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Amid the growing debate on stem cell research and other ethical battle on other scientific researches like the in vitro fertilization, Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine has still been awarded recently to Robert Edwards, 85, for his exemplary work on in vitro fertilization. Edwards, currently an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge in England, was responsible for the birth 30 years ago of the first test tube baby. He is a biologist who successfully joined together a sperm and an egg in a laboratory dish, had it undergone some strict scientific procedures and then implanted into the mother’s womb to become a healthy human baby nine months thereafter.

While in vitro fertilization poses some level of amazement to many and another level of accomplishment for many practitioners in medical uniforms, there are still some underlying issues often controversial that are left unanswered. Several articles can be read on the internet regarding in vitro fertilization that tackling about not the triumph of the once experimental project but more of its criticism particularly on the premise of ethics and morality. In an article published in Time Magazine online, the issue has even reached a legal attention as parents tried to sue a health trust for giving them the wrong baby from a wrong sperm.

In October 14, 2010 an article of Time Magazine entitled ‘Lawsuit over Children Born the Wrong Color After IVF’ shares of a rather peculiar case filed to a Northern Irish High Court. The judge refused to rule in favor of the parents who accused a health trust that it wrongfully used the wrong sperm through IVF on their two children whose skin color was darker than what they have expected. The parents argued that the children were being discriminated in school for their skin colors.

In another story slightly implied in the same article, a woman from Arkansas is said to battle out legally with the control over the embryos created from her eggs. She wanted the embryos to be implanted in her but the law forbids the process without her husband’s consent. Unfortunately, the embryos have also been created with his husband’s sperm and they were divorced. On top of that, the woman and the husband had already paid for the safekeeping of the embryos for 11 years which will never be used unless both parties agree.

A Popular Science’s online article also presented another story concerning IVF and this time it is focused on the ethical considerations and moral debates that have plagued the advocating scientists in medical uniforms for many years. The story was about a baby that has been born from a frozen embryo for twenty years. The mother was already 42 and is now having hard time conceiving a baby. The embryo on the other hand has been acquired from a heterosexual couple who had donated their embryos in 1990 after they have already successfully produced a child through IVF. The leftover embryos have been asked to be frozen. This makes the issue more controversial because the frozen embryo has been made at a same time the child born in 1990. This situation pose a fact that the frozen embryo has a sibling that is actually aged as it is but was born 20 years ago.

Though the last story has no negative implication to the security or economic stability of a country, it presents a rather unusual proposition in terms of ethical considerations. The process can be used to delay population growth not in terms of using contraceptives but altering the normal process which an embryo should undergo thereby delaying its growth to reach a desired date for it to become human.

IVF is truly a remarkable medical breakthrough, but if handled irresponsibly it can cause deliberately dangerous precedents.