Robert G. Edwards studied in Beatty's research group in the ARC Unit of Animal Genetics and received his PhD in 1955. The correspondence here, however, covers the period when Edwards was based in Cambridge as a Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology and, in collaboration with Patrick Steptoe, was conducting work on fertilising human eggs in a laboratory. This work on in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which in 1978 would lead to the birth of the first 'test-tube baby', gained Edwards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010, but at the time led to much hostility, opposition and legal controversy.