IVF is one of the greatest scientific-medical success stories of our times, starting as a revolutionary and controversial technique in the 1970s, to now being a mainstream and sometimes publicly-funded procedure that has produced >8 million babies. Since the early days of Nobel Laurate Bob Edwards’ pioneering scientific contributions to IVF, scientists have always had a disproportionately large role in IVF, compared to other medical practices. However, this contribution is arguing diminishing with time as IVF has developed into a mature and highly corporatized medical practice. Despite this, overall, IVF has a low success rate of just 18%/cycle initiated and is completely ineffective in certain patient groups, e.g. women >43 years. Hence there is still room for significant improvement, especially given the inevitable March of Progress of science, bringing regular new insights into basic mechanisms regulating mammalian fecundity. One such area of major scientific advancement over the past decade is the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating oocyte development, maturation and ovulation. These advances are important as oocyte quantity and quality are fundamentally rate-limiting to the success of IVF. This new knowledge has implications for the efficacy of oocyte in vitro maturation (IVM), which is a reproductive technology that makes use of oocytes from patients that have received minimal or no gonadotrophin stimulation. Whilst IVM brings many advantages to patients, particularly those suffering from polycystic ovarian syndrome and also young cancer patients requiring urgent fertility preservation, IVM is less successful than IVF. Capitalising on the new scientific advances to improve the efficiency and clinical uptake of IVM has been challenging. My group has made a concerted effort to partner with bold and innovative clinician researchers who are prepared to conduct pre-clinical and clinical trials, grounded in solid science. This science-medicine partnership is making a difference for infertile and cancer patients.