Anne McLaren's 94th Birthday

Today’s Doodle celebrates the 94th birthday of British scientist and author Anne McLaren, who is widely considered one of the most significant reproductive biologists of the 20th century. Her fundamental research on embryology has helped countless people realize their dreams of parenthood.

Anne McLaren was born in London on this day in 1927. As a child, she had a small role in the 1936 H.G. Wells’ sci-fi film “The Shape of Things to Come.” In the scene—set in 2054—her great-grandfather lectured her on the advancement of space technology that had put mice on the moon. McLaren credits this formative, albeit fictional, history lesson as one of the early inspirations for her love of science. She went on to study zoology at the University of Oxford, where her passion for science only grew as she learned from talented biologists such as Peter Medawar—a Nobel laureate for his research on the human immune system.

In the 1950s, McLaren began to work with mice to further understand the biology of mammalian development. While the subjects of her research were tiny, the implications of their study proved massive. By successfully growing mouse embryos in vitro (in lab equipment), McLaren and her colleague John Biggers demonstrated the possibility to create healthy embryos outside of the mother’s womb.

These landmark findings—published in 1958—paved the way for the development of in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology that scientists first used successfully with humans twenty years later. However, the development of IVF technology carried major ethical controversy along with it. To this end, McLaren served as the only research scientist on the Warnock Committee (est. 1982), a governmental body dedicated to the development of policies related to the advances in IVF technology and embryology. Her expert council to the committee played an essential role in the enactment of the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act—watershed, yet contentious, legislation which limits in-vitro culture of human embryos to 14-days post embryo creation.  

In 1991, McLaren was appointed Foreign Secretary, and later vice-president, of the world’s oldest scientific institution—The Royal Society—at the time becoming the first woman to ever hold office within the institution’s 330-year-old history.

McLaren discovered her passion for learning at a young age and aspired to spark this same enthusiasm for science in children and society at large. In 1994, the British Association for the Advancement of Science—an institution dedicated to the promotion of science to the general public (now the British Science Association)—elected her as its president. Through the organization and its events, McLaren engaged audiences across Britain on the wonders of science, engineering, and technology with the aim of making these topics more accessible to everyone. 

Happy birthday, Anne McLaren. Thank you for all your incredible work and for inspiring many new generations to come because of it!

Take a closer look at the road to IVF, paved by Dame Anne McLaren with Google Arts & Culture in partnership with The Royal Society.