Robert Edwards (羅博特 愛得華 born 27 September 1925,
Manchester)在再生醫學的貢獻以及對人類倫理宗教傳統理念的挑戰,可與達爾文的物種起源的發表有一比。今年諾貝爾委員會做出了大家期待以久的頒獎。Edwards 當之無愧。Edwards 人品高尚,堪稱英國紳士科學家的典範。他在2001年已獲Lasker Award臨床醫學研究獎。我最喜歡和推崇 Lasker Jury Chair Joe Goldstein 對 Edwards 的評述-句句說在點兒上,轉貼如下 。英國千喜年之季,發行了四枚郵票紀念四位對臨床醫學做出史詩性貢獻的英國人:發明牛痘的真納 (1796); 現代護理學先驅南丁戈爾
(1890); 發明青霉素的費來明爵士 (1928); 發明試管嬰兒的愛得華 (1978). (很遺憾,近代外科學消毒術的發明人 李斯特爵士未列其中)
Albert Lasker
Clinical Medical Research Award
Award Presentation by Joseph Goldstein
The publication of The Origin of Species in 1858 and the birth of
the first test-tube baby in 1978 are defining events in the history of
human society. These events are defining because they forced us to
confront some of the most fundamental ideas about being human. The
instigators of these revolutionary events, Charles Darwin and Robert
Edwards, share several attributes. Both owe their intellectual origins
to Cambridge University in England. Darwin, the father of evolution
theory, was a student at Cambridge where he was introduced to biology,
geology, and natural history. Edwards, the father of in vitro
fertilization, was a professor of physiology at Cambridge from
1963–1989. At Cambridge, he performed the experiments with human eggs
that we honor today. His experiments were truly seminal—literally as
well as figuratively.
As one might expect, when we challenge our conception of humanity, we arouse controversy. Indeed, The Origin of Species
and the first test-tube baby ignited two of the most violent
controversies in the history of biology and medicine. If the human
species evolved by natural selection instead of by Divine creation, then
the Bible cannot be literally true. If human beings can be conceived in
test tubes by scientists, then the act of conception has lost much of
its mystery. As instigators of revolutionary science, Darwin and Edwards
were subjected to vitriolic personal criticisms. But both of them,
befitting their British gentlemanliness, conducted themselves with
dignity and forthrightness, much to the admiration of their scientific
comrades.
Most of you are familiar with Darwin's story, but many of you may not be
so familiar with the Edwards's story. Who is Robert Edwards and what
led him to develop in vitro fertilization, known to the world as IVF?
Edwards was born in a small Yorkshire town, grew up in Manchester,
served four years in the British army during World War II, and then
entered universities in Wales and Edinburgh, where he took courses in
agriculture and zoology and became fascinated with reproduction and
embryology. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1957 from the Institute of Animal
Genetics in Edinburgh. Here, he worked out a method for treating female
mice with hormones so that scientists could precisely control the time
of ovulation and the number of eggs produced. This classic study was
done in collaboration with his future wife, Ruth Fowler. The
Fowler-Edwards method for controlled superovulation made the mouse the
animal of choice for studying early events in reproduction. Edwards no
longer had to come into the lab in the middle of the night to harvest
immature eggs. He could now decide exactly the time the eggs would be
produced. His next goal, like that of many reproductive biologists in
the 1950s, was to learn how to mix eggs with sperm so that fertilization
would occur in vitro outside the womb of the mother.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, scientists in the U.S. were furiously
trying to fertilize human eggs in the test tube. Although several
claimed reproductive success, their results could not be reproduced. The
first major breakthrough came not with human eggs, but with rabbit
eggs. In the early 1960s, Min Chang, a scientist at the Worcester
Foundation in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, took eggs from a black rabbit,
fertilized them with sperm from a black rabbit, transferred the embryo
to the uterus of a white rabbit, and produced a litter of black pups.
This was the first unequivocal demonstration of in vitro fertilization.
Spurred by Chang's success in the rabbit, Edwards began to fertilize the
eggs of many different species of mammals, and in 1965 he first
attempted the fertilization of human eggs. In developing IVF for humans,
Edwards had to overcome formidable technical problems—problems that
were orders of magnitude more difficult in humans than in animals
confined to a cage. Edwards's story is one of courage—technical and
moral. He had to learn how to induce ovulation in women, how to harvest
their eggs from the ovary at the perfect moment, how to incubate them in
a test tube with sperm so that normal fertilization would occur, and
how to implant the embryos into the mother's uterus so that a normal
baby would be born. All of this had to be carried out without doing harm
to the woman or her baby. The most technically demanding step was
finding a way to obtain eggs from the ovaries of women without having to
subject them to open abdominal surgery. This problem was especially
challenging to Edwards because he was a Ph.D. with no experience in
clinical research.
As luck would have it, in 1967 Edwards read a paper in The Lancet
that described a new procedure called laparoscopy. The author was a
gynecologic surgeon named Patrick Steptoe who was affiliated with a
small hospital in Oldham near Manchester. Steptoe reported that he could
visualize the organs of the female reproductive tract by making a tiny
keyhole-sized incision near the navel through which he inserted a long
thin telescope equipped with a fiber-optic light. This newfangled
instrument was called a laparoscope. Although Steptoe did not invent the
laparoscope, he was the first English-speaking surgeon to learn the
procedure firsthand from its inventors in France and Germany. In 1967,
Steptoe published the first book in English to describe laparoscopy. The
book became an instant surgical classic on both sides of the Atlantic.
Edwards was immediately struck by the potential of laparoscopy for
retrieving eggs directly from the ovaries of women at just the right
time in the ovulation cycle. He rang up Steptoe and proposed a
collaboration. Edwards's colleagues in Cambridge raised their academic
eyebrows, thinking he was mad to hook up with a non-academic surgeon in
private practice in a backwater hospital who was fiddling around with a
dangerous foreign device that should never have been allowed into
England in the first place. But, the irrepressible Edwards had the
vision to realize that he needed the technology that Steptoe could
provide. Like many discoveries in medicine, the discovery of in vitro
fertilization itself required fertilization—the cross-fertilization
between a scientist and a physician.
For the next 10 years, from 1968 to 1978, Edwards traveled back and
forth by car over bumpy country roads from Cambridge to Oldham and back
to Cambridge, an arduous eight-hour journey. Edwards calculated that he
traveled the world four times over in his decade of near-weekly
commutes. Commuting may have been tiresome, but that was nothing to
equal the scientific frustrations and disappointments that Edwards and
Steptoe experienced during the first decade of their collaboration.
Within 18 months, they had successfully harvested eggs from infertile
women, fertilized them, and developed living human embryos. But, success
was short-lived. In their first 40 patients the embryos failed to
implant in the uterus of the mother. Then, in 1975 the 41st patient
became pregnant. Steptoe and Edwards were exhilarated, but their
jubilation was again short-lived: the pregnancy had to be terminated
because the embryo implanted in the fallopian tubes rather than the
uterus.
Edwards and Steptoe persevered despite overwhelming odds. To make a
10-year story short, 102 patients received embryo transfers without a
single successful pregnancy. In the end, success turned out to be a
matter of getting the hormones right so that the transferred embryos
would implant properly in the uterus and normal pregnancy would ensue.
The first test-tube baby was born on July 25, 1978—her name, Louise Joy
Brown. July 25, 1978 also marked the beginning of joy for many, many
infertile couples.
Infertility is a frequent medical problem. Throughout the world,
infertility affects 1 in 6 couples. In the U.S right now, more than six
million infertile couples desperately want to have children. Many
infertile women produce normal eggs, but these eggs are unable to reach
the uterus because of blockage in the fallopian tubes. That was the
problem in the mother of Louise Brown. Since the birth of Louise Brown
23 years ago, nearly a million healthy babies have been born to
infertile parents through IVF. Last year alone, more than 100,000 IVF
babies were born, accounting for 1 in 200 births in the U.S. and more
than 1 in 50 births in the U.K., France, Scandinavia, and Israel.
Edwards and Steptoe's breakthrough in IVF spawned five new fields of
clinical investigation. The first spin-off is the preimplantation
diagnosis of genetic diseases, which makes it possible to prevent the
birth of embryos that are destined to develop serious inherited
disorders like cystic fibrosis and Down's syndrome. The second spin-off
is the freezing of human embryos (cryopreservation), which makes it
possible for patients undergoing cancer chemotherapy to preserve their
fertility. A third spin-off is a new treatment for male infertility,
called ICSI, in which a single sperm from a man with a low sperm count
is injected into the cytoplasm of the egg. The fourth spin-off is the
new field of human embryonic stem-cell research, which holds great
potential for treating many common disorders such as Parkinson's disease
and juvenile diabetes. Without Edwards's technique of mixing eggs with
sperm in the test tube, there would be no blastocysts to produce the
stem cells. And finally, the birth of Louise Brown led to a new field of
reproductive bioethics and law, which is especially timely in view of
the current controversy surrounding stem-cell research.
Patrick Steptoe, Edwards's long-term clinical collaborator, died in 1988
at age 75, one week before he was to be knighted at Buckingham Palace
by Queen Elizabeth II. Had Steptoe been alive today, he would have
undoubtedly shared in this Lasker Award with Robert Edwards. Without
cross-fertilization, there would be no in vitro fertilization.
Most advances in medicine proceed in small steps. A precious few are
great leaps. We know that IVF was a great leap because Edwards and
Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely Trinity—the Press, the
Pope, and Prominent Nobel Laureates! The passage of time—plus a million
smiling babies full of joy—have vindicated Edwards. This millennial
year, the UK issued four stamps to celebrate the most noteworthy British
advances in clinical medicine over the last 1000 years. Those honored
were: Edward Jenner for vaccination against smallpox (1796); Florence
Nightingale for founding the field of nursing (1890); Alexander Fleming
for penicillin (1928); and Robert Edwards for developing IVF (1978). If
one picture is worth 1000 words, then one's picture on a millennial
stamp should be worth 1000 Laskers!