How test tube babies went mainstream

The notion that a baby’s beginnings could transpire in a petri dish seems unremarkable today. But not even 50 years ago, researchers’ efforts to devise technologies to allow infertile couples to have a baby sparked fierce opposition on multiple fronts, raising alarms around designer babies and eugenics. Scientists were afraid too.

“Sincere scientists … really believed they might be creating monsters,” says Robin Marantz Henig, who wrote this issue’s cover story on the invention of assisted reproductive technologies, or ART.