- “Joy” is about the British doctors who helped conceive the first IVF baby.
- The Netflix movie stars Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie, and James Norton.
- Here’s where Louise Brown, the first IVF baby, is now.
“Joy” is about the British doctors who helped conceive the first baby using IVF treatment in the late 1970s.
The Netflix movie stars Bill Nighy as Patrick Steptoe, the director of the Centre for Human Reproduction, Thomasin McKenzie as Jean Purdy, an embryologist, and James Norton as Robert Edwards, a physiologist.
The trio started working on IVF in the late 1960s when Steptoe started collecting egg cells from women and using sperm to fertilize them artificially at the Centre for Human Reproduction in Oldham, near Manchester in northwest England. He worked with Purdy and Edwards for almost a decade to try to help women get pregnant using the technique.
The New York Times reported that the team made 100 unsuccessful attempts to implant embryos using volunteers before they were finally successful.
In 1977, Bristol couple Lesley and John Brown came to the clinic after trying for nine years to have a baby.
After implanting Brown with a fertilized embryo, Purdy was the first person to see the embryo’s cell division, which later became the Browns’ first child.
Louise Brown was born in 1978
Leon Neal/Getty Images
Louise Joy Brown was born on July 25, 1978, with her middle name giving the Netflix movie its title. She’s often called the world’s first “test-tube baby,” although she was actually conceived in a petri dish.
Brown is an ambassador for IVF, and is “passionate about breaking the silence on all things fertility and ending the taboo about getting help for fertility issues or being born through scientific means,” according to her website.
She lives in Bristol and has two sons who were conceived naturally.
In an interview at Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre this year to coincide with the play “A Child of Science,” Brown said: “Steptoe and Edwards were like grandfathers to me growing up. Patrick died when I was quite young; I last saw him when we did the Wogan show together, and he held my hand alongside other babies that he and Bob had brought into the world at Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridgeshire, which they opened after my birth.”
She added, “Bob Edwards I was able to get to know as an adult. He came to my wedding and was the first person I rang when I got pregnant after my parents. I knew him and his family as friends. Unfortunately, Jean Purdy died at the age of 39 and I did not know her.”
Purdy died in 1985.
