Professor Robert Edwards awarded Nobel Prize

Professor Robert Edwards, Pensioner Fellow at Churchill College and Emeritus Professor of Human Reproduction at the University, was today awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Edwards, born in 1925, was educated at the University of Bangor and the University of Edinburgh. In 1963, he joined the University of Cambridge as the Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology, and a member of Churchill College. Edwards began work on fertilisation in 1955, and began his partnership with Dr Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist surgeon, in 1968. Although the first successful human test-tube fertilisation took place by 1970, research did not result in a successful pregnancy for ten years. During this time, Edwards supervised students at Churchill College. By the late 1970s, funding for Steptoe and Edwards' project was running out, and their work met with scepticism, resistance and set-backs.