The Founding Papers · FP·02 · 1970
1970: Steptoe's telescope finds the ripe egg
A surgeon in Oldham showed that he could reach inside the body through a tiny cut and collect an egg at the very moment it was ready.
The story
Edwards had fertilised eggs that he had ripened in a dish. Now the team wanted eggs that had ripened naturally, inside the body. The problem was reaching them at the right moment.
Patrick Steptoe had the answer: the laparoscope, a slim telescope that let a surgeon see the ovary through a small incision. In this paper the two men describe collecting eggs just before they would have been released, after the ovaries had been stimulated with hormones.
It was the moment the partnership became complete: the scientist's laboratory and the surgeon's hands. Later the team would turn to natural cycles instead, as the 1980 paper records.
The paper
Laparoscopic Recovery of Preovulatory Human Oocytes after Priming of Ovaries with Gonadotrophins
Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards
The Lancet 1970;1(7649):683 to 689. Published 4 April 1970. Read the paper.
How we know
Citation from PubMed and Crossref, read 6 October 2026. No abstract is indexed and the journal could not be opened, so this label rests on the title.
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