A British scientist named Robert Edwards has won the Nobel
Medicine Prize for his work on in-vitro fertilisation. The
committee said that Edwards' work "represents a milestone in the
development of modern medicine". The 85-year-old scientist began
developing the process in the 1950s. Fertilisation outside of
the human body had previously eluded scientists, but Edwards
combined an egg and a sperm in a petri dish, and then
successfully implanted the resulting fertilised cell back in the
patient's uterus. The first person to be concieved using this
procedure was Louise Brown, in 1978. Since then, about four
million people have been born using IVF techniques, and it has a
live birth rate of about 27 percent, though that varies
dramatically based on the demographics and background of the
parents. Edwards also founded the first IVF centre in Cambridge,
the Bourn Hall Clinic. The Nobel jury added: "A new field of
medicine has emerged, with Robert Edwards leading the process
all the way from the fundamental discoveri