The IVF Museum · Pioneers · Walter Heape

Walter Heape was born in London in 1855, the son of a Manchester merchant. He left formal education at eighteen and spent some years in the family business before going to Cambridge in 1879, where he joined the young school of embryology gathered around Francis Maitland Balfour. In 1882 he became a demonstrator in animal morphology, and from 1885 he served as the Marine Biological Association's first resident superintendent at Plymouth, while its new laboratory was being built.

His lasting place in the history of reproduction rests on one short paper. On 27 April 1890 two fertilised eggs, already at the four-cell stage, were taken from an Angora doe rabbit and placed in the oviduct of a Belgian hare doe that had been mated three hours earlier. Heape was assisted in the operation by the Manchester surgeon Samuel Buckley. On 29 May the Belgian hare gave birth to six young: four Belgian hares, and two unmistakable Angoras with long silky white coats. It was the first recorded transfer of a mammalian embryo, the step on which every IVF treatment still depends.

The historian John Biggers has shown that the experiment was almost certainly done not at Cambridge but at Heape's family home, Northwood, in Prestwich near Manchester, where he kept a private laboratory. Heape was not thinking of medicine. His question was about heredity: could a foster-mother change the inheritance of the young she carried? He concluded that she could not, and that the mother's womb was, in his words, like a bed of soil. In 1897 he reported a repeat with Dutch rabbits that gave a similar, though less clear-cut, result.

He went on to study ovulation and menstruation in monkeys, and in 1900 published The "sexual season" of mammals, which gave biology the words still used today for the stages of the oestrous cycle: pro-oestrus, oestrus, metoestrus, dioestrus and anoestrus. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1906, argued in The Breeding Industry for public support of the science of breeding, and retired from Cambridge in 1907.

a uterine foster-mother has no power of modifying the breed of her foster-childrenWalter Heape, Proceedings of the Royal Society 1897

Life and work

• Owens College, Manchester; Cambridge from 1879, in F. M. Balfour's school of embryology
• Demonstrator in Animal Morphology, Cambridge, 1882
• First Resident Superintendent, Marine Biological Association, Plymouth, from 1885
• Balfour Student, Cambridge, from October 1890
• Fellow of the Royal Society, 1906; retired 1907

Key papers

1. Heape W. Preliminary note on the transplantation and growth of mammalian ova within a uterine foster-mother. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 1890;48:457 to 458. ReadThe first recorded mammalian embryo transfer.
2. Heape W. Further note on the transplantation and growth of mammalian ova within a uterine foster-mother. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 1897;62:178 to 183. Read
3. Heape W. The menstruation and ovulation of Macacus rhesus, with observations on the changes undergone by the discharged follicle. Part II. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 1897;188:135 to 166. Read
4. Heape W. The "sexual season" of mammals and the relation of the "pro-oestrum" to menstruation. Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 1900;44:1 to 70. ReadThe words for the oestrous cycle that biology still uses.
5. Heape W. The Breeding Industry: Its Value to the Country, and Its Needs. Cambridge University Press, 1906. Read the book

See also Samuel Buckley, The Animal Work and the Pioneers wing.

The IVF Museum · Pioneers · Walter Heape
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