Science Editor

Over the weekend, the media was rife with speculation that following last year's controversial decision to award the prize to President Barack Obama after just nine months in office, the Nobel peace prize jury would select a "low-key" winner this year.

If so, the peace prize jury's desire for, well, peace about the prize itself was not shared by the members of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute. The 2010 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to British scientist Robert G. Edwards on Monday "for the development of in vitro fertilization."

Even by the standards of the often glacial Nobel Assembly, Edwards' honor comes late.

The first IVF-conceived baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978 and by now has a (naturally conceived) child of her own. And even in 1978, Brown's birth marked the culmination of two decades of work.

Edwards, a basic researcher, wanted to apply his work on fertilization in animals to treating human infertility. But success remained elusive until he combined his work with advances made by his colleague, clinical researcher Patrick Steptoe, in laparoscopy.

In 1970, Edwards and Steptoe showed that laparoscopy, a then-novel minimally invasive technique, allowed eggs to be retrieved from infertile women at the correct stage of development.

The work of Edwards and Steptoe (who died in 1998 and so does not share the prize) originally met fierce opposition from religious groups purporting to know God's will on reproductive matters, as well as skepticism from fellow scientists concerned with more easily testable questions about the health of the embryos.

Much, though not all, of the criticism of IVF itself has disappeared in the face of the technology's success at delivering healthy babies to otherwise infertile couples – to date, for an estimated 4 million times. But Edwards' work enabled several other technologies that remain controversial.

Among them are preimplantation diagnostics and cloning, but most notably embryonic stem cell research – which in the U.S. remain on a political roller coaster. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 30, 2010.)

Edwards, who is living in a senior residence and is in frail health, did not give the usual press conference on the occasion of winning the Nobel Prize on Monday.

But like so many Nobelists before him, Edwards' Nobel Prize followed a Lasker Award – in this case, by nine years: Edwards won the 2001 Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award. In an interview posted to the Lasker Foundation website, Edwards talked frankly about his work's ethical implications.

"I still have these complex ethical difficulties within me," he told the interviewer in 2001, though "I don't usually formulate them because we have passed many of them" in practice.

The crux of the matter, he said, is "how do you value fetal human life? This is the fundamental question that faced us the very first day when we added sperm to eggs to fertilize them . . . and this of course has divided nations."

Given his own career, Edwards in some respects has a surprisingly conservative answer to how to value human fetal life.

Indeed, his own team ultimately "decided we could not use embryos from our patients for research . . . the embryos were not chattel. No one could give them away."

Which is not to say that Edwards opposes stem cell research. His 2001 interview was given shortly after a key decision by then-President George W. Bush on embryonic stem cell funding.

That decision – which allowed federally funded research to continue with embryonic stem cell lines derived before a certain date – won wide praise at the time as being balanced and permitting embryonic stem cell research to move forward while setting limits. (See BioWorld Today, Aug. 13, 2001.)

But even though Edwards praised that the 2001 decision "should relieve the immediate problem for the research," he also said that it skirted the core issue.

That core issue, he said, is that "to do the work, the person in the laboratory . . . [has] to make their own individual decision to go ahead. That is the basics of the ethics of scientific research."

In a take that is still worth considering for those making stem cell research decisions today, Edwards added that "I think it is a compromise of ethics, because [then-president Bush] relies on other people making the personal decision to go ahead to make [embryonic stem cells] and compromise their own ethical situation, and he pays money to get them, you see. It's not a happy decision, and I hope one day he will go the full hog, and say we must do embryo research. I think so. I hope he can go that far."