IVF pioneer talks to Year A students
Professor Alan Trounson gave a lecture to Year A students when he visited Churchill in September.
Eminent scientist Professor Alan Trounson captivated Year A medical students with his lecture at Churchill on Monday 29 September.
Professor Trounson, Emeritus Professor Monash University, was a pioneer of human in vitro fertilisation (IVF), introducing fertility drugs for controlling ovulation, embryo freezing techniques, egg and embryo donation methods, initiated embryo biopsy, developing in vitro oocyte maturation methods and the vitrification of eggs and embryos.
He led the Australian team for the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in the late 1990s.
He told students it was an interest in farming that started his career. “I wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “I studied wool technology and ended up at Cambridge University (London), working with cattle and horses on reproduction.”
It was that research in reproduction that brought Professor Trounson back to Australia in 1977 to work alongside Professor Carl Wood in the emerging field of IVF.
“I essentially translated my research of cattle to see if it worked in humans and it did,” he told students. “Things that work in animals often work in humans.”
Travelling on a “contorted” career journey saw him working with wild animals in Africa and at the Western Plains Zoo in NSW where he led a successful artificial insemination program for black rhinos. “I have always loved animals,” he added.
This whole experience set the scene for developing human IVF as a technology. “We were able to grow embryoes in the lab, take samples, diagnose genetic diseases and more. As researchers, these things became useful for humans.”
According to Professor Trounson, there was a lot happening in Australia before anywhere else in the world. “It was an exciting time,” he added. “But there were a lot of negative comments that we were going too fast.”
His work took another direction when, with colleagues, Professor Trounson eventually founded not-for-profit foundations, low cost IVF and Friends of Low Cost IVF, to enable wider access to assisted reproductive technology and fertility education for all people across the globe. He outlined his work in Africa and Asia.
“Women from Africa and Asia approached me,” he explained. “If they were unable to have a child, they were blamed and excluded by society, physically and mentally tortured…they often ended up on the streets.