Ruth Fowler Edwards

Ruth Fowler Edwards, Lady Edwards (December 1930 – October 2013) was a British geneticist and the long-time wife and collaborator of Robert G. (Bob) Edwards, the "father" of in vitro fertilization. Life Ruth was descended from a line of distinguished scientists. According to Martin Johnson, She was the granddaughter of Ernest Rutherford, who himself won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1908, ‘for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances’ (Eve and Chadwick, 1938). Her father was Sir Ralph Fowler FRS (1889–1944; Milne, 1945), who was Plummer Professor of Mathematical Physics in Cambridge from 1932 to 1944.Her mother, Eileen Mary Rutherford, was the only daughter of physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford and they had four children, with Ruth as the youngest. Her mother died shortly after Ruth's birth. University years Having developed an interest in biological sciences, Ruth Fowler studied genetics in the early 1950s at the University of Edinburgh and while there, she met the physiologist Bob Edwards in a statistics class in 1952 while she was working on her Ph.D. in genetics, after completing a biology degree there. Edwards was also doing work on his Ph.D. but was having problems so the two students teamed up, solved the problem and both completed their doctorates. After graduation, they left for California for post-doctoral assignments. They studied there a year before returning to the U.K. They married in 1956 and went on to have 5 daughters: Caroline, Jenny, Sarah, and twins Anna and Meg.