Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, is born on July 25 1978. Her parents Lesley and John Brown had failed to conceive because of her mother's blocked fallopian tubes. Dr Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist at Oldham General Hospital, and Dr Robert Edwards, a physiologist at Cambridge University, develop a new technique to fertilise an egg outside a woman's body before replacing it in the womb.
