PREFACE t was at the 77th meeting of ESHRE’s Executive Committee in April I 2002 that the prospect of writing the society’s history was first formally discussed. In fact, the seed of the idea had been sown a few months earlier by ESHRE’s new chairman at the time, Hans Evers, and chairman elect Arne Sunde. After their nominations had been approved at the 2001 annual meeting in Lausanne, both Evers and Sunde had immediately set about the composition of a 16-point strategy report for the Executive Committee, designed to take ESHRE’s management forward over the following three or four years. Section 16 of that report, under the heading of “other items”, was a proposal that ESHRE’s past chairmen should collect “the important documents and illustrations from their term of office” with a view to recording the society’s history. Now, in the spring of 2002, as the Executive Committee sat down at ESHRE’s Central Office in the suburbs of Brussels to battle their way through the strategic plan, they too recognised the huge advance in reproductive medicine reflected in ESHRE’s history. A record of that history would indeed represent ESHRE’s place within that advance - and ESHRE’s contribution to it. The Executive Committee thus did what it always did when faced with a proposal which required consideration and planning: it formed a committee. The ESHRE History Task Force was set up at that meeting in April 2002 under the chairmanship of Basil Tarlatzis; joining him on the committee were his fellow past chairmen Jean Cohen, Pier Giorgio Crosignani, Klaus Diedrich and Andre´ Van Steirteghem. j v PREFACE All except Tarlatzis had been formally involved with ESHRE since its formation in 1984, Cohen as a founding member. For a year, ESHRE’s history continued ticking, until May 2003 when I received a message from Basil Tarlatzis asking if I might be interested in helping out. The Task Force had hoped that one of its members might assemble the documents and record what happened, but the archives were simply too large, the events too many for a weekend labour of love. The Task Force thus turned to me as a professional writer. The ideas I put to Tarlatzis during ESHRE’s annual meeting in Madrid that year were essentially that ESHRE’s history would be best recorded in book form and within a broad framework of reproductive medicine. We thus agreed that the text should provide a document of record, but should also be a lively read in which ESHRE’s history evolves alongside progress in reproduction and in the context of those individuals who made it all possible. Hence, the sources of the book would be ESHRE’s own archives and the personal recollections of those involved. I should therefore express my appreciation to ESHRE’s managing director Bruno Van den Eede for maintaining such a thorough and well organised archive. Bruno joined ESHRE in March 1987 as a part-time assistant, but from that time on his reporting of meetings was scrupulous, his use of English without fault. The details, events and dates recorded in the following pages are derived almost exclusively from Bruno’s minutes. However, what follows is not just a chronology of events. It is also a personal record and a reflection of the sheer human energy given by so many individuals to ESHRE’s progress. Jean Cohen, Pier Giorgio Crosignani, Klaus Diedrich, Andre´ Van Steirteghem, Basil Tarlatzis, Lynn Fraser, Hans Evers, Arne Sunde, Paul Devroey and Liz Corrigan all gave up their time - and many of their own personal papers - to me. I regret that the name of Robert Edwards is not on that list. As the following pages will show, Edwards’s contribution to ESHRE, both as a founding member with Jean Cohen and as editor of Human Reproduction, was enormous; between 1984 and 2000, when he resigned from the editorship of the journals, there was little that happened in ESHRE which did not involve Edwards. However, despite requests from me and from many of his former colleagues, Edwards chose not to contribute personally to this book. He never formally declined to co-operate, but simply said that he didn’t have the time. Nevertheless, the presence of Robert Edwards runs through these pages, and I hope that his contribution to ESHRE has been accurately recorded and appropriately acknowledged. Despite his vi j PREFACE personal absence, ESHRE’s own archives contain many of Edwards’s papers and correspondence, and I have liberally drawn on these, particularly to record events from ESHRE’s early years. Edwards’s founding-father colleague Jean Cohen was also immensely helpful in explaining how those early years unfolded. There are two or three details of this book which I should also here explain. The first involves money, which - in ESHRE’s early years especially - was frequently at the top of the agenda. ESHRE’s official currency started as Swiss francs, switched to Belgian francs, and is now Euros. However, the accounts of many annual meetings were also run in the currency of the host country, and the finances of the journals managed in UK pounds. In my first draft I recorded these currencies at their original face value, noting revenues in deutsch marks or krona, expenditures in guilders or US dollars. It was Hans Evers who suggested that, as exemplary Europeans, ESHRE should express its finances in Euros - which in most cases I have now done. However, in the belief that even the most ardent Europhiles recognise the value of a dollar and a pound, I have left these two currencies in their original form. Readers may also note some discrepancies in the numbers I have used for attendance at ESHRE’s annual meetings. The graph on page…repre- sents the official number of registrants for each meeting; however, I have on occasions noted total numbers of attendees, which is invariably larger. Finally, I should warn readers that this is not a textbook and I have not followed Vancouver style in the use of references and footnotes. Where a reference is, I believe, applicable, I have added it briefly in parenthesis within the running text. Appendix D provides a full list of references to all publications associated with ESHRE. The text has been liberally illustrated, and I am once again grateful to those past chairmen who dug out old photographs from their collections. However, I am particularly indebted to the photographer Dieter Jausovec, Organon’s own in-house paparazzo, for access to his considerable picture archives. Dieter is now retired but on Organon’s behalf has covered all ESHRE meetings from 1991 onwards; many of the illustrations in this book are Dieter’s photographs and we are grateful to him and Organon for granting us rights to use them. I am also indebted to the Daily Mail in London for rights to reproduce their front page of 27th July 1978. Billed as a “world exclusive”, the Mail’s front page was half occupied by a picture of Louise Brown, “bright-eyed at 18 hours old”, such was the public impact of her birth. Jenny Hope, the Daily Mail’s medical correspondent, also j vii PREFACE confirmed details of many dates and headlines for me from the paper’s library. However, while the gratitude is mine - and my name sits squarely on the cover - we should not forget that this is essentially ESHRE’s book. I was commissioned to research the archives, interview the personalities, and write the text. But what is published here is on ESHRE’s behalf and with the approval of its past chairmen. Some of ESHRE’s past and present committee members - notably Berndt Kjessler, Karl Nygren, Franc¸oise Shenfield, David Barlow and Luca Gianaroli - have seen selected sections of the text and made suggestions. Others have offered numerous anecdotes and details from the past. One evening in Berlin last year, for instance, I found myself surrounded at dinner by Pedro Barri, Tony Rutherford and Gab Kovacs. Next morning, my pockets were stuffed with scribbled notes on scraps of paper - what was happening in Melbourne in 1980, who was the first to use transvaginal ultrasound . and much more. I have tried to introduce them all, the facts, the comment and the anecdotes. And I hope that, on ESHRE’s behalf, I have achieved what we set out to do in Madrid in 2003, to put ESHRE’s history on the record and recognise its monumental achievement within the progress of reproduc- tive medicine. Few will disagree that ESHRE - and certainly its annual meeting and journals - are at the forefront of that progress today, and I hope this book is fitting testimony to the vision and effort which made that possible. Simon Brown February 2005 viii j INTRODUCTION: THE EUROPEAN DREAM ajor accomplishments begin with visionaries who dream and, most M importantly, have the will to realise their dream. The history of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), as well as that of in vitro fertilisation itself, is indeed the history of a dream shared by several prominent European clinicians and scientists who joined forces to make it work. Although many breakthroughs in the field of reproductive medicine - for example, laparoscopy and laparoscopic surgery, ovulation induction with human menopausal gonadotropins and particularly IVF - all started in Europe, there was no established European forum before the early 1980s where these innovations could be publicised. By contrast, across the Atlantic the American Fertility Society had been organising an extremely successful annual meeting since 1944 and publishing a monthly journal, Fertility and Sterility, the only prestigious journal in the field, since 1950.