Assisted Reproductive Technology or A.R.T. has completely revolutionized infertility treatment.

Indeed, until 1978, infertility treatment involved very rudimentary therapies with very low probability of success, such as the surgical therapy for fallopian tube obstruction – which is hardly ever practiced nowadays.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a few teams of scientists were seeking new techniques to treat infertility.

Among these teams were:

• The English team of the biologist, Prof. Robert Edwards (Nobel Prize for medicine) and the gynecologist Patrick Steptoe;
• The Australian team of the biologist, Prof. Alex Lopata and the gynecologist Prof. Carl Wood.

The two teams tried to develop extracorporeal fertilization for humans.

After many years and hundreds of unsuccessful attempts, the English team made a breakthrough and the world’s first birth following an extracorporeal in vitro fertilization (IVF) took place in England in 1978 with the birth of a baby girl, the famous Louise Brown.

Since then, while the probability of success in IVF used to be 2-3%, there has been a gradual growth to more satisfactory results of about 30% per attempt over the past 40 years.