Ruth Fowler Edwards


Ruth Fowler Edwards, Lady Edwards was a British geneticist and the long-time wife and companion of Robert G. Edwards, the "father" of in vitro fertilization.

Family

Fowler was the daughter of Eileen Mary Rutherford, the only daughter of physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford, and physicist Sir Ralph Fowler. Having developed an interest in biological sciences, Fowler studied genetics in the early 1950s at the University of Edinburgh. While at the University she met Bob Edwards in a statistics class. They married in 1956 and had 5 daughters.

Career

Fowler and Edwards worked together on controlled ovulation induction in the mouse. In their first joint paper, published in 1957, they showed that superovulation of adults was possible. Fowler later worked on the effects of progesterone and oestrogen on pregnancy and embryonic mortality in the mouse; the differences in ovarian output between natural conditions and superovulation; growth and genetics of the early human embryo developing in culture; uterine fluid composition and embryo implantation in the rabbit; steroidogenesis in human granulosa cells and follicular growth; glycoprotein composition and cell-to-cell interactions in the cumulus-oocyte complex.
An obituary was published by Simon Fishel, Edwards' student, in RBM Online, a journal created by Edwards with the support of Fowler.