Kate Hardy
The Modern Laboratory · People
The Modern Laboratory
Kate Hardy
She counted, cell by cell, the first human blastocysts grown in a dish, and saw how they divide their work.
A careful counter. Kate Hardy studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge. She then joined the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital in London, where she completed her PhD in 1991. Much of the work in this room was done while she was still a doctoral student.
In 1989, with Alan Handyside and Robert Winston, she followed 181 spare human embryos from day two to as late as day seven. The team stained the nuclei of the outer wall and of the inner cell mass in two different colours, so that each group could be counted. Of the normally fertilised embryos, 42 percent reached the blastocyst stage on day five or six. A newly expanded blastocyst on day five held around 58 cells. They also found that some cells died naturally in both groups as the blastocyst grew.
The same year, with Henry Leese and colleagues, she measured how much glucose and pyruvate single human embryos took up from tiny drops of medium, without harming them. Embryos that went on to become blastocysts took up more pyruvate than those that stopped dividing. In 1990 she was one of the four authors of the Nature paper that reported the first pregnancies after genetic testing of embryos.
On to the ovary. Her later research turned to the ovary, and to the signals that wake resting follicles and start them growing. She became a lecturer in 1994, a reader in 2001 and Professor of Reproductive Biology at Imperial College London in 2009. She has served as an associate editor of Human Reproduction Update, and in 2008 she received the Rector's Award for Excellence in Teaching. A picture she made of a human blastocyst is held by the Wellcome Collection, a small reminder of where her story began.
Also see: Alan Handyside, Robert Winston, Henry Leese
About the sources
- Imperial College London. Professor Kate Hardy, Professor of Reproductive Biology: staff profile (education, career history, awards). imperial.ac.uk/people/k.hardy, checked 7 October 2026.
- Shaikly V. The origins of preimplantation genetic testing. Progress Educational Trust, 22 December 2025 (blastocyst image credited to K Hardy via the Wellcome Collection).
- Handyside AH, Kontogianni EH, Hardy K, Winston RM. Pregnancies from biopsied human preimplantation embryos sexed by Y-specific DNA amplification. Nature 1990;344(6268):768–770. PubMed 2330030.
- Hardy K, Handyside AH, Winston RM. The human blastocyst: cell number, death and allocation during late preimplantation development in vitro. Development 1989;107(3):597–604. PubMed 2612378.
- Hardy K, Hooper MA, Handyside AH, Rutherford AJ, Winston RM, Leese HJ. Non-invasive measurement of glucose and pyruvate uptake by individual human oocytes and preimplantation embryos. Human Reproduction 1989;4(2):188–191. PubMed 2918073.
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
