Progress Educational Trust was set up in May 1992. But this was not the beginning.
In 1985, seven years after the birth of Louise Brown, the first 'test tube baby', the first attempt to outlaw embryo research
in the United Kingdom was launched. The late Conservative member of parliament, Enoch Powell, tabled a private members bill
which sought to make research using human embryos illegal. The response to Powell's bill in parliament was positive: only
hard lobbying and the skillful use of parliamentary tactics meant that the bill eventually ran out of parliamentary time.
Shocked by the near success of Enoch Powell's bill, those in favour of human embryo research realised that they had to act
quickly to ensure that further efforts of this kind would be more rigorously opposed. And so, in November 1985, PROGRESS
Campaign for Research into Human Reproduction was launched. A coalition of patients, doctors, scientists and parliamentarians,
PROGRESS had one aim: to make sure that human embryo research was protected by law so that IVF treatment could continue.
PROGRESS took five years to achieve its goal. After a concerted campaign of public education and parliamentary lobbying,
members of PROGRESS were relieved when, in 1990, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act finally came into being. The
act, one of the earliest pieces of legislation governing assisted reproduction, provides a framework within which human embryo
research and assisted conception services are permitted to continue.
The arrival of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act meant
that the work of PROGRESS was largely done. But there was still
an unmet need for public education in the field of human reproduction
and genetics. And so Progress Educational Trust was established
in May 1992. As a charity, the Trust is best placed to carry on
the educational work of PROGRESS and to extent its public information
and related debating activities into a variety of public spaces,
schools, universities and the media.
A more detailed history of in vitro fertilisation and embryo research can be found in PET's exhibition, 21 years of IVF.
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