Quotes from Robert Edwards

Louise Brown's birth marked the end of the beginning of human IVF, acclaimed at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. This event was snubbed by some clinicians now styled as 'pioneers', who shouted that the test-tube claim was a fake! They did not matter.

I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory. It was us.

Never exaggerate your faults. Your friends will attend to that.

You are only what you are when no one is looking.

Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child which carries the heavy burden of genetic disease.

we concentrate our army into an enormous fist. The very fact that such a fist exists will prevent the enemy from dispersing his forces in a war of manoeuvre, he will not be given any opportunity to loosen the close 'interlinking' of his army; on the contrary, he will be forced to concentrate, to go over to the defence on as restricted an area as possible. In other words, we get conditions of a frontal war, we force the enemy to accept our view of the character of the war.

For the moment we have not informed the Finnish people of them, as we have not wished to make the negotiations more difficult through public discussion.

Since we cannot move Leningrad ... then we must move the border.

If the Germans come', Marshal Smigly-Rydz9 had stated only a month before, in August 1939, 'we lose our freedom. If the Russians come, we lose our souls.

The most important thing in life is having a child. Nothing is more special than a child.

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos.

It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly... this was the way to go in the human species.