Obstetrician and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe helped develop in vitro fertilisation and ran a fertility clinic in Oldham Hospital, but two people have come forward with an accusation
The British doctor who helped develop IVF treatment which helps couples worldwide have children has been accused of impregnating women with a “stranger’s sperm”.
Patrick Steptoe, was an obstetrician and gynaecologist who helped develop in vitro fertilisation and ran a fertility clinic in Oldham Hospital, Greater Manchester. Now, two people whose parents attended his clinic have reportedly discovered their biological father was a lab scientist who worked in the same hospital as the physician who died in 1988
The parents of Roz Snyder, 52, and David Gertler, 51, attended the clinic around the 1970s after struggling to conceive children and were shocked when DNA tests revealed they are half-siblings. Ms Snyder told the Telegraph : “Something definitely doesn’t add up.
“All the research I have done, spending night after night on the internet. I can’t find anywhere that Dr Steptoe did artificial insemination.
“It has been life-changing. It has given me an identity crisis. Who am I? I just don’t know. There have been so many tears. So much crying. I just found out my dad’s not my dad.”
The pair discovered the truth when they were alerted by genealogy website Ancestry, which said their late fathers are not their biological ones. Instead, they shared a biological father in Roy Hollihead, who ran a pathology laboratory one floor above Dr Steptoe’s clinic.
Ms Snyder and Mr Gertler do not believe their late parents knew their mothers’ eggs were inseminated using Mr Hollihead’s donated sperm, and they have raised questions about the ethics around some of Dr Steptoe’s fertility work. Mr Gertler told the newspaper about who he had believed was his father.
He added: “Technically while he was the man who brought me up and was wonderful, from a biological point of view he definitely wasn’t my dad. Personality traits everybody said I had inherited from him like a sense of humour and business skills is not true.
“Your foundations completely shift. You feel you don’t belong as much. I’ve almost got impostor syndrome. My instinct is they (my parents) were never told.”
Northern Care Alliance, the NHS trust that now runs Oldham Hospital, said it had no records of Dr Steptoe’s clinic, according to the Telegraph.
His struggle to develop IVF with two other pioneering British scientists – nurse Jean Purdy and physiologist Sir Robert Edwards – was recently dramatised in a new film Joy, starring Bill Nighy as the fertility physician.
