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For Steptoe and Edwards, the Browns' baby, apparently normal and so near birth, was a long-sought goal: in scores of previous transfers of externally fertilized eggs, a successful, full-term pregnancy had never been achieved. To many other doctors, including rival researchers, the feat was a stunning achievement.
If the baby is born normal and healthy, they pointed out, it will give new hope to women who have been unable to conceive be cause of tubal difficulties. In the U.S. alone, as many as 10% of all married women who want to bear children cannot. Possibly a third of these are infertile because of blocked tubes that cannot be surgically repaired.
For many scientists, there were even more sweeping ramifications. They noted that in-vitro fertilization techniques may give researchers an important new laboratory tool for devising ways of coping with genetic diseases, testing new methods of contraception and, perhaps most important of all, studying close up one of nature's most awesome and still baffling processes: the first stirrings of life. Said one leading specialist on reproductive physiology, Dr. Carl Pauerstein of the University of Texas, of the British work: "It has the potential for adding greatly to the knowledge of the reproductive biology of our species."
Other researchers were far more skeptical of going beyond in-vitro fertilization to the actual implantation of the developing embryo in the uterus. "The potential for misadventure is unlimited," said Dr. John Marshall, head of obstetrics and gynecology at Los Angeles County's Harbor General Hospital. How sure could anyone be that the Browns' baby will not be deformed, he asked. "What if we got an otherwise perfectly formed individual that was a cyclops? Who is responsible? The parents? The doctor? Is the government obligated to take care of it?"
There was also widespread criticism of the secrecy in which the work of Steptoe and Edwards was conducted. The Uni versity of Pennsylvania's Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, who has him self fertilized eggs in vitro but never attempted to implant them, points out that the British researchers had not provided any details about the condition of Mrs. Brown's fallopian tubes. "If they are completely absent," said Mastroianni, "you must accept the fact that the egg was fertilized in vitro. But if they are just damaged, there's always the possibility that the egg may actually have been fertilized in vivo [in the body] — that the tubes may have functioned again." Sir John Stallworthy, president of the British Medical Association's board of science, agreed that the sensational claim "requires irrefutable proof."