Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
A Child of Science - cover

A Child of Science

Gareth Farr

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

'One day this will work. One day we will gift two honest, decent, trusting volunteers a baby. I know this more than anything else in the world. I know it in my soul. We will do that.'
In 1978, three pioneering doctors changed the world of fertility as we know it. Supported by an army of immensely brave women from all over the UK, Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards and Jean Purdy achieved the impossible: they created human life in vitro.
Faced with fierce criticism and hostility, and hounded by the media for 'playing God', trials had to be kept largely under wraps. But the trio's determination to give hope to the thousands of families struggling to conceive eventually led to the first 'test-tube baby' and the creation of IVF, a procedure which has since supported the birth of over twelve million babies worldwide.
Gareth Farr's play A Child of Science is a fictionalised account of this true story of ambition and courage, based on extensive research and interviews with embryologists and fertility doctors, as well as those affected by and enabled by IVF. It was first performed at Bristol Old Vic in 2024, directed by Matthew Dunster.
Available since: 06/13/2024.
Print length: 120 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Black Man's Lament or How to Make Sugar - Poem by a 18th Century female author who was also an abolitionist pioneer - cover

    The Black Man's Lament or How to...

    Amelia Opie

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Amelia Alderson, an only child, was born on the 12th November 1769 in Norwich, England. 
    After the death of her mother on New Year’s Eve 1784 she became her father's housekeeper and hostess. 
    The young Amelia was energetic, attractive, and an admirer of fashion.  She spent much of her youth writing poetry and plays and putting on local amateur theatricals.  At 18 she had published anonymously ‘The Dangers of Coquetry’. 
    Amelia married in the spring of 1798 to the artist John Opie at the Church of St Marylebone, in Westminster, and together they lived in Berners Street where Amelia was already living. 
    Her next novel in 1801 ‘Father and Daughter’, was very popular even though it dealt with such themes as illegitimacy, a socially difficult subject for its times.  From this point on published works were far more regular.  The following year her volume ‘Poems’ appeared and was again very popular.  Novels continued to flow and she never once abandoned her social activism and her call for better treatment of women and the dispossessed in her works.  She was also keenly involved in a love of society and its attendant frills. 
    Encouraged by her husband to write more she published Adeline Mowbray in 1804, an exploration of women's education, marriage, and the abolition of slavery.  
    Her husband died in 1807 and she paused from writing for a few years before resuming with further novels and poems.  Of particular interest was her short poem ‘The Black Man's Lament’ in 1826.  Her life now was in the main spent travelling and working for charities and against slavery.  She even helped create a Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Norwich which organised a parliamentary petition of 187,000 names of which hers was the first name. 
    After a visit to Cromer, a seaside resort on the North Norfolk coast, she caught a chill and retired to her bedroom.  
    Amelia Opie died on the 2nd December 1853 in Norwich.  She was 84.
    Show book
  • The Great Poems by African American Writers - Selections from Phillis Wheatley Langston Hughes Paul Laurence Dunbar Countee Cullen and many others - cover

    The Great Poems by African...

    Phillis Wheatley, Frances E. W....

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.
     
    Phillis Wheatley
    To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth
    On Virtue
    An Hymn To the Morning
    An Hymn To the Evening
     
    Frances E. W. Harper
    Bury Me in a Free Land
    Songs for the People
    My Mother's Kiss
    A Grain of Sand
    Our Hero
    The Sparrow's Fall
     
    James Weldon Johnson
    Sence You Went Away
     
    Paul Laurence Dunbar
    The Lesson
    Sympathy
    We Wear the Mask
     
    Claude McKay
    After the Winter
    If We Must Die
    The Tropics in New York
     
    Countee Cullen
    For Paul Laurence Dunbar
    Incident
    Langston Hughes
    The Weary Blues
    Jazzonia
    Negro Dancers
    The Cat And The Saxophone (2 A. M.)
    Young Singer
    Cabaret
    To Midnight Nan At Leroy'S
    To A Little Lover-Lass, Dead
    Harlem Night Club
    Nude Young Dancer
    Young Prostitute
    To A Black Dancer In "The Little Savoy"
    Song For A Banjo Dance
    Blues Fantasy
    Lenox Avenue: Midnight
    Show book
  • The Queen of Sorrow - cover

    The Queen of Sorrow

    Rachel Lawson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Sorrow 
    Astra Queen of Vampires was born of the union of two monsters a mad killer for a mother and a evil sorcerer for a father he mother was under a spell until she was born so sad was her mother by her marriage to the hated enemy of her people and bearing his child she named her child Sorrow. 
    The pair were murdered by a lunatic themselves when Sorrow was a baby. 
    Her uncle raise her with his own children who didn't have powers like their mother a fate from a parallel world and their father a necromancer and enchanter Sorrow's uncle. She later became not just a vampire but their queen. It was Sorrow's uncle who named her Astra as it was a better name for a child to forget her sad start in life with a new name her old name it was like a man being called Sue nothing a man could life down. 
    She later married a friend Max Starfire the Sun's King and had a child called- Astra known as Astry. She would never give her child a bad name like herself. Astry was a vampire/ werewolf like her mother and father. 
    Not alive or dead something in between. 
    They were day walkers Max, Astra and their daughter. 
    Strange creatures neither vampire nor werewolf they were 
    Includes stories with Sorrow or Astra Queen of Vampires from my the Magicians series 
    Narrated by the author and guest narrating Addison Fell as Alexa in Bad Omens
    Show book
  • The Other Boleyn Girl - (stage version) - cover

    The Other Boleyn Girl - (stage...

    Philippa Gregory

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Henry VIII's court is a stage for love and treachery, where the weapons of choice are sex, marriage – and the executioner's axe. As Henry's mistress, Mary Boleyn is a pawn in her family's lust for power. Queen Katherine of Aragon hasn't produced a male heir, and Mary's ruthless uncle scents the chance of putting his niece on the throne.
    But Henry's wandering eye has fallen on another: Mary's headstrong sister, Anne, whose ambition not only threatens to destroy her bond with Mary, but shakes the foundations of Church and State.
    Based on Philippa Gregory's internationally bestselling novel, The Other Boleyn Girl is a brilliant evocation of intrigue at the Tudor court – a racy and riveting drama of events that changed the course of English history. This stage adaptation by Mike Poulton was premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2024, directed by Lucy Bailey.
    Show book
  • The Great Gatsby - cover

    The Great Gatsby

    F Scott igerald

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.  
    Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. Inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922.  
    During World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.  
    Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention.  
    Contemporary scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, race, and environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American dream. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.  
    Narrated by Michael Ward.
    Show book
  • The Hindu Bard - The Poetry of Dorothy Bonarjee - cover

    The Hindu Bard - The Poetry of...

    Andrew Whitehead, Mohini Gupta

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The first print collection of Dorothy Bonarjee's verse
    
    In February 1914, Dorothy 'Dorf' Bonarjee was awarded the Bardic chair at the UCW Eisteddfod for verse. She was the first woman and first non-European to win Wales' most prestigious literary prize.
    
    In their 34th Welsh Women's Classic, Honno Welsh Women's Press presents the first publication of Dorothy Bonarjee's verse alongside a vivid account of the poet's extraordinary life in India, London, Wales and France.
    
    Poet Dorothy 'Dorf' Bonarjee was born in India in 1894 into an elite Bengali family. As a child, she moved to London and in 1912 she enrolled at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Two years later, she was awarded the Bardic chair at the Eisteddfod, and went on to publish poems in Welsh journals. Bonarjee later took a law degree at the University of London and eloped with a French artist. France remained her home for the rest of her life.
    Show book