Patrick Steptoe, the British physician who invented IVF and whose work was rewarded with a Nobel prize has been accused of secretly impregnating mothers using the sperm of a scientist who ran the pathology laboratory in the 1970s on the floor above Steptoe’s fertility clinic at Oldham Hospital in the 1970’s
The Telegraph newspaper makes the claims after two people searching their genetic history found that they shared the same father
David Gertler and Roz Snyder found the information on Ancestry.com, a worldwide genealogy website that matched them with Roy Hollihead.
Mr Hollihead, now in his 80s, told Roz in a WhatsApp message that has shaken her world that Steptoe “used sperm from lab staff, medical students and doctors… But no records of any were kept”.
He told The Telegraph he wasn’t certain that Oldham’s hospital bosses were aware the senior physician was running an insemination clinic as part of his private practice.
Historians says the paper, charting Steptoe’s work have found no official record of donor insemination carried out at his Oldham clinic where Louise Brown, the first “test tube” baby, was conceived in 1978.
The paper adds that “Neither the official keeper of records on Steptoe’s fertility work nor Steptoe’s own son – now an eminent physician in his own right – were aware of the apparent experimental donor insemination clinic that Steptoe was running in Oldham.” and says that Roz and David believe there is “significant” evidence that their parents were unaware donor sperm was being used.
Patrick Steptoe was a pioneer of fertility treatment, who delivered the world’s first “test tube” baby, Louise Brown, in 1978. Since that landmark birth, a further 12 million babies have been through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the technique that Steptoe developed while working alongside Robert Edwards and his assistant Jean Purdy at Kershaw’s Hospital in Royton
Mr Steptoe died in 1988
