IT IS NOT the done thing to campaign for Nobel prizes. The deliberations of the committee that awards the most prestigious honours in science are famously opaque, and it is often said that the best way to be disqualified as a candidate is to covet one too openly. The list of those snubbed is long and eminent.

On occasion, however, the committee’s oversights border on the bizarre. It is supposed to reward those “who have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. Yet it continues to turn a blind eye towards the scientist who has brought more joy to more people than any other alive today. That scientist is Professor Robert Edwards, who with Patrick Steptoe invented IVF. Until 1978, when Louise Brown became the first test-tube baby, infertile couples had few options bar adoption.

Edwards gave them first hope, and then families: more than three million people now owe their existence to his brilliance.

They should also be thankful for his bravery. His work was vilified as unethical by both the Pope and the medical establishment, which libelled his achievements and denied him funding. Edwards is that rare example of the tenacious scientific maverick who was right, and he continues to be snubbed because of it.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded on Monday to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for discovering RNA interference, a technique for turning off genes that promises a medical revolution. They are worthy winners, but for all the importance of their work, it was published just eight years ago, and has yet to have an impact on clinical medicine. Mello himself admitted to “an inkling” that it might one day win a Nobel, but only in a decade or two’s time.

IVF, by contrast, has brought into being millions of lives that would not otherwise have been created. It has transformed the quality of countless more, making the distress of infertility treatable for the first time. What is more, it has opened new frontiers in medical science: without it, the exciting potential of embryonic stem cells would be unthinkable.

It is a travesty that Edwards has been ignored for so long — not least because he is now 81. Steptoe died in 1988 and Nobels are never awarded posthumously. If it is not content to let one of the great breakthroughs of the 20th century pass unrecognised, the committee had better get a move on.