The Vatican’s head of the Pontifical Academy for Life said yesterday that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, a pioneer of the test-tube baby, “inaugurated a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction.”
Robert G. Edwards, a former University of Cambridge professor, helped develop in-vitro fertilization, a procedure condemned by Pope Benedict XVI. Bishop Ignazio Carrasco de Paula, the Vatican’s voice on bioethics, released an e-mailed statement that gave his personal views on the subject.
The choice of Edwards for the prize “isn’t completely out of place,” Carrasco de Paula said. Still, he faulted the scientist for creating a “market of donor eggs.”
The reaction to the Nobel winner contrasts with some of the Vatican’s more stringent criticism in the past. The Roman Catholic Church had condemned embryonic stem cell research and artificial fertilization, most definitively in a 2008 bioethics document released a month after Barack Obama was elected the U.S. president.
IVF violates “the sacred and inviolable character of every human life from its conception until its natural death,” according to the document, entitled “Dignitas Personae” or Latin for “The Dignity of a Person.”
Announcements of the 2010 Nobel Prizes and
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
In conjunction with the June 4 meeting of its Board of Directors, the Nobel Foundation hereby announces that the prize awarding institutions have set the following dates for their announcements of 2010 prize decisions:
| Monday, October 4 11:30 a.m. at the earliest | The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Wallenbergsalen, Nobel Forum, Nobels väg 1, Stockholm |
| Tuesday, October 5 11:45 a.m. at the earliest | The Nobel Prize in Physics The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sessionssalen, Lilla Frescativägen 4A, Stockholm |
| Wednesday, October 6 11:45 a.m. at the earliest | The Nobel Prize in Chemistry The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sessionssalen, Lilla Frescativägen 4A, Stockholm |
| Friday, October 8 11:00 a.m. | The Nobel Peace Prize The Norwegian Nobel Committee, The Norwegian Nobel Institute, Store Sal, Henrik Ibsens gate 51, Oslo |
| Monday, October 11 1:00 p.m. at the earliest | The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sessionssalen, Lilla Frescativägen 4A, Stockholm |
According to tradition, the Swedish Academy will set the date for its announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature later.
The announcements will also be made on the official website of the Nobel Prize:
http://nobelprize.org
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