40 years ago, the first "sterile baby" was born

For her parents, Louise Brown was a small miracle, a miracle for medicine. Today, 40 years ago, on July 25, 1978, Louise Brown was born by caesarean in Oldham near Manchester near Manchester. She was the world's first test tube baby, the newspapers celebrated it as "Child of the Century". Her parents gave her the nickname "Joy" for the joy of her birth, on which she had not counted after years of waiting and testing.

Successful fertilization in the test tube, called in-vitro fertilization, attracted British scientists – embryologist Robert Edwards and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe – a new age in the treatment of cancer. unwanted infertility.

The basic principles of the IVF method, which has helped millions of childless couples produce:, Oocytes are earned at the right time. Fertilization takes place in the laboratory.

According to Edwards and Steptoe's work, female hormone therapy, embryo freezing and ultrasound puncture for oocyte retrieval were refined or invented thereafter. In addition, finer and finer methods have been developed in recent years for the selection of fertilized eggs best suited for implantation.

The first Austrian child to test

Slatan Jovanovic was born in Vienna on August 5, 1982 born. Gynecologists Wilfried Feichtinger and Peter Kemeter were the "medical fathers" here. Since 1979 they have been experimenting with ova and spermatozoa at the 2nd Vienna University Gynecological Clinic. "I sat for nights and I checked everything," recalls Feichtinger. Because the pioneers of the baby's first replica in the world had not revealed all the secrets. In 1980 there was a pregnancy, but the woman lost the child at an early stage.

From 1982 it was a cerebrovascular accident. "We have chic," says Feichtinger. Thus, Austria was the sixth country after Britain, Australia, the United States, Germany and France, where a child was conceived by artificial insemination, come from all over the world. Europe to learn from Austrian colleagues.

Read "Joy" Brown on page 5

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