On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown was born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Lancashire — the world's first human being conceived through in vitro fertilization. The birth made global headlines. Almost none of them correctly credited the person most responsible for the foundational scientific breakthrough.

Miriam Menkin was an American embryologist who, in 1944, achieved the first successful in vitro fertilization of a human egg — a discovery published in Science and then quietly ignored for three decades. Menkin worked for Dr. John Rock at Harvard, performing the painstaking manual work of observing, timing, and manipulating ova in laboratory conditions for years before achieving the fertilization. Rock published the paper. The discovery was attributed to him.

The 1978 birth of Louise Brown resulted from the work of Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, who built on decades of subsequent IVF research including Menkin's foundation. Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010. Steptoe had died in 1988. Menkin was not in the Nobel citation.

The nurse-embryologist who was Steptoe and Edwards' laboratory partner for years, Jean Purdy, had been essential to their experimental protocol. Edwards campaigned for Purdy's inclusion in the Nobel; she was excluded because she had died in 1985, and the Nobel does not recognize deceased recipients.

Louise Brown is 47 years old and has two sons, both conceived naturally.