Flanders today
october 23, 20 1 3
Erkenningsnummer P708816
#303
2
current affairs
Get happy Flemings among most content in Europe, according to annual Vrind indicators 4
f r e e n e w s w e e k ly
6
politics
7
business
9
Saying goodbye Hundreds gather in Ghent to pay their last respects to former PM Wilfried Martens 6
innovation
w w w. f l a n d e r s t o d ay. e u
10
living
13
arts
15
agenda
Ghostly Ghent British author Helen Grant tells us why she sets her next unsettling novel in the medieval city 10
Happy birthdays For three decades, scientists in Flanders have been helping couples conceive via IVF Alan Hope
Thirty years ago, the country’s first IVF baby was born in Flanders. At the time, doctors didn’t feel able to shout about the achievement, but now, as the first generation of IVF children are having children of their own, we talk to the scientists who pioneered the life-changing procedure.
O
n 24 October, Tina will celebrate her 30th birthday. That it’s also the 30th anniversary of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in Belgium is no coincidence. “I had contact with her until a few years ago,” said Paul Devroey, one of the doctors responsible for bringing Tina into the world, making history in the process. “But then she decided she’d rather be out of the picture, I guess. She’d been in the public eye, on television and in the papers.” Tina, from Opwijk, Flemish Brabant, was conceived at the Free University of Brussels (VUB)in 1983 and, nine months later, became the first recognised birth by IVF in Belgium. She
was not, however, actually the country’s first “test tube baby”. That honour goes to the university hospital in Leuven, which had succeeded in bringing a child into the world by IVF five months earlier. Two things stopped the university from claiming its milestone: the family wanted no publicity and have never been identified, and the hospital found itself in a difficult situation as the procedure was clearly forbidden according to the Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae. At the time, the University of Leuven (KUL) was under tighter control from the Catholic church authorities than now; its reticence on religious-ethical grounds led it to hand over dominance in the field – not only in Belgium but across Europe – to Leuven graduate Paul Devroey and former paediatrician André Van Steirteghem of VUB. The two had met in 1978, when Devroey convinced Van Steirteghem to turn his lab skills towards the field of artificial insemination. “I was looking for people who were interested
in working with me on the culture of human embryos,” Dr Devroey tells me. “I tried to convince several people to join me, but they all refused because it was too sensitive; it was not well-regarded in society at that time.” Van Steirteghem agreed to work on the project in 1980. The pair spent three years preparing the lab and travelling the world visiting other clinics. “I was happy that one of my colleagues from the hospital came looking for me with a very innovative project,” Van Steirteghem said in the Canvas documentary Alles voor de wetenschap (Everything for Science). “At a certain point we clicked and decided to start out on what was to become a fantastic adventure.” Leuven’s religious objections left the door open for Brussels. “The Free University of Brussels was the centre where ‘anything goes’,” Van Steirteghem explained. “From lesbian mothers to women who wished to be inseminated with the sperm of their deceased partner. But we always paid a great `` continued on page 3