At that time, we doctors could help only around half of the couples that came to us with fertility problems. We mainly used surgical or endocrinological methods. I first met Bob Edwards in 1964 when he came to Johns Hopkins, where I was an assistant professor, and he asked for some human eggs because in the United Kingdom they were havingtrouble gettingthem. Five years earlier, Min-Chueh Chang had shown that IVF was possible in rabbits. But human sperm had to be 'capacitated' before it could be used to fertilize the egg, and this seemed to occur in the female genital tract. Bob's idea was to capacitate the sperm. My job was to give Bob parts of the female genital tract such as cervical mucus and bits of uterus lining to see what worked. In retrospect I think in vitro fertilization did actually occur at Hopkins in 1965.
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