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Hello everybody, I'm Professor Alastair Sutcliffe.
I am a children's doctor.
Through and through I'm based at the University College London,
Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.
I'm giving this presentation because over
the past 25 plus years I've conducted
studies regarding the health of children born after what I call ART,
Assisted Reproductive Therapies or
Assisted Reproductive Technologies depending on your inclination.
During that field, for which I was a relative pioneer,
there has been, during that period,
considerable increase in studies giving indications as to
what the health issues may or may not
be with these children that had been conceived with this,
one might call it, unnatural way of reproducing full stop.
I'm actually quite fond of quoting somebody that I met,
who's quoted in my book,
"IVF children: The First Generation" which is a little out of date now,
who used to pick me up from a city called Nottingham in the middle of England,
and that was Dave.
Dave was a taxi driver,
and he's quoted in my book and has become famous
throughout the world because of his insight.
He was asking me what I was doing there and he said,
"What are you doing in Nottingham dock?"
This was in the days when I was actually going assessing children after
a type of IVF called intracytoplasmic sperm injection or ICSI,
and I explained then he said,
"It's hardly a Darwinian way of reproducing",
which I thought was quite a succinct comment.
What about this presentation you're going to listen to?
Its fairly fact heavy,
but I would ask you to use the slides merely as references.
They're pretty contemporaneous in terms of the effort to bring
together the messages from a variety of studies across the world literature.
