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World's first test tube baby marries
The world's first test tube baby has married and says she wants a child of her own. Louise Brown, 26, wed Wesley Mullinder, 34, in a ceremony on Saturday. Guest of honour at the wedding at the Church of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, was Dr Robert Edwards, who jointly invented the In-Vitro Fertilisation technique which led to Louise's birth. A delighted Louise said: "Yes, we are trying for a baby. It would be a dream come true for both of us. We're keeping our fingers crossed." Her birth on July 25, 1978, created headlines throughout the world and followed a decade of research on finding ways to fertilise human eggs outside the body. More than one million births worldwide have resulted from the pioneering technique. The Bristol postal worker was born by caesarean section at the Royal Oldham Hospital thanks to the efforts of Dr Edwards and the late Dr Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist at the hospital. In 1975, the two men succeeded in producing an IVF pregnancy. But the pregnancy was ectopic, developing in a Fallopian tube instead of the womb, and had to be terminated. Two years later Edwards and Steptoe removed a single ripe egg from the ovary of Louise's mother, Lesley, and fertilised it in a glass dish with sperm from her husband. The resulting embryo was implanted back into Lesley's body, and she became pregnant. Lesley had tried for nine years to have a baby with husband John before the successful IVF birth, and the couple later had their other daughter, Natalie, through the same process.
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