Dr Subhash Mukherjee was the first Indian and the second in the world to create a test tube baby using in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). This landmark achievement placed India on the global map in reproductive medicine.

India's first test tube baby, Durga (also known as Kanupriya Agarwal), was born on 3 October, 1978, in Kolkata, thanks to Dr Mukherjee's pioneering work.

Despite this groundbreaking achievement, Dr Mukherjee faced scepticism and was not given due recognition by the Indian Government or scientific community at the time.

Years later, Dr T C Anand Kumar, who collaborated with gynaecologist Indira Hinduja to create a test tube baby in 1986, discovered that Dr Mukherjee was the first one to achieve this feat.

It was due to Dr Anand Kumar’s tireless efforts that the Indian scientific world belatedly woke up to the monumental nature of the medical achievement.

Decades after his death, Dr Mukherjee’s contribution was finally acknowledged. In 2002, he received posthumous recognition for his pioneering work by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Dr Mukherjee's work was contemporaneous with that of Robert Edwards, who won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for the development of IVF.

Fascinated by innovations in gynaecology, he completed his PhD in reproductive physiology from the University of Calcutta before going to Edinburgh University in the UK for a PhD in reproductive endocrinology.

After returning to India in 1967, Dr. Mukherjee researched ovulation and spermatogenesis. He teamed up with cryobiologist Sunit Mukherji and gynaecologist Saroj Kanti Bhattacharya to develop an IVF method for Bela Agarwal, a patient with damaged fallopian tubes.

They successfully achieved the cryopreservation of an eight-cell embryo — storing it for 53 days, thawing in DMSO reagent and replacing it into the mother’s womb — a full five years before anyone else would do so.

He was also the first to use human menopausal gonadotrophins (hMG) to stimulate ovaries to produce extra eggs. As Anand Kumar later said, Subhash was “far ahead of his time in successfully using an ovarian stimulation protocol before anyone else in the world had thought of doing so.”

In fact, Durga, the world’s second test tube baby was born just 67 days after the world’s first test tube baby, Louise Brown, in Oldham, England.

While Edwards is widely recognised globally, Mukherjee’s contribution took years to gain acknowledgment.

He encountered significant professional isolation and hostility, which aggravated his personal distress and affected his career severely.

Unable to cope with the professional and personal stress, Dr Subhash Mukherjee tragically died by suicide in June 1981.

Today, his work is celebrated, and IVF and his inventions are being used by millions of couples who are unable to reproduce naturally.