Father of
IVF Robert Edwards passes away
British
scientist Robert Edwards, known as ‘father’ of world’s first test-tube baby
breathed his last on Wednesday, the Cambridge University announced. The
87-year-old died following prolonged illness. Edwards, who was awarded Nobel
Prize for his pioneering work in developing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) along
with his colleague Patrick Steptoe, led to the birth of the first ‘test-tube
baby’ Louise
Brown in 1978, Xinhua reported.
The
invention made millions of childless couples’ dream come true worldwide, as
figures show about four million babies have been born with the help of IVF
treatment. In India, IVF was popularised last year thanks to
Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao opting for the procedure and publicly admitting it.
‘It
is with deep sadness the family announces that Professor Sir Robert Edwards,
Nobel prize winner, scientist and co-pioneer of IVF, passed away peacefully in
his sleep April 10, 2013 after a long illness,’ a statement from Cambridge
university said.
Born
in Yorkshire in northern England Sep 27, 1925, into a working-class family,
Edwards served in the British army during World War II before returning home to
study first agricultural sciences and then animal genetics. Building on earlier
research which showed that egg cells from rabbits could be fertilised in test
tubes when sperm was added, Edwards developed the same technique for humans.
In
a laboratory in Cambridge, eastern England, in 1968, he first saw life created
outside the womb in the form of a human blastocyst, an embryo that has
developed for five to six days after fertilisation. He was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society, Britain’s foremost science institution, in 1984. He was also
appointed an emeritus professor at Cambridge in 1989.
12.04.2013
This gen adults less healthy than
previous
Despite their greater life
expectancy, the adults of today are less "metabolically" healthy than their counterparts of previous
generations, according to a new study from the Netherlands.
Assessing
the trends, the investigators concluded that "the more recently born generations
are doing worse", and warn "that the prevalence of metabolic risk factors and the
lifelong exposure
to them have increased and probably will continue to increase".
The study analysed data on more than 6,000 individuals in the Doetinchem Cohort Study, which began in 1987 with follow-up examinations after six, 11, and 16 years.(1,2) The principal risk factors measured were body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol levels (for hypercholesterolaemia) and levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, which is considered "protective".
The subjects were stratified by sex and generation at baseline into ten-year age groups (20, 30, 40, and 50 years); the follow-up analyses aimed to determine whether one generation had a different risk profile from a generation born ten years earlier - what the investigators called a "generation shift".
Results showed that the prevalence of overweight, obesity, and hypertension increased with age in all generations, but in general the more recently born generations had a higher prevalence of these risk factors than generations born ten years earlier.
For example, 40 per cent of the males who were in their 30s at baseline were classified as overweight; 11 years later the prevalence of overweight among the second generation of men in their 30s had increased to 52 per cent (a statistically significant generational shift). In women these unfavourable changes in weight were only evident between the most recently born generations, in which the prevalence of obesity doubled in just 10 years.
The
study was recently presented in the European Journal of Preventive
Cardiology.
12.04.2013
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