Professor Alison Pamela Murdoch, from Wylam, was recognised in the King’s New Year Honours List for a career dedicated to fertility research.
Now 73 years old, Alison’s career highlights include being a consultant gynaecologist, establishing the Newcastle Fertility Centre in the 1980s, and being a Professor of Reproductive Medicine and Head of Department at Newcastle University.
“When I was a consultant, I was given the responsibility to set up a fertility service because there weren’t any fertility services at that time,” she said. “Infertility was not considered a medical problem so there were no resources. It was an uphill struggle to get the service established.”
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The Fertility Centre was moved from the RVI to the International Centre for Life in Newcastle in 1999 where it remains today.
“Managing to keep that as an NHS-based unit providing services for people throughout the North East would be the achievement I’m most proud of,” she said.
“There have been thousands of babies born over the years as a result of that and the unit is still flourishing, even though I retired from clinical practice seven years ago.”
Alison said one of the unique aspects of her work was researching human embryos. She collaborated with regulatory bodies including the HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) and worked on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
She has just concluded her term as president of the British Fertility Society and is working on a case to put to the Government to revise the law on IVF, which she says is decades out of date.
“When the law was brought in in 1990, it assumed the only people who were going to have babies were married, heterosexual couples. It’s not like that now, we have much more mixed, modern families – sometimes with two or more parents and mixed-gender parents,” she said.
Speaking of the MBE, she said she was ‘very grateful’ to those who nominated her for it.
Alison achieved another significant milestone early in her career.
“I trained until I was a consultant on a part-time basis, I had four children of my own and at that time, in the 1980s, that was really unusual. I was one of the first people in the country to train to be a consultant, having been told by the college I would never be a consultant because I was part-time and a female. Things have changed,” she said.