40 years of experience at the Wunschbaby Institut Feichtinger.

The first Austrian IVF baby was born in August 1982. Forty years ago, the birth of a test-tube baby was a minor sensation – today, in vitro fertilisation is an indispensable part of reproductive medicine. A blessing for couples struggling to conceive. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wilfried Feichtinger is the medical father of that birthday child – and to this day, the Wunschbaby Institut Feichtinger remains a pioneer in fertility medicine.

The desire to have a child is a deeply human longing for love and meaning in life. For most couples, a child of their own is the crowning fulfilment of their relationship. Unfortunately, nature does not work at the push of a button: stress, modern life planning with long years of education, a seemingly endless search for the right partner, health factors – there are countless reasons why women who want to become mothers do not conceive. The solution: assisted reproduction – the conception of a child outside the mother’s body.

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wilfried Feichtinger is the “medical father” of the first Austrian IVF baby: Zlatan Jovanovic was born on 5 August 1982 – making Austria the sixth country in the world, after England, Australia, the USA, France and Germany, in which a baby was born following in vitro fertilisation.

How it all began

In the 1970s, reproductive medicine was quite literally still in its infancy. “The dream of fertilisation outside the mother’s body, in a test tube, existed very early on. For physicians, this new form of fertilisation was also an extremely exciting field of medical research,” Univ.-Prof. Dr. Feichtinger recalls. Together with a group of physicians at the Vienna University Women’s Hospital, he devoted himself to research on the human egg cell. “My colleagues, however, doubted that IVF would ever work in humans,” he says. “I myself was always convinced that one day it would succeed.”

When the first tubal pregnancy following assisted fertilisation occurred in England in 1975, sceptics initially suspected a hoax. The birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, on 25 July 1978 then changed the world of medicine: “I attended the congress in London at which the researchers responsible, Steptoe and Edwards, disclosed their method, gathered all the information and then gave a lecture of my own to my Viennese colleagues – finally winning them over,” says Univ.-Prof. Dr. Feichtinger. Trial series and further research followed in Vienna, together with his colleagues Univ.-Doz. Dr. Peter Kemeter and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stephan Szalay. As early as 1980, the innovative trio of gynaecologists achieved the first pregnancy; sadly, the patient lost her baby in the eighth week. A little later, Jovanka Jovanović became pregnant with Zlatan.

“At the very beginning, it was fascinating to work on a research project in which so little experience existed,” Univ.-Prof. Dr. Feichtinger remembers. Today, Priv.-Doz. DDr. Michael Feichtinger heads the WIF: “Working at the very root of life still fascinates us, and I want to keep finding new and better ways to help couples.” After all, the WIF has to date been involved in the conception of more than 30,000 IVF babies.