The first IVF baby was born in 1978, and doctors braced for backlash

Louise Brown was the first human born after in vitro fertilisation, conceived in a lab dish by physiologist Robert Edwards and surgeon Patrick Steptoe after a decade of failed attempts. Critics predicted disaster, but she was born healthy and later had her own children conceived naturally. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010 for the breakthrough.

— P. C. Steptoe and R. G. Edwards, Birth after the reimplantation of a human embryo — The Lancet, 1978