Questions have been raised about one of the UK’s most well-known fertility doctors after two people whose parents attended his clinic reportedly made the shock discovery that their biological father is a lab scientist who worked in the same hospital as the physician.
Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988, was an obstetrician and gynaecologist who helped develop in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and ran a fertility clinic in Oldham Hospital, Greater Manchester.
The parents of Roz Snyder, 52, and David Gertler, 51, attended the clinic around the 1970s after struggling to conceive children.
Ms Snyder and Mr Gertler were shocked after DNA tests revealed they are half-siblings, the Telegraph reported.
The pair were recently alerted by the genealogy website Ancestry that their late fathers are not their biological ones, but that they shared a biological father in Roy Hollihead, who ran a pathology laboratory one floor above Dr Steptoe’s clinic.
The 84-year-old told Ms Snyder that Dr Steptoe “used sperm from lab staff, medical students and doctors… but no records of any were kept” and told the Telegraph that he was not sure the hospital was aware of the apparent scheme.
Ms Snyder and Mr Gertler do not believe their late parents knew that their mothers’ eggs were inseminated using Mr Hollihead’s donated sperm, and they have raised questions about the ethics around some of Dr Steptoe’s fertility work.
Ms Snyder said: “Something definitely doesn’t add up. All the research I have done, spending night after night on the internet. I can’t find anywhere that Dr Steptoe did artificial insemination.
“It has been life-changing. It has given me an identity crisis. Who am I? I just don’t know. There have been so many tears. So much crying. I just found out my dad’s not my dad.”
Mr Gertler told the newspaper about who he had believed was his father, saying: “Technically while he was the man who brought me up and was wonderful, from a biological point of view he definitely wasn’t my dad.
“Personality traits everybody said I had inherited from him like a sense of humour and business skills is not true. Your foundations completely shift. You feel you don’t belong as much. I’ve almost got impostor syndrome.
“My instinct is they (my parents) were never told.”
Northern Care Alliance, the NHS trust that now runs Oldham Hospital, said it had no records of Dr Steptoe’s clinic, according to the Telegraph.
His struggle to develop IVF with two other pioneering British scientists – nurse Jean Purdy and physiologist Sir Robert Edwards – was recently dramatised in a new film Joy, starring Bill Nighy as the fertility physician.