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The many births of the test-tube baby: proof and publicity in claims to a breakthrough

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Rosanna Dent.

How have discoveries or breakthroughs been announced and recognized or rejected? Though articles in scientific journals have played major parts, these have not topped a stable hierarchy but been nodes in webs that have varied by time and place. This talk is about how the operation of that web changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when interactions intensified between journals and newspapers, TV and press conferences, symposia and magazines. The focus is claims to human in vitro fertilization from 1944, when a two-cell embryo was reported from Harvard Medical School, to the aftermath of the birth of Louise Brown in Oldham, near Manchester in 1978. This perspective on the making of IVF , the founding innovation of reproductive biomedicine, will explain why Baby Louise counts as the first ‘test-tube baby’ although she was not the first to be declared. It will illustrate the interplay, in an intermittently high-profile field, of changing and contested standards of evidence, on the one hand, and norms of communication, on the other. This is relevant to claims-making today, when discoveries are announced on preprint servers and social media.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

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