From next year, 12 women will become Australia’s first recipients of uterus transplants, in pioneering surgery that has its origins in a conversation between a doctor and his patient in Adelaide more than two decades ago.

Back in 2000, the Swedish gynaecologist, Professor Mats Brännström, was working at Royal Adelaide Hospital when a young woman about to undergo a hysterectomy for cervical cancer asked him for a new uterus so she could have a child.

Obviously the answer had to be no, but it sparked an idea that resulted in the landmark trial about to begin in Australia.

“The patient was young, and hadn’t started a family,” says paediatric and adolescent gynaecologist Dr Rebecca Deans, the lead investigator of the uterus transplant research project at the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney.