In 1978, the birth of the world's first IVF baby opened a new era in reproductive medicine, transforming fertility science and offering hope to millions struggling to conceive

At 11:47 p.m. on July 25, 1978, a baby girl was born by cesarean section at Royal Oldham Hospital in Greater Manchester, England. She weighed 5 pounds, 12 ounces, and had all ten fingers and ten toes, just like any other newborn. Her parents named her Louise. What made her different wasn't visible in the delivery room at all, it had happened eight months earlier, in a laboratory dish, when an embryologist and a gynecologist did something no one had ever successfully done before: conceive a human being outside the human body.