Vox Meditantis

Jean Purdy (1945-1985) was the first person to witness a human embryo divide in a laboratory dish – an eight-celled cluster that would become Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, born in 1978. Working alongside physiologist Robert Edwards and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, she spent a decade developing the culture media, laboratory protocols, and embryological techniques that made in vitro fertilisation possible. As Technical Director of Bourn Hall, the world’s first IVF clinic, she transformed experimental science into reproducible clinical practice before her death from malignant melanoma in 1985, aged just 39. Over 12 million people now owe their existence to the methods she pioneered.

Her story matters because it exposes how institutional mechanisms actively erased women’s contributions to science, even when male colleagues fought for recognition. Despite Edwards’ explicit protests to Oldham Area Health Authority in 1981 – declaring Purdy “an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself” – her name was omitted from commemorative plaques for thirty years. This wasn’t oversight; it was deliberate suppression. Purdy’s erasure reveals how professional hierarchies weaponise labels like “nurse” and “supporting staff” to diminish women’s scientific and technical work, whilst her belated recognition reminds us that correcting historical injustice requires not just acknowledgement, but understanding why such erasure occurs at all.

We’re sitting in what would have been your laboratory space at Bourn Hall, though of course it’s been transformed many times since your day. Thank you for joining me across time.

It’s rather strange to be back, actually. Everything’s so modern now – the equipment, the atmosphere. In our time, we built everything ourselves. There wasn’t a manual for what we were doing because no one had done it before.

Let’s start at the beginning. You were born in Cambridge in 1945, daughter of George Purdy, a technician at the Cavendish Laboratory, and Gladys May Southgate. Did that scientific household influence your path?

My father worked with some brilliant minds – physicists unravelling the universe at the atomic level. He’d come home with stories, not the sort you’d tell at dinner parties, but practical ones about troubleshooting equipment, getting the apparatus to cooperate. I suppose I absorbed the idea that science wasn’t just theory in textbooks. It was something you did with your hands, where precision mattered. My mother kept the household running – no small feat during and after the war. She valued education, insisted on it, really. I attended Cambridgeshire High School for Girls, played violin in the orchestra, joined sports teams. My final report said I had a “lovely personality and knack for getting along with other people,” which the teacher thought suited my choice of nursing.

That’s almost patronising, isn’t it? As though technical brilliance and interpersonal skill couldn’t coexist.

Yes, well, it was 1963. They meant well. And nursing was considered respectable, suitable for a young woman. But I’d say those interpersonal skills turned out to be rather essential. When you’re asking women to participate in experimental procedures that might not work, when you’re navigating between a physiologist and a gynaecologist with very different approaches, you need more than laboratory competence. You need to understand people.

You trained at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, then moved to Southampton General before returning to Cambridgeshire to work at Papworth Hospital, where they were pioneering open-heart surgery. What drew you back?

Homesickness, honestly. I’d applied for a research post on tissue rejection locally because I missed Cambridge. Papworth was extraordinary – surgeons attempting procedures that seemed impossible, heart transplants in Britain. There was this atmosphere of pushing boundaries, of accepting that failure was part of progress. When I joined Robert Edwards in 1968 as a research assistant at the Physiological Laboratory, I’d already seen what pioneering medicine looked like.

Edwards had just successfully produced the first human blastocyst outside the body. What was that initial collaboration like?

Bob was relentless. His mind worked at a pace that could be exhausting – ideas tumbling out, hypotheses forming faster than you could test them. He’d been working on the biology of fertilisation for years, mostly with animal eggs. But human eggs were different, harder to obtain, ethically complex. He needed someone who could manage the practical side whilst he thought through the theoretical implications. I wasn’t meant to become an equal partner. I was hired as a lab technician. But within months, I was organising the entire laboratory operation.

And then Patrick Steptoe joined the collaboration.

Patrick was based in Oldham, Lancashire – nearly 200 miles north. He was a gynaecologist who’d introduced laparoscopy to Britain, keyhole surgery for retrieving eggs from ovaries. The medical establishment thought it was dangerous, unnecessary. Sound familiar? He and Bob were both working on things their peers dismissed. When they joined forces, it became clear we needed someone to coordinate between Cambridge and Oldham, to keep records, to manage supplies, to prepare culture media. That someone was me.

Let’s talk about the technical work. For readers who understand embryology, can you walk us through what preparing culture media actually involved?

Right. So, a culture medium is essentially a nutritive solution that mimics the environment inside the fallopian tube and uterus. You need the correct balance of electrolytes – sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium – plus glucose, amino acids, and proteins. The osmolarity must be precise, around 280 to 290 milliosmoles per kilogramme. Too high or too low, and the embryonic cells either shrink or swell and die. The pH has to stay between 7.2 and 7.4, controlled by bicarbonate buffering in equilibrium with carbon dioxide. Temperature: exactly 37 degrees Celsius.

And there were no commercial products available.

None whatsoever. We mixed everything from scratch. I’d weigh out salts on analytical balances – milligrams mattered. Then dissolve them in water that had been distilled multiple times to remove contaminants. We added serum, initially from cows or humans, about 8 to 15 percent by volume, because it contained growth factors we couldn’t yet identify or synthesise. Every batch had to be tested for sterility, pH, osmolarity. If one parameter was off, embryos wouldn’t develop. We lost countless attempts to media problems before we refined the protocols.

The Oldham Notebooks show you recorded most of the experimental data. What were you tracking?

Everything. Patient details – cycle day, hormone levels from blood and urine, follicular development measured by laparoscopy. Egg retrieval times, appearance of follicular fluid, number of eggs recovered. Insemination timing, sperm concentration and motility. Then, critically, embryo development: how many cells, whether divisions were symmetrical, presence of fragmentation, progression to blastocyst stage. I logged ambient conditions too – room temperature, incubator CO₂ levels, even who was present. Bob spent more time in Cambridge teaching undergraduates. I was in Oldham for days, sometimes a week at a stretch, managing the laboratory alone.

So the characterisation of you as Edwards’ “assistant” or part of “supporting staff” fundamentally misrepresents your role.

It does. I wasn’t assisting someone else’s work. I was conducting research. The laboratory was my domain. Bob and Patrick knew that. The problem was that institutional structures couldn’t conceive of a nurse functioning as a scientist. The label constrained how others perceived my contributions, even when the work itself was indistinguishable from what any research embryologist would do.

You also travelled to California in 1969 to work with Guy Abraham at Harbor General Hospital on follicular fluid composition. What was that research about?

Follicular fluid surrounds the egg in the ovary. We hypothesised it might contain factors that promoted maturation or fertilisation. Guy Abraham had biochemical expertise we lacked. I spent weeks there running assays, measuring hormone concentrations, electrolytes, proteins. I sent long letters back to Bob, pages of experimental results, observations, troubleshooting notes. That research fed directly into refining our culture media formulations.

You also developed modifications to pipettes for handling eggs and embryos. Can you describe that?

Standard pipettes were too rigid, the tips too wide or too narrow. Human eggs are about 120 micrometres in diameter, surrounded by cumulus cells. You need a pipette with a smooth, fire-polished tip, diameter slightly larger than the egg, to minimise shear stress during aspiration and transfer. I experimented with different glass types, different heating techniques to form the taper, different internal diameters. The goal was to move eggs without damaging the zona pellucida or the plasma membrane. It sounds simple, but it took hundreds of attempts to get the dimensions right.

And then there’s the moment everyone knows: 15th November 1977. You were the first person to see the embryo that would become Louise Brown begin to divide.

Yes. I was checking the cultures under the microscope – something I did every few hours. And there it was: the zygote had divided into two cells, then four, then eight. Symmetrical cleavage, no fragmentation. It was developing beautifully. I knew immediately this was different. We’d had embryos develop before, but this one had a quality, a robustness. I called Bob and Patrick. We were cautious – we’d been disappointed so many times – but there was this quiet hope.

Louise Brown was born 25th July 1978. What was that day like?

Overwhelming. Joyful. Terrifying. We’d succeeded, but we’d also unleashed something the world wasn’t ready to accept. Religious groups condemned us. The medical establishment was sceptical. The press was relentless. And yet, for the parents – Lesley and John Brown – their daughter was simply their longed-for child. That grounded us. Whatever the controversy, we’d helped create a family.

Let’s talk about the opposition. You were a devout Christian. The Netflix film Joy depicts you being expelled from your church and asked to leave home by your mother because of your IVF work. How accurate is that?

The broad strokes are true, though I don’t know that anyone can say definitively whether I was formally expelled or chose to leave. My faith was important to me. My mother’s was even more so. The church – and by extension, much of our community – saw IVF as interfering with God’s plan. There were sermons about playing God, about the sanctity of procreation within marriage. My mother couldn’t reconcile my work with her beliefs. It was painful. But I couldn’t stop. The work mattered too much.

That must have been isolating.

It was. Bob and Patrick became my family in many ways. And the patients – these women who’d tried everything, who’d been told they’d never have children – they kept me going. One of them once said to me, after a failed cycle, “Don’t give up, Jean. We believe in you.” How do you walk away from that?

After Louise’s birth, you helped establish Bourn Hall Clinic in 1980, serving as Technical Director. What did that involve?

Everything, again. Finding the building – Bourn Hall was a Jacobean manor house I located – equipping laboratories, hiring staff, training embryologists. There was no template for an IVF clinic. We had to create clinical protocols, quality control procedures, patient care pathways. I standardised embryo culture techniques so they were reproducible, not dependent on individual intuition. Between 1978 and my death in 1985, over 500 babies were born through IVF at Bourn Hall. That’s my living legacy.

You also co-authored 26 academic papers between 1970 and 1985, published in Nature, The Lancet, and other prestigious journals. Were you encouraged to publish?

Bob and Patrick insisted. They wanted my name on the papers because they knew I’d earned it. Academic publishing was still very male-dominated, and having a nurse as a co-author raised eyebrows. But the research was ours collectively. I wrote sections on laboratory methodology, embryo culture, data analysis. Patrick and Bob handled the clinical and theoretical discussions.

Now, the difficult part. In 1980, Edwards proposed a plaque at Oldham hospitals commemorating the IVF work, with your name included. The Oldham Area Health Authority rejected that, authorising wording that recognised only “Mr Patrick Steptoe, Dr Robert Edwards and their supporting staff.” Edwards protested in 1981, writing: “I feel especially about Jean Purdy, who travelled to Oldham with me for 10 years, and contributed as much as I did to the project. Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself.” His protests failed. How do you reflect on that now?

I didn’t know about Bob’s letters at the time. I learned about them posthumously, as it were. Knowing he fought for me – that he saw me as an equal – means everything. But the fact that his advocacy wasn’t enough tells you something about the structures we were up against. It wasn’t personal animosity from the health authority. It was bureaucracy protecting professional hierarchies. Doctors and scientists get commemorated. Nurses and “supporting staff” don’t, even when the nurse is doing the science.

A second plaque in 1992 repeated the omission. It wasn’t until 2015 – thirty years after your death – that a blue plaque finally included your name. By then, Edwards and Steptoe were also deceased.

Which is the tragedy, isn’t it? None of us were alive to see it corrected. Recognition that comes too late serves history, perhaps, but it doesn’t serve the person who was erased.

Let’s talk about mistakes. What experiments failed? What would you do differently?

How much time do you have? We wasted months on incorrect assumptions about hormone timing. Early on, we thought we needed to stimulate multiple follicles to increase egg yield, but the hormones threw off the uterine lining, reducing implantation rates. It took us years to realise natural cycles, though yielding fewer eggs, gave better outcomes initially. We also lost embryos to suboptimal culture conditions – too much oxygen, wrong glucose concentrations. Each failure taught us something, but they were frustrating. You’d invest weeks into a cycle, and it would fail at day three because the pH drifted overnight.

Were there ethical dilemmas you struggled with?

Absolutely. We were creating embryos knowing many wouldn’t be used. What happened to them? At the time, we didn’t have cryopreservation techniques – embryo freezing came later. So embryos that weren’t transferred were simply not used further. That weighed on me, particularly given my faith. We also grappled with patient consent. How do you explain risks when you don’t fully understand them yourself? We were as transparent as possible, but there was an element of “we’re figuring this out together” that would be unacceptable by modern standards.

The Medical Research Council refused funding in 1971, citing concerns about the “normality” of IVF babies – essentially, fears they’d be disabled – and questioning whether the work was scientifically exciting. How did you respond to that?

We were furious. The subtext was that helping infertile couples wasn’t important enough, scientifically or ethically. The establishment prioritised population control over individual suffering. And the disability argument was insulting on multiple levels – it implied that preventing the birth of disabled children was a scientific good, which is eugenics dressed up as ethics. We pressed on without MRC funding, relying on the Ford Foundation and private donors like Lillian Lincoln Howell.

Today, over 12 million people have been born through IVF. The role of clinical embryologist, which you essentially invented, is now a distinct profession with training programmes and professional societies. How does that feel?

It’s extraordinary. I couldn’t have imagined the scale. When we started, we were trying to help one couple at a time. The idea that millions of families would be created through these techniques – that embryologists would be recognised professionals with their own expertise – it’s validation beyond anything I hoped for. Though I do wish I’d been around to see it.

The 2024 Netflix film Joy, starring Thomasin McKenzie as you, brought your story to mainstream audiences. The film also depicts your struggle with endometriosis. Is that accurate?

We don’t have definitive records of my medical history, so I can’t confirm or deny that. But it’s a reasonable inference. I never had children. I worked on fertility treatment with an urgency that sometimes felt personal. Whether that was because of endometriosis, or simply because I saw suffering and wanted to alleviate it, I suppose only I would know.

You died of malignant melanoma in 1985, aged 39. A room was arranged for you at Bourn Hall during your illness so you could remain part of the team. What was that final period like?

I wanted to work as long as I could. Bourn Hall was my home, my purpose. The team became my family – Bob, the embryologists I’d trained, the patients. Dying young is unfair, but dying whilst still connected to work that mattered made it bearable. I saw babies born right up until the end. That was enough.

What advice would you give to women scientists today, particularly those whose contributions are minimised or attributed to male colleagues?

Document everything. Keep your own records, publish under your own name, ensure your intellectual contributions are visible. Don’t wait for others to advocate for you – though it helps when they do. And recognise that institutional structures are designed to perpetuate existing hierarchies. Changing them requires not just individual persistence, but collective action. Women need to support each other, mentor each other, and refuse to be categorised as “support staff” when they’re doing the science.

And to embryologists, specifically?

Remember that every embryo you culture represents someone’s hope. The technical precision matters – pH, temperature, osmolarity – but so does the human connection. I think that’s what Bob meant when he called me “patient” and “indomitable.” It wasn’t just that I was good with pipettes. It was that I cared about the babies, about the parents, about getting it right not for glory but because it mattered.

One last question. If you could correct one thing in the historical record, what would it be?

That I was part of a “threesome,” as Bob called it. Not an assistant, not support staff, but one of three people who created IVF together. Patrick did the surgery. Bob did the theoretical biology. I did the embryology, the laboratory management, the patient care, the data recording. We were a team. Equal partners. That’s the truth, and it took thirty years for the world to acknowledge it. I’d prefer that didn’t happen to other women.

Jean Purdy, thank you. The 12 million people who owe their existence to your work are testament enough.

I just wanted to look after the babies. That’s all it ever was.

Letters and emails

Since publishing this conversation, we’ve received dozens of letters and emails from our community – embryologists, fertility patients, biomedical researchers, and those simply moved by Jean Purdy’s story. They want to know more about the technical details she overcame, the personal costs she bore, and the wisdom she might offer to those carrying forward her legacy today. We’ve selected five questions that represent the breadth and depth of this response: voices from five continents, each bringing their own perspective to understanding what it meant to create a field from nothing, and what it means to continue that work now. Here’s what they asked.

Adwoa Mensimah, 34, Reproductive Health Researcher, Accra, Ghana
You mentioned that early IVF faced fierce religious and ethical opposition, which you experienced personally. Today, many African countries still have limited access to fertility treatment, often due to cultural stigma, cost, or lack of infrastructure. If you were advising fertility specialists working in resource-limited settings now, what would you tell them about building trust with communities whilst pioneering treatments that challenge traditional beliefs about conception and family?

Adwoa, your question takes me straight back to those early days in Oldham, where we faced similar barriers – not quite the same as what you’re describing in Ghana, but close enough that I recognise the landscape. Trust is everything when you’re asking people to believe in something their community tells them is wrong, or dangerous, or against God’s will.

First, I’d say this: don’t underestimate the power of simply being present. Bob and Patrick and I spent years travelling to Oldham, week after week, living in the community where our patients lived. We weren’t distant experts swooping in from Cambridge. We ate in the local cafés, stayed in modest lodgings, attended the same shops. People saw us as neighbours, not outsiders. That mattered when the newspapers were calling us irresponsible, when the churches were condemning the work. Our patients knew us as people who genuinely cared, who’d sit with them through disappointments, who remembered their names and their stories. You can’t build that kind of trust remotely.

Second, involve the community in understanding the science, but don’t patronise them. We held small meetings with patients – sometimes just two or three couples at a time – where we explained exactly what we were doing. I’d draw diagrams of the fallopian tube, show them the microscope, let them see the culture dishes. People aren’t stupid. They know when you’re being honest and when you’re hiding things. We told them the risks, the uncertainties, the failures we’d already experienced. Some walked away. But the ones who stayed trusted us more because we’d been truthful.

Religious opposition is harder, particularly when it comes from within your own faith community, as it did for me. I can’t tell you how to reconcile that for others – I barely managed it for myself. What I can say is that we found allies in unexpected places. Not every religious leader condemned us. Some understood that alleviating suffering was itself a moral good, that helping couples become parents wasn’t playing God but participating in creation. Find those voices. Amplify them. They carry more weight than any amount of scientific argument when you’re dealing with questions of faith and tradition.

Regarding cost and infrastructure – this is where I think resourcefulness becomes essential. We built Bourn Hall with limited funds, scavenging equipment, improvising when we couldn’t afford purpose-built apparatus. I mixed culture media from basic chemical components because commercial products didn’t exist. That kind of ingenuity is still possible. You don’t need the fanciest laboratory to do good embryology. You need cleanliness, precision, attention to detail, and someone who understands the biology deeply enough to adapt when things go wrong. Train local embryologists thoroughly. Give them ownership of the work, not just technical tasks. That’s how you build sustainable programmes rather than dependent ones.

One thing I learned from working with Lesley Brown and the other early patients: they became our advocates. When a baby was born, when a family was created, those parents told their stories. Not because we asked them to, but because they wanted others to know it was possible. In contexts where cultural stigma is strong, peer testimony can shift attitudes more effectively than any medical conference or government policy. Protect your patients’ privacy absolutely, but if they choose to share their experiences, support them. Let the parents speak for the treatment in ways that clinicians never could.

I’d also say this, and it’s perhaps the hardest part: accept that you won’t change everyone’s mind, and that’s all right. We faced protests, hate mail, condemnation from people who genuinely believed we were doing evil. Some of those people never changed their views, not even after Louise Brown grew up healthy and happy. You can’t wait for universal approval before you help the people in front of you who are suffering. We made a choice to proceed despite opposition because we believed – Patrick, Bob, and I – that the suffering of childless couples mattered, that their longing deserved respect and response.

But here’s what I wish I’d understood better at the time: the importance of documenting not just the science, but the human stories. We kept meticulous laboratory records – I’ve got notebooks full of pH readings and embryo morphology assessments – but we didn’t adequately record the patients’ experiences, their emotional journeys, their cultural contexts. That data would have been invaluable for understanding how to improve care, how to communicate better, how to address the psychological toll you mentioned. If you’re working in communities where fertility treatment is new, document everything. Not just success rates and clinical outcomes, but how patients felt, what they needed, where the system failed them. That knowledge will serve the next generation of specialists.

Finally, remember that pioneering work is lonely. You’ll make mistakes. Cycles will fail. Patients will blame you, sometimes fairly. Your own community might ostracise you, as mine did. But if the work is grounded in genuine compassion, if you’re honest about limitations, if you keep learning and adapting – then you’re doing something worthwhile, regardless of how long it takes for recognition to arrive. The families you help create will be your vindication, even if plaques and prizes never are.

Connor Hayes, 28, Biomedical Engineering PhD Candidate, Toronto, Canada
You described fire-polishing pipette tips and adjusting internal diameters to minimise shear stress on human eggs during transfer. Modern microfluidic devices and automated embryo handling systems claim to reduce human error and improve reproducibility. But I’m curious – do you think there’s something lost when we remove the tactile, hands-on element from embryology? Can automation truly replace the sensitivity and intuition you developed through physically handling thousands of embryos, or are there qualitative judgements that still require human touch?

Connor, you’ve hit on something that troubles me about the direction of modern embryology, though I should say upfront that I’m viewing your microfluidic devices and automated systems from the perspective of someone who did everything manually. So take my concerns with that in mind.

When I was handling embryos – and I handled thousands, as you say – I developed an almost instinctive sense of what felt right. The resistance when you drew an egg into the pipette, the way the cumulus cells moved in the medium, the subtle differences in how embryos at different developmental stages responded to manipulation. You learned to adjust pressure on the bulb based on viscosity of the fluid, temperature of the room, even how long the dish had been out of the incubator. None of that was written in protocols because we were writing the protocols as we went along.

I remember one particular evening in Oldham – must have been 1975 or ’76 – when I was transferring embryos between culture dishes. One of them looked perfect under the microscope: symmetrical cleavage, appropriate size, no fragmentation. But when I picked it up, something felt wrong. The zona pellucida seemed more rigid than it should have been, or perhaps the embryo itself was less deformable. I can’t describe it more precisely than that because it wasn’t something I measured. It was tactile information, transmitted through the pipette, through my fingers, into some processing part of my brain that had learned what “normal” felt like through repetition. I didn’t use that embryo for transfer. Turned out my instinct was right – it arrested at the next division.

Now, could I have articulated why I made that decision in a way that would allow a machine to replicate it? Probably not. That’s the difficulty with automation. You can programme a device to maintain consistent aspiration pressure, consistent movement speed, consistent temperature. You can probably even programme it to recognise visual markers of embryo quality more reliably than a tired human looking down a microscope at two in the morning. But can you teach it to notice the things you don’t yet know are important?

Here’s what worries me: we didn’t understand embryo metabolism fully when we started. We didn’t know which nutrients were essential, which culture conditions were optimal, how to predict developmental potential. We discovered those things partly through careful observation, but also through accidents, anomalies, unexpected results that made us question our assumptions. When I mixed a batch of culture medium incorrectly – got the calcium concentration wrong, say – embryos behaved differently. Sometimes worse, occasionally better. Those mistakes taught us things deliberate experiments might not have.

Automation standardises processes, which is valuable. But it also reduces variation. And variation – controlled variation, observed carefully – is how you learn. If a machine is handling embryos identically every single time, you lose the opportunity to notice that slightly slower aspiration produced better outcomes, or that embryos cultured in dishes near the incubator door (where temperature fluctuated minutely) developed differently than those in the centre. I’m not saying you should introduce random variation deliberately. I’m saying that human handling, even when we’re trying to be consistent, introduces tiny perturbations that sometimes reveal important biological truths.

There’s also the question of skill degradation. When I trained the first embryologists at Bourn Hall, I insisted they spend months learning manual techniques before we’d let them near patient embryos. Not just because mistakes were costly – though they were – but because handling embryos manually forces you to understand their physical properties. You learn that human eggs are delicate but surprisingly resilient. You learn that blastocysts are more deformable than eight-cell embryos. You develop a mental model of what you’re working with that goes beyond visual assessment.

If the next generation of embryologists only ever works with automated systems, what happens when the automation fails? And it will fail, Connor – machines always do eventually. Will they know how to rescue the situation manually? Will they even recognise that something’s gone wrong if they’ve never experienced what “right” feels like in their hands?

I’m not arguing against technological progress. If your microfluidic devices genuinely improve outcomes – and I assume the data shows they do, or you wouldn’t be developing them – then that’s wonderful. More babies born, more families created. That’s the goal. But I’d urge you to think about hybrid approaches. Use automation where it clearly outperforms human capability: precision movement, environmental control, perhaps even initial embryo assessment using imaging far more sophisticated than our microscopes. But keep the human in the loop for decisions that require judgement, for recognising patterns that haven’t been codified yet, for responding to the unexpected.

And for training, absolutely maintain manual skills. Even if 99 percent of routine work is automated, that remaining 1 percent – the difficult cases, the unusual presentations, the equipment failures – will require embryologists who understand what they’re doing at a fundamental, hands-on level.

You asked whether automation can truly replace sensitivity and intuition. My answer is: not yet, and perhaps not ever, because sensitivity and intuition arise from embodied experience that I’m not convinced machines can replicate. But more importantly, I’m not sure it should replace those things entirely. The goal isn’t to remove humans from embryology. It’s to give humans better tools whilst preserving the judgement and adaptability that come from deep practical knowledge.

One last thought: I spent ten years travelling to Oldham, often working alone in that laboratory late into the night. The work was exhausting, sometimes tedious. If automation can reduce that burden on modern embryologists – give them more time to think, to analyse, to interact with patients rather than being chained to the microscope – then it’s serving a valuable purpose. Just don’t let it completely sever the connection between the embryologist and the embryo. That relationship, that intimate knowledge of the cells you’re caring for, matters in ways that are hard to quantify but impossible to ignore.

Min-Ji Park, 41, IVF Patient Advocate, Seoul, South Korea
In South Korea, there’s enormous pressure on women to pursue fertility treatment, sometimes undergoing ten or more IVF cycles. The emotional toll is rarely discussed openly. You worked directly with patients during the experimental phase when success rates were far lower than today. How did you help women cope with repeated failures? And do you think the medical field has improved at supporting the psychological aspects of fertility treatment, or have we simply become better at the technical side whilst neglecting emotional care?

Min-Ji, your question cuts right to the heart of something I struggled with throughout my career, and I’m not certain I ever got it right. The emotional side of fertility treatment – the hope and despair cycling month after month – that was as real as any laboratory protocol, but we didn’t have proper tools for addressing it.

In the early days, before Louise Brown, our success rate was zero. Every single cycle failed. Can you imagine asking women to participate in experimental procedures knowing that? We were honest about it – told them we’d never succeeded, that we were trying to work out why – but honesty doesn’t soften the blow when you ring someone to say their embryo didn’t implant, or didn’t even fertilise, or we couldn’t retrieve any eggs at all. I made those telephone calls dozens of times. Each one felt like a small bereavement.

What I learned, mostly through trial and error, was that women needed different things at different stages. Some wanted detailed explanations: what went wrong, which step failed, what we might try differently next time. They approached it almost scientifically, as though understanding the mechanism would give them control over an uncontrollable situation. I could help those patients. I’d sit with them, show them their laboratory results, explain the embryo grading, discuss adjustments to hormone protocols. It gave them agency, or at least the feeling of it.

Others couldn’t bear technical details. For them, every statistic was a reminder of failure. They needed space to grieve, permission to be angry, acknowledgement that what they were experiencing was genuinely terrible. I wasn’t trained for that kind of care. My nursing background helped – I’d sat with dying patients, delivered bad news to families – but this was different. These women weren’t ill in the traditional sense. They were mourning children who’d never existed outside a petri dish, and society told them that wasn’t real loss. But it absolutely was.

The pressure you describe in South Korea – ten or more cycles, enormous social expectation – we saw early versions of that. Not quite the same cultural context, but women who felt their worth as wives, as women, depended on producing children. Lesley Brown, Louise’s mother, had been trying to conceive for nine years before she came to us. Nine years of monthly disappointments, of people asking when she’d start a family, of feeling like she was failing at something that seemed effortless for everyone else. That kind of chronic grief does damage that doesn’t show up in medical records.

I tried to create what I suppose you’d now call a support network, though we didn’t use that language then. At Bourn Hall, I encouraged patients to talk to each other – not formally, just in the waiting areas, over cups of tea. Women who’d succeeded would sometimes come back to visit, bring their babies, let the current patients see that it was possible. But I was cautious about that too, because for every woman who found hope in seeing a successful outcome, there was another who felt worse, wondering why it worked for someone else but not for her.

One thing I wish we’d done better: recognising when to stop. We didn’t have clear guidelines about how many cycles were reasonable before admitting that IVF wasn’t going to work for a particular couple. Part of that was because we were still learning – maybe the next attempt would be the one where we got the protocol right. But part of it was that we found it desperately hard to tell someone, “We can’t help you.” So women kept trying, kept hoping, kept enduring the physical and emotional strain of repeated cycles. Some eventually succeeded. Others didn’t, and I wonder now whether we should have helped them come to terms with childlessness earlier, rather than prolonging hope that might have been false.

To answer your question about whether the medical field has improved: I honestly don’t know. From what I understand, modern IVF has much higher success rates, better diagnostic tools, more refined protocols. That should reduce the number of futile cycles. But I also hear about what you’re describing – this relentless pursuit of pregnancy regardless of cost, financial or emotional. So perhaps we’ve just created different problems.

What I think hasn’t changed enough is the recognition that fertility treatment is as much psychological as physiological. When I was working, we didn’t have counsellors attached to clinics as standard practice. Patients saw me, or sometimes Bob, or Patrick. We did our best, but none of us had proper training in psychological support. I believe modern clinics have counselling services, which is progress. But if those services are offered as an optional add-on rather than an integral part of treatment, then we’re still failing patients.

Here’s what I’d say needs to happen: every fertility clinic should have psychological support embedded from the first consultation. Not just available if patients ask for it, but routinely offered, normalised, presented as essential to treatment as blood tests or ultrasounds. Someone should sit with patients before they start and ask: What will you do if this doesn’t work? How many attempts feel right for you? What does success mean to you – is it only a biological child, or might there be other paths to parenthood? What support do you have outside this clinic?

And crucially, clinics need to be honest about success rates in ways that patients can actually understand. We throw around percentages – “30 percent success rate per cycle” – but what does that mean to someone who’s already failed three times? Their personal probability isn’t the same as the population average. Women need help interpreting statistics in the context of their specific situation: their age, their diagnosis, their previous outcomes. Otherwise we’re offering false hope dressed up as data.

You mention that the emotional toll is rarely discussed openly in South Korea. That’s a cultural issue, and I’m not equipped to advise on how to shift cultural norms. But I will say this: silence around suffering makes suffering worse. When I was ostracised by my church and my family for doing IVF work, the isolation was nearly unbearable. The only thing that helped was finding other people – Bob, Patrick, colleagues, patients – who understood what I was experiencing and didn’t minimise it. If women undergoing fertility treatment could speak openly about the grief, the anxiety, the sense of failure, without being told they’re being dramatic or ungrateful, that alone would be therapeutic.

One last thing: we need to acknowledge that sometimes fertility treatment fails, and that’s not the patient’s fault, not the clinic’s fault, just the sad reality of biology. Not everything can be fixed with enough money or determination or technological sophistication. There’s grief in that recognition, but also, potentially, release. The freedom to stop trying, to choose a different path, to define family in ways that don’t require biological parenthood. I wish I’d been better at helping patients reach that point when it was appropriate. It felt like giving up, like admitting defeat. But for some women, it might have been the kindest thing we could have done.

Leonardo Fuentes, 52, Science Policy Advisor, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Medical Research Council refused funding in 1971, partly because they didn’t consider infertility treatment “scientifically exciting” enough. This mirrors ongoing debates in Latin America and globally about what research deserves public funding. If you could rewrite the criteria by which scientific merit is judged – particularly for work that directly alleviates human suffering but may not advance theoretical knowledge – what principles would you propose? How do we balance pure research with applied medicine in funding decisions?

Leonardo, the Medical Research Council’s rejection still rankles, even now. Bob was furious – absolutely livid – when they turned us down in 1971. Their reasoning was transparent: infertility wasn’t considered a serious health problem, not like cancer or heart disease. Women who couldn’t have children weren’t dying, weren’t disabled in ways the medical establishment recognised as legitimate. Therefore, helping them wasn’t “scientifically exciting” enough to warrant public funding.

There was also this barely concealed attitude that we shouldn’t be encouraging reproduction anyway. This was the era of population control rhetoric, warnings about overpopulation destroying the planet. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb had been published just a few years earlier, predicting mass starvation if we didn’t limit births. So here we were, trying to help infertile couples have children, and the scientific establishment was saying, “Why? The world doesn’t need more people.” It was maddening.

But the deeper issue you’re raising – how we judge scientific merit – that’s more complex. The MRC operates on peer review, which means scientists decide what other scientists should study. And scientists, being human, have biases about what constitutes “important” work. Theoretical advances, fundamental discoveries about how the universe or the body works – that’s prestigious. Applied medicine that directly helps patients but doesn’t necessarily generate new knowledge? Less so.

I’d argue that’s backwards, or at least incomplete. Scientific merit shouldn’t be judged solely on whether research advances abstract knowledge. It should also consider whether research reduces suffering, whether it addresses genuine human needs, whether it has practical applications that improve lives. IVF didn’t reveal fundamental new biology – we already knew how fertilisation worked in animals. What we did was translate that knowledge into a clinical application. Under the MRC’s criteria, that wasn’t “exciting.” But tell that to Lesley Brown holding Louise for the first time, or the hundreds of families created at Bourn Hall before I died, or the millions since.

Here’s what I’d propose for funding criteria: weight research according to multiple dimensions rather than privileging theoretical work. First, scientific rigour – is the methodology sound, are the hypotheses testable, will the work generate reliable data? That applies equally to basic science and applied medicine. Second, potential impact on human welfare – how many people could benefit if this research succeeds, and how significantly would their lives improve? Third, feasibility – is the research team capable of delivering results within a reasonable timeframe and budget?

Crucially, I’d include patient and public voices in funding decisions, not just scientific peers. When the MRC rejected us, it was researchers deciding that other researchers’ questions weren’t interesting enough. But patients – couples experiencing infertility – would have prioritised that work instantly. Their perspective is valid and should inform where public money goes, particularly for medical research funded by taxpayers who might themselves need those treatments.

There’s also the question of risk tolerance. Funding bodies prefer safe bets: established researchers, proven methodologies, incremental advances. Revolutionary work is risky – it might fail completely, waste money, produce nothing. But the biggest breakthroughs often come from exactly that kind of risky research. IVF was ridiculously risky in 1971. We had no proof it would work in humans, no animal models that perfectly predicted human outcomes, no guarantee we wouldn’t create abnormalities or health problems. The MRC saw that risk and said no. Private funders – the Ford Foundation, later Lillian Lincoln Howell – saw the same risk and said yes, because they valued the potential outcome enough to gamble on it.

I’d build funding structures that explicitly allocate a portion of resources to high-risk, high-reward projects. Not the majority – you still need steady, incremental research – but perhaps 10 or 15 percent set aside for work that might fail spectacularly but could also transform entire fields. Let researchers apply specifically for that funding stream, with evaluation criteria that acknowledge uncertainty as inherent rather than disqualifying.

Then there’s the pure versus applied debate. You mention balancing them, but I’m not convinced they’re as separate as funding bodies pretend. Our IVF work relied entirely on Bob’s pure research into mammalian fertilisation from the 1950s and ’60s. Without that foundational knowledge, we’d have had nothing to apply clinically. Conversely, the clinical work raised new questions that fed back into basic research about embryo development, implantation, hormonal signalling. It’s a cycle, not a hierarchy.

So rather than funding “pure” research and “applied” research as separate categories, I’d fund problems. Identify a challenge – infertility, infectious disease, neurological disorders – and support research across the entire spectrum from fundamental biology through clinical application. A single funding programme might support someone studying molecular mechanisms of fertilisation, someone developing culture media, someone running clinical trials, someone investigating long-term health outcomes. They’d collaborate, share findings, work towards a common goal. That’s how you get breakthroughs that actually reach patients, rather than discoveries that sit in journals indefinitely because no one bridges the gap to application.

Now, who decides what problems are worth solving? That brings us back to values. In 1971, the MRC didn’t think infertility was a problem worth solving because they didn’t value what we were trying to achieve – helping couples have children. They saw it as trivial compared to life-threatening diseases. But suffering isn’t only physical pain or mortality risk. The grief of childlessness is real suffering. The social stigma, the sense of inadequacy, the loss of a future you’d imagined – those are real harms. Any ethical funding framework has to recognise that.

I’d establish panels that include not just scientists but ethicists, patients, social scientists, economists. Ask them: What constitutes suffering? What interventions would reduce it most effectively? How do we weigh competing needs when resources are limited? Those are moral questions as much as scientific ones. Scientists should inform the discussion with data, but they shouldn’t monopolise the decision-making.

Finally, be explicit about funding priorities rather than pretending objectivity. The MRC claimed they were making neutral, merit-based decisions, but they were actually prioritising certain kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of impact. That’s fine – every funding body has to make choices – but own it. Say publicly: “We’re prioritising research into communicable diseases because they affect millions globally,” or “We’re prioritising fundamental molecular biology because we believe it will generate knowledge with wide applications.” Then people can debate whether those priorities are right, whether they serve public interests, whether they’re excluding important work.

What happened to us – being told our work wasn’t important when we knew it was – that happened because priorities were hidden behind claims of scientific objectivity. Make the priorities transparent, involve broader voices in setting them, build in mechanisms for revisiting them regularly, and fund a diversity of approaches rather than betting everything on one model of what science should be. That’s how you avoid leaving the next Bob Edwards and Patrick Steptoe and Jean Purdy without the resources they need to change the world.

Viktoria Ivanova, 29, Developmental Biologist, Prague, Czech Republic
You worked without commercial culture media, mixing every component from scratch and testing each batch for pH, osmolarity, and sterility. Modern embryologists use standardised, pre-made media with proprietary formulations – we often don’t even know the exact composition. What if you’d had access to commercial media in the 1970s? Would standardisation have accelerated your progress, or did the necessity of mixing your own solutions give you deeper understanding of embryo metabolism and nutritional requirements that might have been lost with ready-made products?

Viktoria, what a fascinating question – and one that makes me slightly uncomfortable because the honest answer undermines the romanticism of our pioneering work. Would commercial media have accelerated our progress? Almost certainly yes. Would we have lost something valuable in the process? Possibly, though not in the ways you might expect.

Let me start with the practical reality: mixing culture media from scratch was exhausting, time-consuming, and a constant source of potential error. I’d spend hours weighing out salts – sodium chloride, potassium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium sulphate – dissolving them in triple-distilled water, adjusting pH with hydrochloric acid or sodium bicarbonate, checking osmolarity with a freezing-point depression osmometer. Then filtering everything through 0.22-micron membranes to sterilise it, because autoclaving would have destroyed heat-sensitive components. Every batch had to be tested before use, which meant maintaining mouse embryo cultures as quality control – if mouse embryos didn’t develop properly in a batch, we couldn’t use it for human embryos.

The whole process took the better part of a day, sometimes longer if something went wrong. And things went wrong constantly. I’d get the calcium concentration slightly off, and embryos would arrest at the two-cell stage. Or the pH would drift because the CO₂ incubator wasn’t maintaining proper atmosphere, and nothing would develop past fertilisation. We lost entire cycles – patients who’d undergone egg retrieval surgery – because of media problems we didn’t identify until embryos failed to progress.

So yes, if I could have opened a bottle of pre-mixed, quality-controlled, guaranteed-sterile culture medium in 1975, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. The time saved alone would have been enormous. I could have focused on refining other aspects of the procedure – egg retrieval timing, embryo transfer technique, patient selection – rather than spending half my working hours as essentially a laboratory chemist.

But here’s where it gets complicated. Because we were mixing everything ourselves, we understood exactly what was in the medium and how each component affected embryo development. When embryos weren’t developing well, I could adjust individual variables: increase the glucose, reduce the phosphate, try a different protein source. I knew from direct experience that pyruvate was essential for early cleavage stages, that amino acids became more important as embryos progressed to blastocyst, that trace metals like zinc and selenium mattered even though we didn’t fully understand why.

That knowledge came from mistakes as much as successes. I remember one batch where I accidentally used magnesium chloride instead of magnesium sulphate – similar-looking white crystals, different chemical properties. The embryos developed abnormally, fragmenting excessively. That error taught me something about the specific role of sulphate ions that I wouldn’t have learned if I’d been using commercial media. Similarly, when our incubator malfunctioned overnight and the CO₂ dropped, causing pH to rise to 7.8, we observed that embryos became vacuolated and arrested. Those observations fed directly into our understanding of optimal culture conditions.

Commercial media would have eliminated those learning opportunities – or rather, transformed them. Instead of me discovering through trial and error what worked, I’d have been dependent on whatever the manufacturer had determined worked. If their formulation wasn’t quite right for human embryos, I might not have had the knowledge or authority to recognise that and modify it.

There’s also the question of proprietary formulations, which you mentioned. Modern embryologists often don’t know exactly what’s in their media because companies won’t disclose the precise composition – it’s commercially sensitive information. That troubles me philosophically. How can you optimise a process if you don’t know what variables you’re working with? How can you troubleshoot problems if you can’t adjust individual components? You’re essentially treating the medium as a black box: put embryos in, hope they develop, but if they don’t, you’ve got limited options for working out why.

When we published our papers in Nature and The Lancet, we included detailed media formulations – every component, every concentration. Other researchers could replicate our work exactly, or modify it based on their own observations. That’s how science progresses. If we’d been using commercial media, we’d have written “embryos were cultured in Medium X from Company Y,” which tells you nothing useful. Future researchers would be dependent on that company continuing to produce that specific formulation, with no ability to reverse-engineer it if the company went out of business or changed the formula.

On the other hand – and I’m trying to be fair here – commercial standardisation serves important purposes in clinical practice. At Bourn Hall, once we’d established reliable protocols, we needed consistency. We were training new embryologists, treating multiple patients simultaneously, trying to achieve reproducible results. If every embryologist was mixing their own media with slight variations, outcomes would vary depending on who was on duty that day. That’s unacceptable in a clinical setting. Patients deserve standardised care where success rates reflect the procedure itself, not which technician happened to prepare the media that morning.

Commercial media, properly validated, provides that standardisation. It also reduces the risk of contamination – one of our constant fears. Despite all our precautions, we occasionally had bacterial contamination, usually traced to water quality or environmental sources. A sealed bottle of commercially prepared medium, manufactured in controlled conditions and batch-tested, is almost certainly safer than anything I could mix in a hospital laboratory.

So if I’d had access to commercial media in the 1970s, would I have used it? For routine clinical work at Bourn Hall, absolutely. The benefits – time savings, consistency, reduced contamination risk – would have outweighed the loss of flexibility. But for research, for troubleshooting, for pushing the boundaries of what was possible, I’d still want the ability to mix my own formulations, to modify components, to understand intimately what I was working with.

What worries me about the current situation isn’t commercial media per se – it’s over-reliance on it to the point where embryologists lose the foundational knowledge of embryo metabolism and nutritional requirements. If you’ve never mixed media from components, do you understand what pyruvate does, or why bicarbonate buffering requires CO₂ atmosphere, or how osmolarity affects cell volume regulation? Or do you just know “use Medium X for cleavage stage, Medium Y for blastocyst stage” without understanding the biological principles underlying those formulations?

I’d want modern embryologists to learn the hard way first – mix media from scratch during training, experience the failures that come from incorrect formulations, develop an intuitive sense of how embryos respond to different conditions. Then, once they’ve got that deep knowledge, transition to commercial media for efficiency and safety. That way you’re not simply following protocols robotically. You’re making informed decisions based on understanding what embryos need and why.

There’s a parallel here to cooking, if you’ll forgive a domestic analogy. You can make a perfectly good meal using pre-mixed sauces and convenience foods. It’s faster, more consistent, less prone to catastrophic errors. But a chef who’s learned to make sauces from scratch – who understands how emulsification works, how to balance acidity and fat, how heat affects protein structure – that chef can improvise, adjust on the fly, create something extraordinary when all you’ve got are basic ingredients. I’d rather train chefs than people who heat up pre-made meals, even if the pre-made meals are technically excellent.

So to answer your question directly: commercial media would have accelerated our clinical success, probably by several years. We’d have had more consistent outcomes, fewer failed cycles due to media problems, faster establishment of Bourn Hall as a reliable treatment centre. But I don’t think we’d have understood embryo biology as deeply. And in the long run, that deep understanding is what enables the next generation of innovations – new culture strategies, improved formulations, solutions to problems we haven’t encountered yet.

The ideal, I suppose, is what you’re moving towards now: commercial products for routine use, based on decades of research into embryo metabolism, but with ongoing basic research to keep pushing our understanding forward. Just don’t let the convenience of ready-made solutions stop you from asking why they work, what might work better, and whether the manufacturers’ formulations are truly optimal or just good enough. Stay curious. Stay sceptical. And every so often, mix up a batch from scratch, just to remember what it feels like to build something from nothing.

Reflection

Jean Marian Purdy died on 16th March 1985 at Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge, aged just 39. Malignant melanoma had taken her swiftly, brutally, at the height of her professional contribution. A room had been arranged for her at Bourn Hall during her final illness so she could remain connected to the work that had defined her adult life. She died surrounded by the laboratory she had built, the protocols she had written, the colleagues she had trained – and the knowledge that over 500 babies had already been born through the techniques she pioneered. She could not have known that the number would eventually reach 12 million, nor that her name would be erased from official recognition for three decades after her death.

Throughout this conversation, certain themes emerged with persistent clarity. Purdy’s ingenuity wasn’t the dramatic sort celebrated in popular accounts of scientific breakthroughs – no eureka moments, no sudden flashes of insight. Instead, it was the painstaking, meticulous ingenuity of someone who weighed salts to the milligram, fire-polished pipette tips by hand, travelled 200 miles north week after week for a decade, and recorded every experimental detail in notebooks that would become the foundation of an entire field. Her perseverance operated on multiple registers: technical resilience through hundreds of failed cycles, personal courage in the face of religious condemnation and family estrangement, and professional determination to be recognised as a scientist rather than dismissed as “supporting staff.”

The erasure she experienced wasn’t passive forgetting but active suppression. Robert Edwards fought explicitly for her inclusion on the 1980 commemorative plaque, describing her as “an equal contributor” to himself and Patrick Steptoe. The Oldham Area Health Authority refused. That refusal reveals how institutional structures weaponise professional hierarchies – the label “nurse” became a mechanism for minimising scientific contributions that were indistinguishable from those of credentialed researchers. When Edwards received the Nobel Prize in 2010, the announcement mentioned Steptoe (also deceased and thus ineligible) whilst omitting Purdy entirely. The asymmetry exposes deeper patterns: women’s contributions depend on others’ advocacy in ways men’s do not, and when women die young, their voices vanish from the historical record at precisely the moment when their field achieves mainstream acceptance.

Where did Purdy’s perspective in this imagined interview differ from documented accounts? Most notably in her candour about mistakes, ethical uncertainties, and the emotional toll of the work. Historical records preserve her laboratory precision – the Oldham Notebooks contain thousands of data points meticulously recorded – but offer little access to her interior life. We don’t have letters expressing doubt, diaries revealing fear, or interviews where she acknowledged failures. Roger Gosden, who researched her story, noted that “as the assistant to a famous scientist and a gynaecologist (and being female) you didn’t have much visibility with biographers and the press.” Her archival silence means we must infer her experiences from context: the religious opposition IVF faced, the social stigma of working on reproductive medicine, the isolation of being the only woman in the core research team.

The historical record contains significant gaps and uncertainties. We cannot definitively confirm whether Purdy had endometriosis, though the 2024 Netflix film Joy depicts her struggling with the condition. We don’t know the precise nature of her estrangement from her mother or expulsion from her church – these details come from fragmentary accounts and reasonable inference rather than documented evidence. We also lack her own voice on key questions: Did she resent being characterised as Edwards’ “helper”? Did she feel the Nobel omission was unjust, or would she have accepted it as inevitable given the prize’s posthumous policy? What did she think about the commercial direction of IVF, or the accessibility barriers that prevented many couples from accessing treatment?

What we do know is that her technical contributions were foundational and enduring. The role of clinical embryologist, which didn’t exist before her, is now a recognised profession with dedicated training programmes, professional societies like the Association of Clinical Embryologists, and specialised master’s degrees offered at universities worldwide. Modern embryologists still follow protocols she established: meticulous culture media preparation (even when using commercial products), careful embryo handling techniques, precise environmental control, detailed record-keeping. The research tradition she helped establish continues through institutions like Bourn Hall, which remains operational and has overseen the birth of tens of thousands of IVF babies since its founding in 1980.

Recognition came eventually, though too late for her to witness. In 2015, thirty years after her death, a blue plaque in Cambridge finally acknowledged her as co-developer of IVF alongside Edwards and Steptoe. In 2018, Louise Brown – the baby whose eight-celled embryo Purdy first observed dividing on 15th November 1977 – laid flowers on Purdy’s memorial headstone in Grantchester churchyard, a gesture of profound symbolic weight. In 2022, Bourn Hall dedicated a plaque honouring both Purdy and Muriel Harris, the theatre nurse similarly excluded from earlier commemorations, with officials explicitly describing the correction as addressing “historic injustice” and “discrimination.”

The 2024 Netflix film Joy brought Purdy’s story to mainstream audiences, introducing millions to a name that had been deliberately obscured. Thomasin McKenzie’s portrayal emphasised not just Purdy’s scientific contributions but her personal sacrifices – the family relationships severed, the faith community lost, the professional recognition denied. The film sparked renewed academic interest, educational initiatives, and public discussions about women’s erasure from scientific history. It placed Purdy in the company of other underrecognised women scientists – Rosalind Franklin in DNA structure, Lise Meitner in nuclear fission, Chien-Shiung Wu in particle physics – whose contributions were minimised or attributed to male colleagues.

Yet even belated recognition carries complications. Purdy’s story is now preserved primarily through Robert Edwards’ archived papers at Cambridge University, meaning his perspective dominates historical interpretation. Her own archive – if she kept one – has not survived or has not been made public. This imbalance perpetuates the pattern she experienced in life: her achievements filtered through others’ testimonies rather than presented in her own voice. Historians and biographers are left reconstructing her experiences from laboratory notebooks, co-authored publications, and the advocacy of colleagues who believed she deserved equal credit.

What might Purdy’s life and legacy offer young women pursuing science today? First, the reminder that credentialism matters less than contribution. Purdy trained as a nurse but functioned as a research embryologist, inventing methodologies and generating knowledge that transformed reproductive medicine. Her story challenges the notion that scientific legitimacy requires specific degrees or institutional positions – though it also exposes how lacking those credentials made her vulnerable to erasure. Second, her experience underscores the importance of documentation and visibility. Had Edwards not preserved letters protesting her omission from plaques, had he not insisted on including her name on publications, her contributions might have been lost entirely. Women in STEM must ensure their work is visible, credited, and preserved, not trusting that merit alone will secure recognition.

Third, Purdy’s collaboration with Edwards and Steptoe demonstrates that allyship matters. Edwards spent decades advocating for her equal recognition, writing letters that went ignored, giving lectures that insisted on the “threesome” partnership. Male colleagues who witness women’s erasure have a responsibility to use their privilege to demand correction, persistently and publicly. That Edwards’ advocacy failed to prevent initial erasure but eventually contributed to belated recognition shows both the limits and necessity of such efforts.

Fourth, Purdy’s story reveals that scientific breakthroughs require diverse expertise working in concert. Steptoe brought surgical skill in laparoscopy, Edwards brought theoretical knowledge of fertilisation biology, and Purdy brought laboratory precision, patient care, and the capacity to translate experimental procedures into reproducible clinical protocols. None could have succeeded alone. This interdependence challenges hierarchical models that privilege certain kinds of knowledge – theoretical over applied, credentialed over experiential – and suggests that scientific progress depends on valuing all contributions equally.

Finally, Purdy’s legacy is measured not in prizes or plaques but in the 12 million lives made possible by IVF. Every child born through fertility treatment owes their existence, in some measure, to the culture media she mixed, the pipettes she fire-polished, the embryos she observed dividing under her microscope. That living legacy continues growing – currently about 500,000 IVF babies are born globally each year, a number that would have astonished her. The families created, the grief of infertility alleviated, the futures made possible – that is vindication beyond any institutional recognition.

Jean Purdy spent ten years travelling to Oldham, often working alone late into the night, mixing solutions and monitoring incubators whilst the world slept. She witnessed the first cell division that would become Louise Brown, a moment of almost unbearable significance that she experienced in solitude before calling her colleagues. She died at 39, her name deliberately removed from commemorations of the work she had made possible. But the babies kept coming, generation after generation, their existence testimony to the woman who saw life divide and believed that work mattered more than recognition. She was wrong about the latter – recognition matters immensely, both for justice and for inspiring those who follow. But she was profoundly right about the former. The work endures. The lives she made possible continue. And now, finally, her name stands alongside Edwards and Steptoe, not as helper or assistant, but as equal partner in one of the twentieth century’s most transformative medical achievements. It took three decades too long, but Jean Marian Purdy is no longer forgotten.

Who have we missed?

This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind – and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way – whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher – please share her story.

Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion – even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.

Editorial Note: This interview is a dramatised reconstruction created from historical research, archival materials, and documented accounts of Jean Purdy‘s life and work. Jean Purdy died in 1985, making a contemporary conversation impossible. Her responses have been crafted based on published scholarship, the Oldham Notebooks archived at Cambridge University, co-authored scientific papers, contemporaneous accounts from Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, biographical research by historians including Roger Gosden, and publicly available records regarding her contributions to in vitro fertilisation.

Where historical evidence exists – such as her technical methodologies, laboratory protocols, and the institutional erasure she experienced – we have endeavoured to represent it faithfully. Where gaps appear in the record – particularly regarding her interior life, personal relationships, and emotional experiences – we have made informed inferences consistent with known biographical details and the social context of her era. Quotations attributed to Edwards and others are drawn from documented sources; dialogue and reflections attributed to Purdy herself are imagined, though grounded in her documented work and character.

This approach allows us to centre Purdy’s perspective in ways the historical record does not, given that her own archive has not survived or been made public. Readers should understand that whilst the scientific content reflects established historical fact, the voice, personality, and subjective experiences presented here represent interpretive reconstruction rather than verbatim testimony. Our aim is to honour her legacy by giving her the platform she was denied in life, whilst acknowledging the inherent limitations of speaking for someone who cannot speak for herself.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.