Robert Edwards was born 27 September 1925, the son of Samuel and Margaret Edwards. He was educated at Manchester Central High School, and the University of Wales, in Bangor, 1948-51, and the University of Edinburgh, 1951-57. In 1956, he married Ruth Eileen Fowler; they had five daughters.

On leaving Edinburgh, Edwards worked briefly as Resident Fellow at California Institute of Technology, 1957-58, then at the National Institute of Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, 1958-62, and at Glasgow University, 1962-63. In 1963, he became the Ford Foundation Reader of Physiology at the University of Cambridge. Edwards had begun work on fertilisation in 1955, and began his partnership with Dr Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist surgeon, in 1968. The first successful human test-tube fertilisation took place in 1970, though it was not until 1978 that Louise Brown, the first 'test tube baby', was born.

Edwards and Steptoe went on to found the first clinic for in-vitro fertilisation at Bourn Hall, Cambridge, in 1980, and Edwards served as Scientific Director of the Bourn Hallam Clinics in Cambridgeshire and London, from 1988 to 1991, also working as Professor of Human Reproduction at Cambridge, from 1985 to 1989. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2010 and was knighted in 2011. He died on 10 April 2013.

Edwards's publications include: A Matter of Life (with P. C. Steptoe), 1980; Conception in the Human Female, 1980; (with C. R. Austin) Mechanisms of Sex Differentiation in Animals and Man; (with J. M. Purdy) Human Conception in Vitro, 1982; (with J. M. Purdy and P. C. Steptoe) Implantation of the Human Embryo, 1985; (with M. Seppälä) In Vitro Fertilisation and Embryo Transfer, 1985; Life Before Birth, 1989.