It is wonderful news that Dr. Robert G. Edwards and Dr. Patrick Steptoe won the Nobel Prize for medicine. Their research has helped millions of couples around the world and I am personally grateful to them for allowing us the chance to have a family.

The NY Times article talking about their accomplishments also talked about the challenges they faced.

Both Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe had to endure an unremitting barrage of criticism while developing their technique. Dr. Steptoe “faced immense clinical criticism over his laparoscopy, even being isolated at clinical meetings in London,” Dr. Edwards wrote in the journal Nature Medicine in 2001 after receiving the Lasker award. “Ethicists decried us, forecasting abnormal babies, misleading the infertile and misrepresenting our work as really acquiring human embryos for research.”

What does this remind you of? So many parallels to the debates that rage today…

If the conservative right-wing was in charge, science would not progress on so many dimensions. If they had got their way back in the ’70s and ’80s, there would be an incredible number of childless couples today.

Let’s all be thankful that they didn’t win then and I hope they don’t win now.