- What medical applications eventually emerged from the isolation of oestrone, androsterone, and progesterone?
Reproductive Medicine
IVF, contraception, and the biology of reproduction.
- What roles did Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe each play in developing IVF over roughly a decade of failures?
- Why was Patrick Steptoe ineligible for the Nobel Prize eventually awarded for IVF?
- How did public and religious reaction to Louise Brown's birth range from jubilation to alarm?
- How many people had been born through IVF by 2018, and what does that scale reveal about the technique's impact?
- What did Cecil Jacobson allegedly do instead of using anonymous sperm donors at his fertility clinic?
- How was Jacobson's alleged conduct uncovered and how many children was he found to have fathered?
- What crimes was Cecil Jacobson convicted of in 1992?
- What obstacles did Robert Edwards face while developing in vitro fertilization from the 1950s onward?
- What role did gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe play in the birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown?
- How many children had been born through IVF by 2001, and how did that number change by Edwards's Nobel in 2010?
- What did the two honoured studies on Coca-Cola's contraceptive properties actually conclude, and how did they contradict each other?
- What biochemical mechanism might explain why an acidic, carbonated drink could affect sperm motility?
- How does the shape of the lower vertebrae let a pregnant woman's spine curve back to compensate for forward-shifted weight?
- Why should a pregnant person's centre of mass, by simple leverage, be expected to pitch them forward?
- What technical obstacles did Robert Edwards have to solve to fertilise a human egg outside the body?
- Who was Louise Brown and why does her 1978 birth matter scientifically?
- Why was Edwards's collaborator Patrick Steptoe absent from the Nobel ceremony?
- Roughly how many people alive today were conceived through IVF?
- Why did polyester trousers affect rats' sexual activity more than cotton or wool ones?
- What did Shafik's follow-up research on human volunteers find about fabric and fertility?
- What temperature asymmetry did Mieusset and Bengoudifa find between the left and right sides of the scrotum?
- Why is scrotal temperature asymmetry relevant to sperm production and fertility?
- What risk did older prenatal tests like amniocentesis carry that Dennis Lo's discovery eliminated?
- What did Dennis Lo discover in 1997 about fetal DNA in maternal blood?
- Why did it take until the early 2010s for non-invasive prenatal testing to reach clinical use?