She was the third person who made IVF. The hospital left her off the plaque.
In vitro fertilisation was built by three people. Two of them are on the plaque.
The third was Jean Purdy.
She joined the physiologist Robert Edwards and the gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe in 1968, and she stayed through the decade of failure that came before the success. IVF did not work at first. There were years of attempts, of embryos that did not take, of a technique invented one careful step at a time. Purdy, a trained nurse and embryologist, ran the embryo culture and the laboratory work the whole effort depended on. She was the first human being to watch the cells of an embryo divide outside the body.
On 25 July 1978, Louise Brown was born, the first child conceived by IVF. The work had changed the world, and Purdy had been there for every year of it.
She was no assistant. She co-authored 26 scientific papers with Edwards and Steptoe. When the three of them opened Bourn Hall Clinic in 1980, the first IVF clinic anywhere in the world, she was its technical director and a founder. By any honest measure of the word, she was the third creator of IVF.
Then the record began to close around her.
When a commemorative plaque was placed at the Oldham hospital where the work had been done, it named Steptoe and Edwards. Purdy was left off. For roughly thirty years, the public story of IVF was a story of two men.
This was not an oversight that no one noticed at the time. Robert Edwards saw it, and he objected. In 1980 he wrote to the Oldham Area Health Authority and asked that Purdy be named on the plaque alongside him and Steptoe. The Authority refused. He wrote again. He was refused again. He put it on the record that she was equally responsible for the work. The plaque went up with two names anyway.
Here is what makes this case unusual, and worth telling carefully. The men did not steal her credit. They fought for it. The party that erased her was the institution.
And the argument survives, because Edwards kept the letters. They are held in his papers at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, catalogued and made public around 2019. They show a senior scientist arguing, in writing and more than once, that his woman colleague deserved equal standing, and a health authority declining to give it. The documents never state a reason. The archivist who catalogued them offered the likeliest one without softening it: it “probably had quite a bit to do with the fact she was a nurse, an embryologist and a woman.”
The correction came late, and only after the paper trail surfaced. By then all three were beyond the reach of the usual honors. Purdy had died of cancer in 1985, at 39. Steptoe died in 1988. When the Nobel Prize for the development of IVF was finally awarded in 2010, it went to Edwards alone, because the prize is not given to the dead.
Since 2019 the record has moved. A plaque now names Purdy. Louise Brown has honoured her in public. In 2024 her part in the story reached a wide audience on film. The record that held two names for thirty years now holds three.
It took the institution’s own refusal, preserved on paper, to force it.
This is the short version. The full investigation, with the paper trail, is Case File No. 01.