The Debate Around IVF

One of the nice things about being a graduate is that your old university likes to remind you about it as often as possible in the form of alumni emails. This week, a newsletter from my former place of study, Glasgow University, tells me that the alumnus Robert Edwards has won the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year for pioneering in vitro fertilization (IVF).

IVF has been discussed quite a bit in the media in the last few years, especially here in the UK. Usually the coverage takes on the predictable mantra of "IVF: Blessing or Curse?" or something similar. This creates a nice media-style point of conflict while simultaneously, in my humble opinion, missing the point altogether. My view is IVF is undeniably a blessing: It has led to about one million babies who would otherwise not have existed. Despite the media hyperbole, this has generally benefitted young parents who wouldn't have been able to conceive otherwise, often leaving them with no other options (in the UK at least, it's notoriously difficult to adopt).

So are there legitimate criticisms of IVF and if so, what are they? To answer this question, it helps to take a look at history. Edwards and his colleagues ran into quite a few difficulties early on. The work wasn't seen as relevant by funding organizations which felt (perhaps rightly) that science should focus on solving the problems caused by overpopulation before looking at the issue of fertility. There were also predictable objections from the press, the scientific establishment, and the Catholic Church. Because of those question marks and opposition, funding for the research was obtained from private capital. And while private capital tends to be abundant, it has the disadvantage that its central aim is to make money. So while the much needed extra cash advanced the technology and led to its success, it also meant that as soon as IVF became profitable, there was little financial incentive to improve it. And because IVF is now readily available, it's offered to pretty much anyone who asks for it, often irrespective of whether it's likely to help them. In many cases, for example, problems in fertility are caused by damaged fallopian tubes or other issues for which IVF isn't in the least bit useful.

So while fellow graduates of the University of Glasgow should be proud to have Edwards as one of our own (even if, as I later found out, he was only there for a year or so!), we should at the same time recognize the real problems with IVF. The story of IVF shows that successful science often has as much to do with brilliance and creativity as it has to do with financing and profits — those who put money into it and those who get money from it. The lesson from IVF is clear. When private finance takes over science, we shouldn't be surprised if there are problems with how it's applied to public issues. Thirty years on, we see other big projects like the Human Genome Project being taken on by private finance partly because the public route is seen as too inefficient. It's impossible to know whether in 30 years we'll see similar problems here to what we've seen with IVF, but it's certainly something we should have the sense to consider.

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