In many ways Louise Brown lives an ordinary life near Bristol, England. She worked as a postal clerk, and then for a shipping company. She married in 2004 and had a child in 2007. Yet the still remembers a time when her life was surrounded by reporters from the world’s leading news outlets. She knows she was likely the most famous baby right out of the womb — because of how she got to that womb in the first place.

On this day, July 25, in 1978, Louise Brown, the first baby conceived in vitro, via artificial insemination, was born to parents Lesley Brown and her husband John. Lesley was diagnosed with fallopian tube blockages that prevented her from conceiving child naturally, and the couple decided to go for the experimental procedure.

Doctors removed an egg from Lesley and fertilized it with John’s sperm. Before, the scientists would wait until the single cell divided into 64, which typically took five days, but this time they decided to implant the fertilized egg into Lesley womb after just two days. The procedure worked, and Louise was born by Caesarean section, weighing in at healthy 5 lbs 12 oz.