Professor Alan Trounson never planned on working with babies, let alone making them in a test tube.
Alan was working on farms, doing his PhD on reproduction in sheep, when he first met Professor Carl Wood, a gynecologist who was trying to find a way to help infertile women conceive. When he joined Professor Wood’s team, he brought along the technology that he’d developed in animals.
“I thought this would work in a human,” Professor Trounson tells Insight’s Jenny Brockie on this week’s . “I’d done this in pigs and horses and sheep and cows … I thought the human can’t be that different.”
But Alan faced strong resistance from other scientists, who thought his methods – using fertility drugs to control ovulation, for example – were destined to fail.
Others disagreed with IVF, too – an unusual coalition between the Catholic Church, who felt Alan and his colleagues were ‘playing God’, and radical feminists, who believed scientists were manipulating women’s bodies for their personal gain.
“The kind of things we were doing, everybody else thought was crazy,” says Trounson. “But it worked, and it worked well.”
Professor Alan Trouson and Anthea Polson Source: Insight
Alan’s optimistic approach to science helped lead to the first IVF babies born in Australia in 1980, and his controversial methods became the standard techniques used worldwide.
Anthea Polson was one of the first women to undergo the then experimental procedure. “I thought I was going to be a bit of a guinea pig,” she tells Insight. But even she didn’t think it would work. Anthea’s daughter, born in 1981, was the third IVF baby in Australia, and the fifth in the world. “I was flabbergasted,” Anthea says. “We don’t think we’re going to be the lucky ones.”
Alan went on to make breakthroughs with embryonic stem cells and cancer therapies, and IVF went on to become a standard procedure and a booming industry.
Over 7 million babies have now been born through IVF, through the break-through work of people like Professor Trouson and Anthea Polson. | - Catch up online now:
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