This is the July 31, 1978 cover of Time magazine, heralding the origin of in vitro fertilization which had been made possible in the previous years with the efforts of Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe, Barry Bavister, and Jean Purdy. Purdy had been the one to actually create the first human embryo through IVF, and held the baby that grew out of that method, called Louise Joy Brown, who was delivered via caesarian section on July 28, 1978.
The research that had enabled IVF (for the record, the embryos are not developed in test tubes but in petri dishes) to be done was formulated on a trial-by-oocyte manner. What was only emerging in the late 1970s that would have been really helpful to know were the processes of cellular division — which proteins got synthesized at which times — because that made all the difference in determining which eggs could be successfully fertilized. Purdy had been cut out of being named as a major author on the 1969 Nature paper that went into detail with the IVF findings. She tragically died at age 39 of melanoma before seeing her work nominated for a Pulitzer Prize!
Sources: The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Scribner Press, 2022, pp 112-115
