This episode of the Progress Educational Trust (PET) podcast marks the centenary of JBS Haldane's Daedalus, a lecture – subsequently a book – that pioneered the idea of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The discussion is chaired by Sarah Norcross (Director of PET), with contributions from: ⚫ Sandy Starr (Deputy Director of PET) ⚫ Samanth Subramanian (author of the book A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane) ⚫ Professor Max Saunders (author of the book Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the 'Today and Tomorrow' Book Series) ⚫ Professor Nick Hopwood (author of the forthcoming book The Many Births of the Test-Tube Baby) ⚫ Dr Chloe Romanis (Assistant Professor in Biolaw at Durham University, and author of research and commentary on ectogenesisis) February 2023 marked the centenary of Daedalus, a landmark lecture given in Cambridge by the geneticist, polymath and provocative public intellectual JBS Haldane. With this lecture, Haldane introduced the idea of assisted reproductive technology and specifically in vitro fertilisation (IVF) into the public imagination. The Daedalus lecture so unsettled Haldane's friend Aldous Huxley, that it prompted Huxley to publish the famous dystopian novel Brave New World. Meanwhile, Haldane's student Anne McLaren would go on to do pioneering work with mice in the 1950s that paved the way for IVF, in some sense helping to bring Haldane's imagination to life. McLaren also went on to pioneer the regulation of IVF in the 1980s, as part of the Warnock Committee, thereby helping to reassure the public that the extremes of Haldane's vision would be moderated. The Daedalus lecture became a milestone in public engagement with science when it was adapted by Haldane into a a href="https://archive.org/details/daedalus_or_science_and_the_future" target="_blank"...