Test Tube Baby Turns 30...

...and makes me feel old!

From AFP:

The birth of Louise Brown, the world's first IVF baby, hit headlines around the globe three decades ago -- but the married mother-of-one wants to keep her 30th birthday Friday low-key by contrast.

Brown -- who lives in Bristol, south-west England, with husband Wesley Mullinder and 18-month-old son Cameron, working as a shipping company administrator -- remains reluctantly in the public eye despite her modest lifestyle.

Louise Joy Brown was born on July 25, 1978 at Oldham and District General Hospital in north-west England by Caesarean section, weighing five pounds 12 ounces (2.61 kilograms). Her younger sister Natalie, born four years later, was also an IVF baby, the 40th in the world.

Her parents, Lesley and John, had been trying to have children for nine years but could not because Lesley Brown's fallopian tubes were blocked.

The couple's breakthrough came when they heard about research being carried out by Cambridge University physiologist Robert Edwards and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and signed up with them for fertility treatment. Researchers created a fertilised embryo from the couple's egg and sperm in a laboratory and then implanted in Lesley Brown's womb.

Natalie Brown later went on to become the first IVF baby herself to give birth -- naturally -- in 1999. Louise married Mullinder, a nightclub doorman, in 2004 and had baby Cameron in 2006, also after a natural conception.

Hard to believe we've come so far since then.