Energetic pioneer of IVF whose work led to the birth of the first 'test-tube baby' in 1978
Sir Robert Edwards, who has died aged 87 after a long illness, brought about the most significant advance in the history of infertility treatment. This was achieved through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), with the human egg being fertilised by sperm outside the body. His research partner in this work was Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988, and so could not join him in 2010 in being awarded the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.
A modest, affable, argumentative and generous Yorkshireman, known to friends and colleagues as Bob, he demonstrated energy, determination and rigour in the study of human reproduction. Questions of human egg maturation and its anomalies, and achieving human fertilisation in vitro, came to dominate his interests during his early days in Cambridge. He arrived there in 1963 from the biochemistry department of Glasgow University, and two years later published a remarkable paper in the Lancet that laid out the course of IVF studies for the next 20 to 30 years.
In 1968, he established the viability of preimplantation genetic diagnosis – checking embryos for genetic defects before they are implanted – in an animal model, an approach that was not applied to early human embryos until more than two decades later. During his time at Glasgow, Bob had isolated stem cells from early rabbit embryos, work which similarly displayed the farsightedness that pervaded his research.
Also in 1968, Bob forged a key partnership with Patrick, a gynaecologist from Oldham, in Lancashire, and a pioneer of keyhole surgery. Together with Jean Purdy, their nurse-technician, and their patients, the two pioneers proceeded to achieve IVF, resulting in the birth of Louise Brown, the first "test-tube baby", on 25 July 1978.
They faced obstacles that would have deterred a less determined pair, for not only was the work demanding clinically and scientifically, but they were given no financial support from UK funding bodies, and were regularly attacked not just by religious leaders and the press but also by most of their scientific and clinical colleagues. As a graduate student of Bob's, I well remember being ostracised at meetings and in the departmental tearoom for my association with him.
Louise Brown's arrival marked the beginning of a positive change, albeit a slow one, in attitudes to Bob and Patrick's work. Nowadays, IVF and related forms of assisted conception are so commonplace as to hardly raise comment in most quarters. By the time of the Nobel prize, more than 4.5 million babies had been born as a result of their pioneering initiative.
Bob was born one of three sons into a working-class home in the Yorkshire mill town of Batley. His father laboured on the Settle to Carlisle railway, while his mother was a machinist in a local mill. She had come from Manchester, and after the family relocated there the boys all obtained scholarships to attend Manchester Central High School for Boys.
In 1943, Bob had his education interrupted by conscription and second world war service, mostly in Palestine. On demob in 1948, he was already a mature student when he read agricultural science at the University College of North Wales at Bangor. Disillusioned with the course, which he found was devoid of scientific rigour, he switched to zoology after two years, but was devastated in 1951 to obtain only a pass degree.
This scarring experience might have blighted his academic prospects had it not been for the passion that was noticed by Prof Conrad Waddington, who accepted him for a diploma and then a PhD in genetics at Edinburgh University. Bob's initial work in this field focused on the possibility that birth defects might arise through errors in chromosomal segregation during egg maturation or fertilisation, and he worked with Ruth Fowler, whom he married in 1954, to demonstrate that eggs could be induced to mature chromosomally according to a predictable schedule by hormone treatment.
After spells working on contraceptive development at the California Institute of Technology (1957-58) and the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, north London (1958-62), Bob spent a year at Glasgow and then moved to Cambridge, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.
As well as being an experimentalist and keeping abreast of the scientific literature in such diverse fields as immunology, embryology, genetics and endocrinology, Bob was also a prolific writer and a groundbreaking promoter of the public awareness of science and of its role in overcoming infertility and genetic disease. Early and continuing ethical challenges to his work also prompted Bob to think and publish widely about reproductive bioethics – a subject of which he was truly a father figure.
He also drove the foundation of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology and its journals. These he edited for many years, and then in 2000 set up a new e-journal, Reproductive BioMedicine Online, with emphasis on rapid publication and the airing of controversies.
His almost inexhaustible vitality, combined with a passionate belief in humanity, socialism and people's inherent common sense, enabled him time to engage in local politics: for a five-year period he was a Labour councillor. Elected FRS in 1984 and made professor of human reproduction in 1985, he was knighted in 2011.
Bob was sad that Patrick was not able to share the Nobel prize with him. Since he was not in good enough health to collect it personally in Stockholm, I took his place in opening the Nobel symposium in his honour. It was a privilege and a pleasure to know him for almost half a century, and he will be sorely missed.
He is survived by Ruth; by his five daughters, Caroline, Jenny, Sarah, Meg and Anna; and by 12 grandchildren.
• Robert Geoffrey Edwards, infertility researcher, born 27 September 1925; died 10 April 2013