The past For many practitioners of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) today, it must be hard to comprehend the disdain and disgust with which the introduction of IVF as therapy for infertility was greeted. The ethical and legal wrangling about human reproductive cloning and the current debate over trans-generational (germline) genome editing gives a small flavour of how IVF was seen then. What was regarded as an irrelevant, disruptive and unethical practice is now effectively mainstream treatment in most countries of the world.