis of 81 records in Europe PMC for the two addresses and the date range; the institution's own announcement for the 2024 merger. We put no founding date on this label because we do not have one.
IN·07c.1854Untraced
Heape's home laboratory, Northwood
Prestwich, Manchester
A laboratory in Walter Heape's own house. Not a university department, not an institute — a private laboratory in a private residence called Northwood, in the northern suburbs of Manchester, on land sold off from the Sedgley Hall estate after 1854.
What happened hereThe first mammalian embryo transfer, 27 April 1890. Two Angora rabbit embryos flushed from one doe and carried to term by a Belgian hare, alongside her own young — the experiment on which so much of this story depends.
The experiment is often placed in Cambridge, but the clues point to Prestwich: Heape's grant applications of 1890 were sent from Northwood, Prestwich; Who's Who for 1928 has him resident in Cambridge in 1879–86 and 1891–1906 but not in 1890; and Samuel Buckley, the surgeon who assisted, was a Manchester man unlikely to have travelled.
What it is nowNot yet marked. There is no plaque to Walter Heape anywhere in the Open Plaques database. A detailed local history site covering more than eighty Prestwich houses has no entry for Northwood — it appears once, as a bare name in a list, with no mention of the Heape family. There is no National Heritage List entry, and no council plaque. Whether the house still stands is not yet known. The birthplace of embryo transfer still waits for its plaque.
About the sources
Biggers (1991) for the location and its evidence, via The Animal Work. The absence of commemoration is a positive finding from four negative searches — Open Plaques by phrase and by area, prestwich.org.uk's place index, the National Heritage List, and local plaque schemes. Whether the building survives is genuinely unknown; answering it would need Bury Archives, the Manchester Local Image Collection or historic Ordnance Survey mapping, none of which we could reach.
IN·08EDWSOperating
The Churchill Archives Centre
Churchill College, Cambridge
The archive repository of Churchill College, and the single most important source for this history. Reference EDWS, the Papers of Sir Robert Edwards: 140 archive boxes, covering 1925–2014, deposited in eighteen separate accessions between 2010 and 2018, mostly by Edwards' family and by Bourn Hall Clinic — that is, out of a family home and a working clinic.
The Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, 2019.Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What happened hereThis is where the Oldham notebooks are. Johnson and Elder worked from twenty-one notebooks and 571 pages of loose sheets and scraps, running from 9 January 1969 to 1 August 1978. Almost everything we know about Jean Purdy's work comes out of those boxes. The collection also holds correspondence, drafts, photographs, film, the record of the political and religious reaction to IVF, and the scrapbooks of Barbara Rankin, Edwards' secretary from 1969 to 1987.
What it is nowOpen, with conditions, and the conditions matter. When Johnson and Elder worked on the material in 2015 it was not a public collection — about 115 boxes lodged temporarily for the family, of which they wrote that “part of the archive is likely to be embargoed for 100 years, containing as it does identifiable patient reproductive information,” and that “it is not yet clear that the material will ever be made available to scholars generally.” The collection formally opened for research in 2019, after cataloguing and conservation funded by the Wellcome Trust, at 140 boxes and “mostly open,” with some files closed for data protection. So the position has improved — but the patient-identifying Oldham material is precisely the part most likely to remain shut, and no researcher should assume the notebooks Johnson and Elder read are open on the same terms.
The Papers of Patrick Steptoe are held at the Churchill Archives Centre as a distinct collection, reference GBR/0014/STPT, covering 1946–1980 in 6.5 archive boxes: correspondence, scientific articles, photographs and slides. Part was given by Bourn Hall Clinic in 2022; the rest was moved out of EDWS 16, where Steptoe's papers had previously sat inside Edwards'. Catalogued by Madelin Evans in 2023 and mostly open, with some files closed for data protection.
About the sources
Churchill Archives Centre research guide and the Cambridge ArchiveSearch catalogue record; corroborated by Johnson & Elder, Oldham Notebooks I.
IN·091990Operating
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
2 Redman Place, London E20
The United Kingdom's statutory regulator of fertility treatment and human embryo research, established under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 and amended by the 2008 Act. Licensing and data collection began on 1 August 1991, which is the date that matters — “the HFEA was established in 1991” is half right, and “in 1990” is the other half.
What happened hereEverything since. It has collected data on every IVF and donor insemination treatment performed in the UK since 1 August 1991, which is why British IVF has a public statistical record that most countries do not.
What it is nowOperating, as an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care; an independent review in November 2023 concluded it should remain one. It keeps a public register of licensed clinics. Bourn Hall appears on it as centre 100 — the first IVF clinic in the world is now an entry in the register created by the Act that IVF made necessary.
About the sources
HFEA's own site and its Annual Report and Accounts 2023/24; gov.uk organisation page. The statutory dates are set out in detail in the Timeline.
Region II
North America
Four places. Two of them — a hospital in Brookline and a private institute in Shrewsbury — are where human and rabbit eggs were first fertilised outside the body on that continent. Neither exists as an institution now.
IN·101944Absorbed
The Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts
An independent research institute in reproductive endocrinology and steroid biochemistry, founded in 1944 by Gregory Pincus and Hudson Hoagland — and founded outside a university on purpose, because Harvard had denied Pincus tenure. It begins, in other words, as a workaround for an institution that would not have him.
What happened hereTwo things, both enormous. M. C. Chang was on the staff from 1945 to 1982: the capacitation work from 1951, and the definitive demonstration of rabbit IVF published in Nature on 8 August 1959, with the Worcester Foundation printed on it as his affiliation. And the oral contraceptive, developed here by Pincus, Hoagland and Chang on Katharine McCormick's money from 1953, in coordination with John Rock, and approved by the FDA in 1960. The same three men, in the same building, on opposite sides of the same physiology.
What it is nowAbsorbed. Renamed the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research, it fell into serious financial trouble and was merged into the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1997; Thoru Pederson was its last president. The Shrewsbury site survives as the UMass Chan Medical School's Shrewsbury campus at 222 Maple Avenue, and its five buildings are named Chang, Higgins, Hoagland-Pincus, Fuller and Rose Gordon — so the men are commemorated in the fabric. What is not commemorated is the work: the Boston Globe reported in 2010 that there is no marker anywhere on the site recording that the contraceptive pill was developed there.
About the sources
UMass Chan Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library, Office of Medical History and Archives finding aid to the Worcester Foundation papers 1944–1997, for the founding and the merger; the university's own campus listing for the buildings; Chang, Nature 184(4684): 466–467 (1959) read directly for the affiliation; Boston Globe, 23 May 2010, for the absent marker — which also gives the founding as 1943 with a move to Shrewsbury in 1947. We follow the institution's own archive and flag the conflict.
IN·111875Gone
The Free Hospital for Women
Brookline, Massachusetts
A charity hospital founded in 1875 by Dr William Henry Baker, in a converted dwelling house on East Springfield Street in Boston's South End, “for poor women affected with diseases peculiar to their sex or in need of surgical aid.” It moved in 1895 into a purpose-built Brookline building by Shaw and Hunnewell, in grounds laid out by the Olmsted office, and became Harvard's gynaecology teaching hospital and one of the leading centres of reproductive endocrinology in America.
What happened hereRock and Menkin's work, including the egg hunt and the 1944 report; Rock and Arthur Hertig's embryo studies; and Rock's part in the oral contraceptive. Brigham and Women's own list of milestones dates 1944 as the year “researchers successfully fertilize a human ovum in a test tube” here — without naming Rock or Menkin on that page.
What it is nowIt is a block of flats, and the institution was dissolved in four steps. On 2 May 1966 it merged with the Boston Lying-In Hospital to form the Boston Hospital for Women, the two sites continuing as the Lying-In and Parkway Divisions. In 1975 that merged with the two Brigham hospitals to form the Affiliated Hospitals Center, which was renamed Brigham and Women's Hospital in 1980 when the Francis Street building opened. The Brookline buildings survive: hospital use ended in 1978, and in 1984 Childs, Bertman and Tseckares converted them into a residential community called The Park, overlooking Olmsted's Riverway.
About the sources
Harvard Countway Library historical note to the Boston Hospital for Women records for the merger sequence and its exact dates; Mass General Brigham's milestones for the founding and the 1944 entry; American Medical Biographies (1920) for Baker; Society of Architectural Historians, SAH Archipedia MA-01-BR27, for the building, the 1978 closure and the 1984 conversion. Sources disagree on when the Brookline site actually shut — see §VI.
IN·121983Absorbed
The Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine
Norfolk, Virginia
The IVF programme at Eastern Virginia Medical School, and the place that produced the first IVF birth in the United States. Howard and Georgeanna Jones arrived at EVMS in July 1978 — the day after the announcement of Louise Brown's birth — the clinic opened in March 1980, and the Howard and Georgeanna Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine was established and named in 1983.
Robert Edwards with Howard and Georgeanna Jones at Howard Jones' birthday party, Johns Hopkins, November 2000.Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. The Papers of Robert Edwards, EDWS 18/4/55.First page of Robert Edwards' letter to Ruth Fowler Edwards from Johns Hopkins Medical School, 13 July 1965.Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. The Papers of Robert Edwards, EDWS 17/3.
What happened hereElizabeth Jordan Carr, born 28 December 1981 at 7.46 a.m., delivered by caesarean by Mason Andrews: the first American IVF birth.
The reason it happened in Norfolk rather than Baltimore is an institutional rule. Both Joneses were compelled out of Johns Hopkins in 1978 by a mandatory retirement age of 65 — the institution where, in 1951, Howard Jones had examined Henrietta Lacks and diagnosed the tumour whose biopsy went to George Gey's laboratory and became the HeLa line. A nine-year-old medical school with no such rule took them, and American IVF began there. The clinic also opened against organised opposition: sustained anti-abortion campaigning aimed at stopping it, a hostile Washington Post editorial, and a proposal in the Virginia legislature to limit IVF research, which was rejected.
What it is nowSplit in two and sold. On 5 May 2021 Shady Grove Fertility agreed to acquire the clinical practice from EVMS; patient care transferred on 1 July 2021 and the clinic on Colley Avenue now trades as SGF Jones Institute, a private practice inside the US Fertility network. The academic parent went too: on 1 July 2024 EVMS was integrated into Old Dominion University as Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences, and evms.edu now redirects to odu.edu. The fellowship established in 1981 continues.
About the sources
The Jones Foundation's own history for the 1983 establishment; PBS American Experience and Margaret Marsh (the Joneses' biographer) for the 1978 arrival, the retirement rule, the 1980 opening and the opposition; US Fertility newsroom and ODU's own fellowship page for the 2021 transfer; Virginia public media for the 1 July 2024 merger. The hospital of Elizabeth Carr's birth is given as Norfolk General only in local reporting, so we name the city and not the hospital.
IN·131943Operating
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
A United States federal laboratory, established in 1943 as Clinton Laboratories, part of the Manhattan Project, site of the X-10 Graphite Reactor. Today the Department of Energy's largest multi-programme science laboratory.
What happened herePeter Mazur and Stanley Leibo were staff biologists in the Biology Division, working on the fundamentals of cryopreservation, and they invited David Whittingham from Cambridge to their laboratory to repeat and extend his mouse embryo experiment. The result — Whittingham, Leibo and Mazur, Science 178: 411–414 (1972) — is the slow-cooling protocol that human embryo storage still rests on.
It is worth sitting with where that came from. The technique that made embryo banking possible was worked out inside a nuclear weapons laboratory, in a biology division that existed because the Atomic Energy Commission needed to know what radiation does to cells.
What it is nowOperating, under the same name, on unrelated work.
About the sources
US Department of Energy for the laboratory; Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University) for Mazur and Leibo's posts and the invitation; the 1972 Science citation confirmed against its DOI record, the article itself being behind a paywall.
Region III
Australia
Two hospitals in Melbourne, both founded by and for women in the nineteenth century, and both of which produced a world first within four years.
IN·141896Repurposed
The Queen Victoria Medical Centre
Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, Victoria
A hospital for women, staffed by women — one of only three in the world so constituted. Founded in 1896 as the Victoria Hospital for Women and Children by Dr Constance Stone and ten other women doctors, first in St David's Welsh Church on La Trobe Street; renamed for Queen Victoria in 1897; at Mint Place until 1946, then into the Swanston and Lonsdale Street buildings the Royal Melbourne had vacated. It became the Queen Victoria Medical Centre after a merger in 1963, and from 1965 was Monash University's teaching hospital in obstetrics and gynaecology.
The Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne, 1945.Victorian Railways, 1945. State Library Victoria. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
What happened hereCarl Wood's Monash programme. Zoe Leyland, born 28 March 1984 at the Queen Victoria Medical Centre, Melbourne — the first authenticated birth from a frozen embryo. Monash's own 1984 bulletin uses that word and explains it: earlier pregnancies had been reported from frozen-thawed embryos, but this was the first authenticated birth. Later summaries routinely place her at Monash. She was born here.
What it is nowThe hospital left, and the women of Victoria fought their own government for the building. In 1987 the hospital moved to Clayton, where it was amalgamated with Moorabbin Hospital to form the Monash Medical Centre; Prince Henry's Hospital was folded into it in 1991, and it is now part of Monash Health. It did not simply reopen under a new name — it was merged out of existence. The state government intended to demolish and sell the vacated Lonsdale Street site. A coalition of Victorian women's organisations campaigned from 1987 to 1992 and won: the Queen Victoria Women's Centre Trust Act 1994 preserved the last remaining heritage-listed 1910 tower and dedicated it to services for women. It operates today as the Queen Victoria Women's Centre; the rest of the block became the QV retail precinct. The building where the first frozen-embryo baby was born survives because women campaigned for five years to stop it being knocked down.
About the sources
Public Record Office Victoria, which holds the institution's records 1899–1987, for the founding and the name changes; eMelbourne (RMIT and University of Melbourne); the Queen Victoria Women's Centre's own history for the campaign and the 1994 Act. The date of the Southern Health to Monash Health renaming is disputed between sources and we do not give one.
IN·151856Operating
The Royal Women's Hospital
Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria
Victoria's principal women's hospital, founded in August 1856 as the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital and Infirmary for Diseases of Women and Children, at 41 Albert Street on Eastern Hill. Moved to Carlton in 1858; renamed simply the Women's Hospital in 1884; granted the “Royal” title by Queen Elizabeth II on 6 September 1954.
What happened hereCandice Reed, born 23 June 1980 at the Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne — Australia's first IVF birth, and the third on the internationally documented record. The team was Ian Johnston and Alex Lopata's, at the Royal Women's and the University of Melbourne. She was not a Monash baby; Monash's own timeline does not claim her.
She is frequently described as a Monash baby. She was not. And ‘the world's third’ needs its ladder: it is third on the internationally documented record, fourth once Durga is counted.
What it is nowOperating, on a new Parkville site since 2008, as Australia's largest specialist women's hospital — the only institution in this wing still doing the same work, under substantially the same name, that it was doing when its part of this history happened.
About the sources
The hospital's own history pages for every date above, and its own fortieth-anniversary news item for Candice Reed.
Region IV
India
Four entries, one of them a doctor's own makeshift laboratory. The second IVF birth in the world was achieved by three men from three different institutions, working on their own.
IN·161956Operating
Bankura Sammilani Medical College
Bankura, West Bengal
A medical college founded in 1956 by the Bankura Sammilani Trust, with roots in a medical school of 1922, and established explicitly as a nationalist project — in the college's own words, “as a part of [the] Swaraj movement against British rule.” The Government of West Bengal took it over in 1961 with an intake of twenty-five students.
What happened hereSubhas Mukherjee was Professor of Physiology here in 1978, when Durga was born. This was his posting. It was not his laboratory — see IN·19.
What it is nowOperating, as a West Bengal government medical college affiliated to the West Bengal University of Health Sciences, with 200 MBBS places.
One thing should be recorded. The college's own website does not mention Subhas Mukherjee. Neither does its encyclopedia entry. The institution that employed the man who did India's first IVF does not claim him.
About the sources
The college's own website for the founding, the trust, the 1961 takeover and the present affiliation; ICMR-NIRRCH's commemorative booklet on Mukherjee for his post. The absence of any mention of him is a direct observation of the site as it stands on the verification date.
IN·171970Operating
The Institute for Research in Reproduction
Parel, Mumbai
The Indian Council of Medical Research's national reproductive biology institute, next to KEM Hospital. Its lineage runs back further than its founding: a family planning unit in 1954, reorganised as the Contraceptive Testing Unit in 1956, then the Reproductive Physiology Unit, and established as an ICMR institute in 1970.
What happened hereIndia's first scientifically documented IVF birth. In collaboration with KEM Hospital, and under T. C. Anand Kumar, the team produced Harsha Chawda, born 6 August 1986, the laboratory work done here and the caesarean performed at KEM by Dr Indira Hinduja.
And then Anand Kumar did something institutions rarely do. He examined Subhas Mukherjee's handwritten notebooks, concluded that Durga, in 1978, had been India's first IVF baby, and the world's second, and published it in Current Science in 1997 — which is how ICMR came to recognise a man his own state government had destroyed. The director of the institute that held the official record gave the record away.
What it is nowOperating, and renamed twice in five years. In December 2021 it became the ICMR National Institute for Research in Reproductive and Child Health; ICMR's own institutes register now lists it as the National Institute for Research on Women's Health, while the institute's own website still carries the previous name. The change is evidently mid-transition and we could find no date for it.
About the sources
The institute's own history page and ICMR's institutes register for the lineage, the 1970 establishment and the current listing; ICMR-NIRRCH's commemorative booklet for Anand Kumar and Mukherjee. Anand Kumar's exact years as director we could not establish. Neither renaming date is firm — see §VI.
IN·181926Operating
King Edward Memorial Hospital
Parel, Mumbai
A large public hospital founded in 1926, funded and run by the municipal corporation of Bombay, with Seth GS Medical College attached.
What happened hereHarsha Chawda was born here on 6 August 1986, by caesarean performed by Dr Indira Hinduja, from embryos cultured at the ICMR institute next door.
What it is nowOperating, and very large — some 2,250 beds and around 1.8 million outpatients a year. In February 2026 it opened a new public-private IVF centre, framed explicitly as a return to the site of India's first documented test-tube baby forty years on.
About the sources
The hospital's own materials and Indian medical press. Reported, not independently audited: the bed and outpatient figures are the hospital's own.
IN·191978Untraced
Subhas Mukherjee's laboratory
Calcutta — address unrecorded
There was no institutional laboratory. ICMR's own commemorative booklet, written by Dr Srabani Mukherjee and published by its successor institute, states it without softening: he “carried out all these experiments at home without any laboratory facility and modern technological assistance.”
A glass vacuum flask with an alcohol bath, into which carbon dioxide snow was added at intervals to bring the temperature down at about half a degree a minute. Liquid-nitrogen storage dewars, whose purchase from the Indian Oxygen plant at Taratala is confirmed by a supplier's letter found in his papers in 2024. Flat-bottomed flasks for follicular fluid. And a 37°C incubator, which survives.
What happened hereDurga, born 3 October 1978 — seventy days after Louise Brown, and the second in the world if births recognised only in retrospect are counted. The clinical work, the transfer and the delivery took place at the Belle Vue Clinic, a private hospital on Dr U. N. Brahmachari Street.
Look at where the three men worked. Subhas Mukherjee, Professor of Physiology, Bankura Sammilani Medical College. Sunit Mukherjee, Professor of Food Technology and Biochemical Engineering, Jadavpur University, who did the freezing. Saroj Kanti Bhattacharya, Associate Professor of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, Calcutta Medical College. Three men from three unconnected institutions, none of which sponsored the work, using a private clinic for the theatre and a private home for the laboratory. The 1978 Indian IVF has no institutional address.
What the primary record actually saysOn the primary record — the team's signed report of 19 October 1978, reproduced verbatim in Current Science in 1997 — Mukherjee's team equilibrated cleaved human embryos in 1.5 M dimethyl sulphoxide, slow-froze them by hand in an alcohol bath in a glass dewar with carbon dioxide snow added at intervals, held them in liquid nitrogen for about fifty-three days, thawed them, and transferred three on 18, 19 and 20 January 1978. A child was born on 3 October 1978. The dates close: retrieval on 24 November 1977 plus fifty-three days is 18 January 1978.
What it is nowNot yet traced. The house where the work was done has not been identified. Belle Vue Clinic is still operating, under the M. P. Birla Group, and its public materials make no mention of the 1978 birth.
What exists instead is a scatter of memorials, all posthumous, most of them a long way from Calcutta: a memorial oration of the Indian Cryogenics Council from 1982; the Dr Subhas Mukherjee Memorial Reproductive Biology Research Centre at Behala, inaugurated on 19 June 1985, the fourth anniversary of his death, which holds the surviving incubator; a plaque at NRS Medical College, Kolkata, installed 19 June 2006; an ICMR award in his name from 2012; a statue at the district hospital in Hazaribagh, where he was born, in 2018.
The Behala centre was one man. Prof. Sunit Mukherjee — the cryobiologist who did the freezing in 1978 — kept his friend's papers there and ran it alone into his late eighties. When researchers reached him in 2018 they found the collection in dusty cupboards in a nondescript industrial estate, and Sunit Mukherjee near tears that the work would be lost with him. He gave them everything, and a five-hour recorded interview. He died on 4 January 2020. The papers went to ICMR-NIRRCH in Mumbai. We have found no evidence the centre operates in 2026 and do not claim that it does.
About the sources
ICMR-NIRRCH's commemorative booklet — an official publication of the successor to the institute that vindicated him — for the home laboratory, the team's affiliations and the memorials; Anand Kumar TC, Current Science 1997;72(7):526–531, which reproduces the team's signed report of 19 October 1978 verbatim, for the freezing protocol; Mukherjee & Mehta, Indian J Hist Sci 2024;59:113–121 for the archive and the supplier's letter; independent Indian press for Belle Vue. Two things this label got wrong when first published on 27 August 2026 and now corrects: the domestic refrigerator, which no source supports, and the interval from Louise Brown's birth, which is seventy days and not sixty-seven. The “2005 West Bengal plaque” in circulation appears to be the 2006 NRS memorial misdated. His own fate is set out in §IV and in Pioneers.
Region V
The Pacific
One institute, and the only one here named after the person who did the work.
IN·202000Operating
The Institute for Biogenesis Research
John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
A research centre in reproductive biology established in September 2000 with Ryuzo Yanagimachi as founding director — built around a man who had already produced the first mouse from intracytoplasmic sperm injection in 1995 and Cumulina, the first cloned mouse, in 1998, both at Hawai‘i.
What happened hereThe ICSI and cloning work that came out of Yanagimachi's laboratory, and the training of a generation of reproductive biologists in the Pacific.
What it is nowOperating, and renamed in his honour — it is now the Yanagimachi Institute for Biogenesis Research, with fourteen full-time faculty and more than $12m in grants. Yanagimachi died in 2023, and the university announced an oral history project in 2024 to preserve his account. It is the only place in this wing whose institution renamed itself after the person who did the work, rather than having to be argued into naming them at all.
About the sources
The institute's own site for the September 2000 founding and its present name and scale; University of Hawai‘i news for his death and the oral history project. The end date of his directorship, and the date of the renaming, are not stated anywhere we could find.
III
What became of them
Twenty-one rows for twenty entries — the Marshall Laboratory is listed separately from the building that contained it, because the building survives and the laboratory does not.
Every place in this wing, then and now
Place
Then
Now
Status
Dr Kershaw's Cottage Hospital
Cottage hospital, 1931; the IVF laboratory from 1971
Dr Kershaw's Hospice, since 1989, in the same buildings
Repurposed
Oldham and District General Hospital
Workhouse 1851, then the clinical base 1969–78
The Royal Oldham Hospital, rebuilt, Northern Care Alliance NHS FT
Operating
Bourn Hall
House of 1602; the world's first IVF clinic from 1980
Bourn Hall Clinic, same house, Canadian private-equity ownership
Operating
The Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge
Drapers' Company building, 1914
Standing; home of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience
Operating
The Marshall Laboratory, Cambridge
Seven rooms at the top of it, shared by three groups
No longer exists in any form; never a constituted unit
Gone
The National Institute for Medical Research
Britain's flagship medical research institute
Ridgeway Views — about 460 homes, Barratt London
Gone
MRC Experimental Embryology and Teratology Unit
Carshalton, then St George's; Whittingham
Gone; last papers 1997. Founding and closure dates unknown
Gone
Heape's home laboratory, Prestwich
The first mammalian embryo transfer, 27 April 1890
No plaque, no listing, no local record. Survival unknown
Untraced
The Churchill Archives Centre
—
Holds EDWS: 140 boxes, opened 2019, incl. the Oldham notebooks
Operating
The HFEA
Created by the 1990 Act; licensing from 1 August 1991
Operating; confirmed as an NDPB by review, November 2023
Operating
Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology
Independent institute, 1944; Chang and Pincus
UMass Chan Shrewsbury campus; buildings named for them
Absorbed
The Free Hospital for Women, Brookline
Charity hospital, 1875; Rock and Menkin
“The Park” — residential conversion, 1984
Gone
The Jones Institute, Norfolk
First US IVF birth, 28 December 1981
Clinic sold to Shady Grove, 2021; EVMS absorbed by ODU, 2024
Absorbed
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Clinton Laboratories, 1943; Mazur and Leibo
Operating, same name, unrelated work
Operating
The Queen Victoria Medical Centre
Founded by women doctors, 1896; Zoe Leyland, 1984
Hospital → Monash Health, Clayton. Site saved by campaign
Operating, Parkville, same work and substantially the same name
Operating
Bankura Sammilani Medical College
Mukherjee's post in 1978
Operating — and makes no mention of him
Operating
Institute for Research in Reproduction, Mumbai
ICMR institute, 1970; Anand Kumar
Operating; renamed twice since December 2021
Operating
King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai
Harsha Chawda born here, 6 August 1986
Operating; new IVF centre opened February 2026
Operating
Mukherjee's laboratory, Calcutta
His own home; the theatre was the Belle Vue Clinic
No address in the record. Belle Vue operating, uncommemorated
Untraced
Institute for Biogenesis Research, Hawai‘i
Founded under Yanagimachi, September 2000
The Yanagimachi Institute — renamed for him
Operating
IV
The setbacks
The road to IVF had its setbacks: a ban, refusals of money and of premises, a result that was not believed, and a name left off a wall. These are their stories, and the stories of the people who kept going.
The ban
Mill Hill forbids the work outright, c.1960–62
Sir Charles Harington, Director of the National Institute for Medical Research, learned what Edwards was pursuing and banned any work on human IVF at NIMR. Alan Parkes, who had brought Edwards in and might have shielded him, had gone to Cambridge in 1961; the Cambridge post Parkes offered had no funding until 1963. Edwards left in 1962 and spent a stopgap year in Glasgow.
Britain's principal medical research institute decided that human IVF would not be done on its premises, and it was not. The work went to a cottage hospital in Royton instead.
The refusal of money
The Medical Research Council refuses the grant, 1971
Confident after the 1969 Nature paper, Edwards and Steptoe applied for long-term support for “Studies on Human Reproduction.” They were refused on ethical grounds about two months later, and the refusal was held as policy throughout the 1970s.
The referees' reasoning is on the record. They classified the work as human experimentation rather than treatment. They weighted the risks heavily and saw few benefits. They ranked infertility low against population control. They wanted primate work first. And they were antagonised by the press coverage — one called it “distasteful” and said the work had “antagonised a large number of Dr Edwards' scientific colleagues.” They also found the Cambridge set-up itself inadequate for clinical work, which is its own indictment.
The consequence was seven years of a twelve-hour round trip from Cambridge to Oldham, driven by Edwards and Purdy, because the money to do it locally had been refused.
The refusal of money
The MRC leans on the hospitals that were helping
Johnson and Elder write that how official Oldham's support was “is unclear from documentary evidence, possibly because the MRC had put pressure on some hospitals to cease supporting the work” — adding, in the same sentence, “although we have no direct evidence that such pressure was applied to ODGH.”
But the general claim is sourced: the funding council did not merely decline to fund this work, it discouraged institutions that did. That makes Oldham's choice to carry on all the more remarkable.
The refusal of money
The United States bans its own funding by letting a committee lapse, 1980–93
In 1975 the Department of Health, Education and Welfare made federal funding of IVF-related research conditional on the approval of an Ethics Advisory Board. In 1979 that Board reported that IVF research was ethically acceptable and could be federally funded. The Board was then disbanded in 1980 without having approved a single application.
The regulation still required its approval. No such body existed. The effect was a de facto ban on federal funding for IVF research lasting thirteen years — achieved not by a decision to prohibit, but by allowing a committee to cease to exist. It ended when the requirement was lifted in 1993, and was re-imposed in another form by the congressional funding ban of 1995.
This is why the Jones Institute was privately funded, and a large part of why American IVF developed as a commercial enterprise rather than an academic one.
The refusal of premises
Cambridge passes Edwards over, 1966–67
Edwards applied for Parkes' chair on 6 January 1966. He was unsuccessful. It went to Thaddeus Mann, who then chose not to move into the Physiology building at all. The headship of the Marshall laboratory did not go to him either; the University appointed Colin Austin.
He got neither the chair nor the rooms, and did the work in the rooms anyway.
The refusal of premises
Cambridge offers the founders of IVF a shed, 1979
After Louise Brown, the offer from Cambridge for a clinical IVF service was an ancient operating theatre on the third floor of Old Addenbrooke's Hospital, and a shed on the ground floor for the laboratory. It was unusable. They went private.
The first IVF clinic in the world is a Jacobean manor house in a Cambridgeshire village because the National Health Service would not provide a workable room. The NHS position was that IVF was “still science” with “more phases of research needed” — eighteen months after a baby had been born.
The refusal of premises
The Daily Mail's owner buys Bourn Hall, then walks away, April 1979
Associated Newspapers bought the hall and funded the conversion, then withdrew — too risky, and too likely to be attacked by rival newspapers — and prepared to sell. The project stalled until Alan Dexter refinanced it through ICFC and Steptoe and Edwards bought the property themselves.
A commercial institution, not a public one; the same pattern. A year after Louise Brown was born, the withdrawal of an institution nearly ended it.
The refusal of premises
Johns Hopkins retires the two people best placed to do it, 1978
Not hostility. A rule. Howard and Georgeanna Jones were compelled out of Johns Hopkins by a mandatory retirement age of 65, ending decades at the institution where Howard Jones had diagnosed Henrietta Lacks's tumour. Eastern Virginia Medical School, nine years old and with no such rule, took them both.
American IVF happened at a new medical school in Norfolk because a great university had a fixed retirement age.
The refusal of belief
West Bengal declares Subhas Mukherjee's work “bogus,” 1978–81
The saddest chapter in this story.
An expert committee convened by the West Bengal government met on 17 November 1978 at the Institute of Radio Physics and Electronics, Calcutta. It was chaired by a radio astronomer. Its members were a nuclear physicist, a gynaecologist and a neurophysiologist. Not one had any experience of in vitro fertilisation. It pronounced his work bogus.
He was then barred from travelling abroad to present it. He was transferred to R. G. Kar Medical College in 1980 and then to the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology as Professor of Electrophysiology — a physiologist who had achieved the second IVF birth in the world, reassigned to the eye hospital. He died by suicide on 19 June 1981.
Vindication came in 1997, when T. C. Anand Kumar went through his notebooks and published the conclusion that Durga had been first. Sixteen years too late, from a different institution, in a different city.
The refusal of belief
Massachusetts exports its own first IVF baby, 1981
Elizabeth Carr's parents lived in Massachusetts. The state's post-Roe fetal research statute left IVF in uncertain legal standing, and legislators had proposed a near-total ban on fetal research before settling on something narrower. The Carrs travelled to Norfolk, Virginia.
The law was not clarified until roughly eighteen months after she was born, when the Suffolk County District Attorney gave an opinion that physicians performing IVF would not be prosecuted. Massachusetts went on, in 1987, to pass the most expansive IVF insurance mandate in the country.
The state where a human egg was first fertilised outside the body, in 1944, was the state where in 1981 you could not safely be conceived that way.
The refusal of belief
Organised opposition to the Norfolk clinic, 1979–80
The Jones programme faced sustained anti-abortion campaigning aimed at preventing it opening, and a hostile Washington Post editorial. A proposal in the Virginia legislature to limit IVF research was rejected, and the clinic opened in spring 1980.
The wrecking ball
The Victorian Government moves to demolish the Queen Victoria site, 1987–92
When the hospital left Lonsdale Street for Clayton in 1987, the state government intended to sell and demolish the site. A coalition of Victorian women's organisations campaigned for five years and forced its preservation, secured by the Queen Victoria Women's Centre Trust Act 1994.
This one has a happy ending. The building where the world's first frozen-embryo baby was born stands because women fought their own government for it, and won.
The refusal of credit
Jean Purdy's name, and the long wait for her plaque
Robert Edwards to the Hospital Secretary, 7 July 1980, asking for two plaques that would name Jean Purdy among others.Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. The Papers of Robert Edwards, EDWS 1/1/1/52.
Beginning in July 1980, in an increasingly ill-tempered correspondence with the sector administrator D. Killion, Edwards asked for two plaques, one at each site, naming Jean Purdy at both, with Muriel Harris and James Holmes at Kershaw's and John Webster and the theatre and midwifery staff at Oldham General. He was told only one plaque was possible. In January 1981 he wrote:
“I feel strongly about the inclusion of the names of the people who helped with the conception of Louise Brown. I feel this especially about Jean Purdy, who travelled to Oldham with me for 10 years, and contributed as much as I did to the project. Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself… I feel this must be my last letter on this subject.”
He lost. The plaque names Steptoe and Edwards and calls the rest “their supporting staff.” He complained again in 1992, to the chair of the Oldham NHS Trust, about the plaque at Oldham General: “I thoroughly disapprove of the plaque and strongly believe it should be altered.” It also omitted her. So did the plaque unveiled at Bourn Hall in July 2013 — so the omission was never only the NHS's.
It took until 13 March 2015 for the Society of Biology to put her name on the wall at Kershaw's, and until 9 March 2022 for the NHS and Oldham Council to name her and Muriel Harris at the Royal Oldham. Thirty-four and forty-two years after Edwards first asked. Both were posthumous by decades.
The refusal of credit
Places that have yet to remember
Some places have still to tell their own part of the story.
The Worcester Foundation site carries no marker recording that the contraceptive pill was developed there — though five buildings are named after the men who developed it.
Bankura Sammilani Medical College does not mention Subhas Mukherjee anywhere on its website.
The Belle Vue Clinic does not mention the 1978 birth.
Set against that: ICMR published a commemorative booklet and named an award for him; the Hawai‘i institute renamed itself after Yanagimachi. Both came long after the fact, and in India's case because one scientist went through a colleague's notebooks.
The hospital that said yes: Oldham and District General
One hospital stood by the work when others would not.
Oldham General was, after the Ford Foundation, the largest identified funder of the programme. Its management committee absorbed costs the MRC had refused. Its clinical staff worked unpaid and out of hours on top of full duties. Its theatre superintendent equipped a second hospital's operating room on £250 and scrounged the rest. It did this while the national funding council was refusing the work on ethical grounds and, on the record, discouraging hospitals from supporting it. Edwards and Steptoe thanked the hospital in seventeen of twenty-three papers.
Johnson and Elder's verdict: “It is clear that without this local support the work would have ceased.”
The institution that made IVF possible was a district general hospital in Lancashire built out of a workhouse, acting against the advice of the national research establishment.
V
Where the papers are
The story survives because people kept the papers.
Almost everything we know about Jean Purdy's work survives because a family and a clinic gave 140 boxes of papers to a Cambridge college, and the Wellcome Trust paid for them to be catalogued. Subhas Mukherjee's papers have no such home yet, and much of his story is still waiting to be read.
Where the papers are kept
Collection
Where
What it holds
Access
The Papers of Patrick Steptoe (STPT)
Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
6.5 boxes, 1946–1980: correspondence, scientific articles, photographs and slides. Part given by Bourn Hall Clinic in 2022; the rest moved out of EDWS 16, where Steptoe's papers had sat inside Edwards'.
Catalogued 2023; mostly open, some files closed for data protection.
Bourn Hall Clinic: archives (SA/BOU)
Wellcome Collection, London
10 boxes and one oversize folder, c.1960s–2010s, donated by the clinic in March 2022. Wellcome notes gaps where records did not survive, including during Serono's ownership.
Uncatalogued. Wellcome states it cannot facilitate access to uncatalogued material until 2027.
The Papers of Lesley Brown
Bristol Archives
The papers of the first woman to conceive by IVF, noted by Wellcome as related material to SA/BOU.
Not established.
The Papers of Sir Robert Edwards (EDWS)
Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
140 boxes, 1925–2014, in 18 accessions from the family and Bourn Hall. Includes the 21 Oldham notebooks and 571 loose pages, 1969–78, and Barbara Rankin's scrapbooks.
Opened 2019, mostly open; some files closed for data protection. Publication requires the copyright holders' permission.
Gregory Pincus Papers
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
44,100 items, 212 containers, 86 linear feet, 1920–2006. Worcester Foundation material, and the files on the oral contraceptive trials in Puerto Rico and Haiti, including the women who took part and the side effects they reported.
Open; finding aid published.
Min Chueh Chang Papers
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
12,600 items, 36 containers, 14.4 linear feet, 1933–2010. Correspondence, research files, and the working files of his authorised biographer.
Open; finding aid published.
Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research Papers
Lamar Soutter Library, UMass Chan
The institutional records, 1944–1997, to the merger.
Open; finding aid published.
Boston Hospital for Women records
Countway Library, Harvard
The Free Hospital for Women and its successors, including the Rock and Menkin material; predecessor hospitals' annual reports 1875–1979 digitised.
Public archive; transferred and made available 2022.
Dr Kershaw's Cottage Hospital records
Oldham Local Studies and Archives
Board of management minutes from 13 August 1930 (B-UDR 8/1; D-DRK; HBO/13/6).
Public archive.
MRC file FD 7/3336
The National Archives, Kew
“In-vitro fertilisation centres”: the Embryology and Teratology Unit's licence application and the VLA visits of 1985 and 1990.
Closed until 1 January 2067.
The papers of Subhas Mukherjee
ICMR-NIRRCH, Mumbai — not a public archive
Rescued 2019–22 by a project of the Indian National Commission for History of Science, months before their sole custodian died. Scanned and sorted into fifteen categories: handwritten scientific notes and diaries, unpublished papers, patients' letters, conference invitations, his correspondence with the investigation committee, and his widow's correspondence with the Chief Minister after his death.
No catalogue, finding aid, accession numbering or access policy has been published, and no repository is formally named. A researcher must approach ICMR-NIRRCH directly.
VI
Sources and notes
The sources behind every place in this wing.
Read the notes on sources
A date this wing corrects — and a correction to our own earlier pages
The Society of Biology blue plaque at Dr Kershaw's, the first to name Jean Purdy, is widely dated 19 March 2015. That date appears in a figure caption in Johnson and Elder's otherwise excellent 2015 paper, and this museum repeated it.
It is wrong. Three independent sources give 13 March 2015: a contemporaneous news report published on the day of the unveiling; the Open Plaques record; and, decisively, an eyewitness account in Human Fertility by Andrew Steptoe — Patrick Steptoe's son, who was present and gave the speech. The 19 March date may be contamination from Jean Purdy's Times obituary, which appeared on Tuesday 19 March 1985 and is cited in the same paper's reference list. We have corrected Pioneers and the Timeline.
Corrections to this wing, made after external review
This wing was published on 27 August 2026 and reviewed the following day. Five things in it were wrong, and they are worth listing rather than quietly fixing, because four of the five were errors of the same kind: a detail arriving from research and not being checked against what this museum had already established elsewhere.
There is a Steptoe collection. We wrote that there was not. Reference GBR/0014/STPT, 6.5 boxes, formed by a 2022 deposit and catalogued in 2023 — described on the very research guide we cited. It was true before 2022, which is how it got in, and is no excuse.
There was no domestic refrigerator. We said Mukherjee froze the embryo using one. The detail appears in no source we can find. The documented apparatus is a glass vacuum flask, alcohol, dry ice and liquid-nitrogen dewars.
Howard Jones did not culture Henrietta Lacks's cells. He examined her and diagnosed the tumour; the biopsy went to George Gey's laboratory.
Carshalton was not the home of the embryo-freezing work. The 1971 freezing was done in the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge and the 1972 demonstration at Oak Ridge; Whittingham moved to Carshalton around 1982.
The Queen Victoria did not simply reopen under a new name. It was amalgamated with Moorabbin Hospital to form the Monash Medical Centre.
And two internal contradictions: we called Durga's birth “sixty-seven days” after Louise Brown while the Founding Papers correctly said seventy, and we printed bare ordinals for Durga and Candice Reed that belong to two different counting conventions. Both now come from a single claim registry that every wing builds from, which is the structural fix for a structural problem.
Dates we do not have
The MRC Experimental Embryology and Teratology Unit has no founding date on its label, because we could not find one. Nor a closure date, nor a mechanism of closure. The one relevant file at Kew is sealed until 2067.
The Charles Darwin Professorship. Cambridge's own documents give Austin's tenure as 1966–81; Johnson gives 1967–81. We say “first held from 1966–67” and do not say the chair was created for him — it is endowed from the Dr E. J. Bles fund, and no source says it was established in order to appoint him.
The Mary Marshall and Arthur Walton Professorship of Reproductive Physiology. Whether it still exists, and who has held it since Thaddeus Mann, we could not establish.
When the Free Hospital's Brookline site actually closed. One authority says 1978, another says the 1960s, and Harvard's own historical note declines to give a date. Only the 1984 conversion is firm.
Both recent renamings of the Mumbai institute, and T. C. Anand Kumar's years as its director.
The end of Yanagimachi's directorship, and the date his institute was renamed for him.
Bourn Hall's opening day. The year is certain; 28 September 1980 rests on a single source.
The Southern Health to Monash Health renaming, on which sources differ by a decade.
Things we could not confirm at all
Whether Heape's house still stands. Four searches returned nothing: Open Plaques by phrase and by area, a local history index covering more than eighty Prestwich houses, the National Heritage List, and council plaque schemes. The absence of commemoration is a finding we will stand behind. The survival of the building is not; answering it needs Bury Archives or historic Ordnance Survey mapping.
Where Subhas Mukherjee's home laboratory was. ICMR states the work was done at home. No source gives the address. For a wing about places this is the finding, and we have not filled it in.
Whether the Behala memorial centre is still operating. Its inauguration on 19 June 1985 is well sourced; its present existence is not.
Bourn Hall's present beneficial ownership. Companies House persons-with-significant-control data could not be read, so the ownership described on the label rests on the company's own announcement and trade press.
The inscriptions of two plaques — the 2022 Purdy and Harris plaque at the Royal Oldham, and the 2013 plaque at Bourn Hall beyond the fact that it names Steptoe and Edwards and omits Purdy.
The hospital of Elizabeth Carr's birth. Norfolk General appears only in local reporting, so we name the city.
Where a source has to be named because the claim rests on it
The Harington ban is Edwards' own account. Johnson's 2011 paper is peer-reviewed and written by the historian who worked the archive, but its citation is Edwards and Steptoe's memoir. We found no MRC minute or NIMR record confirming it independently. It is the anchor of this wing and it has one ultimate source, and both of those things are true at once. Harington's Royal Society biographical memoir is the obvious next check, and we have not made it.
“The Marshall Laboratory was named for F. H. A. Marshall” is an inference, not a verified fact. It is highly probable and no source we found states it.
Open Plaques mis-sites the older Oldham inscription, attributing the “performed at this hospital…” wording to the Royal Oldham. Johnson and Elder's figures place that wording at Kershaw's, with a separate later plaque at Oldham General, and the 1980–81 correspondence concerns the Kershaw's one. We follow the paper.
The Worcester Foundation's founding year is 1944 on the institution's own archive and 1943 in the Boston Globe. We follow the archive.
NIMR's arrival at Mill Hill is 1950 per the Crick and 1949 per Barnet Council. Both are official; we print 1949–50.
Not attempted
Two places surfaced in the sources and are not in this wing: the ARC Unit of Reproductive Physiology and Biochemistry on Huntingdon Road, Cambridge — Thaddeus Mann's base, and arguably part of this story — and Oldham Local Studies and Archives as a repository in its own right, which holds substantial Kershaw's material. We name them here rather than pad the wing with entries we have not done the work on.
Search our store
Back to top
Spend $250 to get free shippingSpend $250 more to get free shippingCongratulations! You get free shipping.
