<b>July 27 2003</b> – Amid a cloud of red balloons and ribbons, more than 1,000 children – each of them a unique laboratory creation – ate burgers, watched a brass band and played on a bouncy castle yesterday. The largest gathering of children and young adults born using fertility techniques gathered in the grounds of a stately home in Cambridge to celebrate their existence and provide a testament to the fertility specialists who defied the odds 25 years ago by bringing the first of them into the world. 'We are not anti-life, we are pro-life', declared Professor Bob Edwards, the feisty doctor who – along with Patrick Steptoe, who died 15 years ago – created the world's first test-tube baby, Louise Brown. At 77, the man who was initially labelled the anti-Christ for daring to work on embryos was still full of vigour and ideas, as he joined Louise and his other babies on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her birth.
At times, it was hard to comprehend the scale of this achievement. Hundreds of children who followed in Louise's footsteps swarmed across the lawn of Bourn Hall – now a fertility clinic. Some were recalcitrant teenagers in punk T-shirts, like Sam Cheney. Others, tiny babies like 13-week-old twins Antonia and Henry Veary, were asleep and unaware of their heritage.
For Louise herself, the entire day – and the ensuing media scramble – appeared a bit too much. The shy, softly spoken postal worker with a Bristol accent and a fiancé at home, cut the birthday cake for the photographers, but said she found it hard to cope with all the fame. How would she would describe the publicity? 'Weird,' she replied. 'But it's nice to be here.'
The party was such a happy occasion, it disguised years of sadness and grief for infertile couples who had spent so long trying to conceive. One of those who remembered clearly was Fiona Drewe, whose two strapping boys, Nick, 21, and Anthony, 17, were at the event.
'I remember women crying on the wards. The tears were awful,' she recalled. 'For some of the women, nothing could be done. But Patrick Steptoe was so sympathetic, and he never did it for the money. We were one of the very lucky couples; look at my boys now.'
The sense of the sheer luck involved in the gruelling, highly emotional biological race that is fertility treatment was not lost on anyone at yesterday's party. Even now, there is only a one-in-four chance of conceiving through IVF, although the success rates are slowly creeping up, at around one per cent a year.
But Edwards' moving account of what the earliest days were like when they had no real idea how fertilisation worked suggest that Louise's conception was indeed a minor miracle.
Since 1960, Edwards had been working on the human egg. The first creation of an embryo using in vitro fertilisation took place in 1969, but then the question arose of how would eggs actually be collected from the human womb. Edwards read about a maverick called Steptoe, who had devised a probe known as a laparoscope. Steptoe and Edwards realised that if this device, which is inserted through the abdomen, could reach the woman's fallopian tubes, it could also reach the ovaries where the eggs were stored.
Day by day, Edwards would find women so desperate for children that they were willing to submit to the process of having their eggs 'harvested'. One of those was Lesley Brown, who had moved to Oldham with her husband John and was childless. 'By the time we met the Browns, there was only one obstacle in the way,' he recalled yesterday. 'We needed a uterus that was prepared and needed no hormonal support. we knew that if we could get that single egg out of Lesley, there was a chance.'
Louise's mother had been told her chances of conceiving naturally were a million to one, because her fallopian tubes had been surgically removed. In 1977, Edwards managed to harvest her eggs, and drove over to his laboratory in Cambridge, holding the tube by his side to keep the eggs warm and useable.
Five days after the sperm had been added to the egg. Edwards looked down his microscope and saw five balls of cells, blastocysts, floating in fluid. He thought it might work.
So did Lesley. A quiet woman, she said: 'As soon as [the embryo] was implanted, I felt as if I was in a cocoon. I was warm and comfortable, and I was sure. I always thought it would work.'
Her hopes were fulfilled, and at 11.47pm on 25 July, 1978, Louise was born in a packed operating theatre at Oldham General Hospital. The doctors were relieved to see she was perfect. Had there been a deformity, their critics would have screamed at them that it was the result of their monstrous techniques.
From there, the science has rushed on – and so have social attitudes. There are now an estimated 1.5 million babies who have been born using IVF, and each year brings a new breakthrough in our understanding of infertility.
Edwards believes people should not be afraid, although he acknowledges the science moves at a dizzying pace.
'We have done more in the past five years than in the previous 50,' he said. 'Over the next 50 years, the world will be totally different again. You must expect that there will be arguments for years to come, and we have to communicate with our patients and keep their confidence.'
He believes cloning of humans may well come about, despite the widespread revulsion at it. 'One day cloning may have to be used. We have to face this fact, it won't go away,' he says.
The greatest problem with IVF, he thinks, is that only 20 per cent of embryos implant in the womb. 'This has bugged us for 25 years. We suspected it when Louise was born and we now know it's a factor. It seems an absurd fact of nature; it's a conundrum.'
But all the conundrums were put on one side yesterday – for a short while, as parents simply enjoyed the party and relished the fact they had beaten the odds.
David Cheney, whose son Sam was born as a result of a frozen sperm sample, said: 'People can talk about this openly now. I feel no shame or embarrassment, and my son won't either. He has enriched our lives more than we can say.'