As an attendee at various national and international conferences during the formative years of IVF in the early 1980’s, I distinctly remember how difficult it was to hear a myriad of laboratory and clinical techniques being described and to have any possibility of discerning which were best practices for IVF success. I concluded that the only way to be successful was to copy every aspect of the process from a successful program. I therefore took a sabbatical in Melbourne Australia with Alan Trounson and his clinical team at Monash, while also observing another successful program across town at The Royal Women’s Hospital with Alex Lopata. That experience convinced me of the critical role of a top quality IVF laboratory and allowed me to establish a highly successful IVF program on my return to UCLA (Meldrum et al., 1987).