The quiet man triumphs

The new embryo-screening technique developed by Alan Handyside is a triumph for the quiet man of British reproductive medicine.

In a field that is famous for producing outspoken doctors and scientists such as Mohamed Taranissi and Lord Winston, his former research partner, Professor Handyside has kept a low profile.

But his peers know him as one of IVF’s most brilliant innovators, the father of the preimplantation genetic diagnosis procedure that has helped hundreds of couples to have healthy babies.

In 1989 he led the team at Hammersmith Hospital in West London that successfully screened embryos for the first time. His group treated Debbie and Delvin Edwards, from Hayes, Middlesex. Mrs Edwards carried the genetic disorder adrenoleukodystrophy; any son that she had would have a 50 per cent chance of developing the brain disease. The team used IVF to create embryos and removed a cell from each at the eight-cell stage to determine their sex. Then, only female embryos were implanted into Mrs Edwards’s womb. She gave birth to two healthy girls.

Professor Handyside moved on to Guy’s Hospital in London where he helped to open a centre that could perform the procedure. A spell at Leeds University followed before he became director of the Bridge Centre, a London fertility clinic, in 2005.

He decided to work in IVF after being taught by Bob Edwards, who with Patrick Steptoe performed the first test-tube baby procedure in 1978.

The procedure that Professor Handyside developed is now used to detect about 350 genetic conditions.

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