The Director ... continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity ... actually showed them ... how the eggs ... were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how ... this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillion containing free-swimming spermatozoa ...
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
To millions of people in Britain and elsewhere around the world last week, it seemed as if Huxley's prophetic vision had become reality. Banner headlines in Britain called it OUR MIRACLE and BABY OF THE CENTURY. On television newscasts in Europe and the U.S., stories about an obscure British couple and the abstruse subject of embryology shouldered aside items about the Middle East, international trade balances and inflation. Some commentators heralded the coming birth as a miracle of modern medicine, comparable to the first kidney and heart transplants. Theologians—and more than a few prominent scientists—sounded warnings about its disturbing moral, ethical and social implications. Others, made wary by the recent cloning hoax, remained unconvinced that the child about to be born was indeed the world's first baby conceived in a test tube.
The center of all the furor was a four-story red brick building in the old textile mill town of Oldham in the northwest region of England. There, in a guarded room of the maternity section of Oldham and District General Hospital, Lesley Brown, 30, a resident of Bristol, was being tended in her final month of pregnancy. For nine years she and her husband Gilbert John, 38, a van driver for British Rail, had futilely tried to have a child. Now, finally, the Browns were on the verge of achieving their hearts' desire—in a most spectacular manner. Early in August, she is due to give birth by natural means to a child that her doctors say was conceived not in her body but in vitro (in glass) in a medical laboratory.
In anticipation of that scientifically assisted blessed event, normally quiet Oldham (pop. 227,000) last week was in a state of siege. From as far off as Japan, scores of reporters and cameramen had converged on the town to be on hand for the birth of Baby Brown. Despite pleas from the doctors that the hullabaloo was endangering both mother and child, journalists steadfastly prowled the hospital's precincts. They were seeking any morsel of news. Perhaps a brief word with one of the doctors responsible for the Brown experiment: Patrick Steptoe, who came and went daily in his white Mercedes, dodging in and out of the hospital's side doors to avoid the press. Or a chat with the equally elusive father. Or, scoop of scoops, a photograph of Lesley Brown peeking from behind her carefully curtained window.