Prof Sir Robert Edwards was knighted in 2011, five decades after he began experimenting with IVF.

His work led to the birth of Ms Brown at Oldham General Hospital in 1978. She said he had brought “happiness and joy” to millions of people.

IVF is used worldwide and has resulted in more than five million babies.

Prof Edwards died in his sleep after a long illness.

Ms Brown said: “I have always regarded Robert Edwards as like a grandfather to me.

“His work, along with Patrick Steptoe, has brought happiness and joy to millions of people all over the world by enabling them to have children.

“I am glad that he lived long enough to be recognised with a Nobel prize for his work, and his legacy will live on with all the IVF work being carried out throughout the world.”

The University of Cambridge, where Prof Edwards was a fellow, said his work “had an immense impact”.

Born in Yorkshire in 1925 into a working-class family, Prof Edwards served in the British army during World War II before returning home to study first agricultural sciences and then animal genetics.

Building on earlier research, which showed that egg cells from rabbits could be fertilised in test tubes when sperm was added, Edwards developed the same technique for humans.

In a laboratory at Cambridge in 1968, he first saw life created outside the womb in the form of a human blastocyst, an embryo that has developed for five to six days after fertilisation.

“I’ll never forget the day I looked down the microscope and saw something funny in the cultures,” Edwards once recalled. (BBC)