The birth of the first test-tube baby was a very important achievement for the life sciences. However, the term "test-tube baby" is a misnomer. The concept of "test-tube baby" is quite clear. This title can legitimately be applied only to such a baby who was fully manufactured inside laboratory instruments, starting with raw elements like Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen. It will have to be entirely a laboratory synthesis, without any contribution from an already existing human cell. But what happened with Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was entirely different. In her case a human egg was fertilized in laboratory glassware but then all the growth took place inside the mother. It was only a test-tube fertilization, NOT the artificial synthesis of a human being.

There was nothing new in the test-tube fertilization itself, except that it was successfully done in man for the first time. Even when it comes to man, the work on Louise Brown was not entirely the first attempt. In 1961, that is some 16 years before Louise Brown, an Italian doctor had filmed some of his work with human eggs. But the world at that time was not ready to receive this work; the response was either of indifference or of hostility from the scientific and the religious world. A few others also worked along the same lines, but they received little publicity.

In the late seventies, however, the world at large was prepared to hear of such a news, and at this right moment Doctors Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards announced the birth of Louise Brown. It was the quaint mood of the people and the ever-hungry news-media which gave so much importance and publicity to the event, much of which was exaggerated.

Research that led to the birth of Louise Brown had begun as early as the last century. The first recorded successful egg transfer experiment was done by Walter Heape. Heape was a Cambridge University scientist, who reared an animal in the uterus of a foster mother in 1890. He obtained two ova from an Angora rabbit doe which had been fertilized by an Angora buck some 32 hours earlier. Then these ova were implanted into the upper end of the fallopian tube of a Belgian doe. This Belgian doe had been fertilized by a Belgian Buck some three hours before. In due course, the Belgian doe gave birth to six young : four of them had Belgian resemblance and two had Angora look. However, the importance of such ova transfer for research and breeding was realized only around 1930. In that year not only were ova implanted into animals from outside, but they were also fertilized in vitro. This process was then used for next 50 years to bread superior animals. Then came the announcement about Louise, a human.

What Doctors Steptoe and Edwards had done was like this; a mature egg was taken out, with a suction needle, from Mrs. Leslie Brown's ovary. The egg was then transferred to a culture dish containing blood-serum and nutrients. Mr. Gilbert Brown's sperms had also been added into the dish. After the egg was fertilized by a sperm within this solution, outside the womb, the Zygote (the fertilized ovum) was transferred to another dish containing life sustaining nutrients. Cell division took place and it was allowed up to the 8-cell stage. This took about two and a half days.

Meanwhile, Mrs. brown was treated with hormones to condition her uterine lining to accept the fertilized and growing egg. It was then implanted at the right position in her uterus. The result was Louise Brown. All this success was not achieved overnight. It is reported that Steptoe and colleagues failed some eighty times over a period of 10 years before achieved success with Mrs. Brown.

The whole procedure described above was very much akin to surgical operations and transplantation. All what was new was the fertilization of the human egg outside of a woman. Clearly this is neither creation nor the synthesis of life.

The building-blocks for this experiment were taken from human beings, not synthesized. These sperms and eggs already contained all the genetic information necessary for their eventual growth into Louise. Hence the idea that they have "created" or "synthesized" human life in a test-tube is a myth. Actually the blown up headlines and the euphoria in the world press resulted at least partially from a misunderstanding that Louise was fertilized and grown completely in laboratory, a process which could be ultimate in reproductive engineering. But the myth-loving mankind is ready to believe anything that it fancies.

It is very clear that man has not been able to synthesize life. "Test-Tube Baby" is the mythical name given to babies born by a recently perfected surgical technique. Though it has raised many ethical problems, the experiment in itself does not in any way contradict Genesis one and two.

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Original article contributed by Dr. Johnson C. Philip. Revised by:

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