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But pickings were slim; the Browns had made a deal, estimated at $565,000, that allowed only reporters from the London Daily Mail to have access to the Brown family. Doctors and hospital personnel were also exasperatingly inaccessible. Frustration ran high, and after a bomb threat was called in to the hospital, there were rumors that it had been made by a reporter or photographer who, as a last resort, planned to intercept Lesley Brown as she was being evacuated from the building. (She was indeed moved, but only to a different part of the hospital.) Snarled a hospital guard at a cluster of reporters who had stationed themselves just under Lesley Brown's room: "You bastards, don't you care about the baby?"
In fact, journalists as well as the public cared all too much. As the Oldham Evening Chronicle commented: "It was not unnatural that the world's press should scramble for information.
People want to know, and have a right to be curious about such things." Indeed, long before anyone heard of Huxley or even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster, people were fascinated and frightened by the prospects of creating life outside the womb.
A 16th century rabbi in Prague was thought by later generations to have been endowed with mystical powers that enabled him to create a golem, or artificial man, at will. Perhaps the most famous of these legends is that of Faust and Homunculus, the little manlike creature that was created in a vial.
Yet for all the breathlessness and hyperbole in the British press — "We could get baby farms, mass-produced kids, 1984 six years early!" exclaimed London Daily Express Editor Derek Jameson— the Brown venture fell far short of ushering in a Brave New World. Like countless other women with fertility problems, Lesley Brown suffered from a fallopian tube disorder. In their al most fanatic insistence on secrecy, her doctors declined to say whether the tubes were missing or merely blocked. Whatever the trouble, it was apparently serious enough to prevent her from becoming pregnant.
Under normal circumstances, pregnancy occurs when an ovum, or egg cell, released by a woman's ovary during ovulation is fertilized as it passes through the fallopian tube, successfully penetrated by just a single sperm that has traveled through the uterus. After the fertilized egg undergoes a number of cell divisions, the tiny clump of cells enters the uterus, where it burrows into the wall and develops for nine months or so until birth.
To bypass Lesley Brown's fallopian tubes, Oldham Hospital's Steptoe, 65, a highly respected gynecologist, and his colleague, Cambridge University Physiologist Robert Edwards, 52, undertook a remarkable procedure they have been experimenting with for a decade. They removed a ripe egg from Mrs. Brown's ovary, placed it in a laboratory dish and added sperm from her husband. After incubating the ovum as it began to divide, they finally placed the developing embryo in the uterus, where it became implanted and continued to grow into a fetus in what seemed to be an entirely normal way.