British physiologist Robert Edwards has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his role in developing in vitro fertilization. The Nobel medicine prize committee said Edwards’s work had brought “joy to infertile people all over the world.”

Klas Kärre, Nobel Committee: “Briefly, what he did was to develop, in several steps, a method whereby you can take out eggs from the woman and let those eggs meet the sperm of her partner in a test tube or in vitro, which means in glass, in glass a test tube, and then put back the fertilized egg for normal development in the woman.”

Robert Edwards said his discovery impacted other areas of medicine, as well.

Robert Edwards: “We knew for the first time that science and medicine had entered human conception decisively and that from now on we would look at illnesses and disease and other disorders in embryos as part of medicine.”