The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (11 page)

While studying and working at Harvard, Pincus met and befriended Hudson Hoagland, another disciple of Crozier’s. Hoagland would later describe Crozier as the leader of “
an arrogant bunch of brats
.” Their research was intended to push boundaries and expand knowledge, regardless of whether it was practical or if it pleased the university hierarchy.

Pincus’s interest in how animals passed along genetic traits led him to study the eggs of mammals more deeply—specifically how they were fertilized and how they developed
in vitro
(in test tubes). He tried hormone injections to see how they affected rabbits and at one point noted that estrogen injections prevented pregnancy, but he never pushed on to consider the potential of using such hormones to control human fertility. At the time, Pincus was only trying to better understand how reproduction occurred. He manipulated eggs. He tried fertilizing them outside the rabbits’ bodies. He tried transferring eggs from one female to another. He wasn’t searching for practical applications so much as playing around and trying to learn what he could.

Within a few years at Harvard, Pincus earned grants from the National Research Council and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Having chosen an important research subject and made impressive contributions quickly, he seemed poised for a remarkable career. At the time, Jewish researchers at schools such as Harvard had to be better than their peers to earn commensurate respect, and Pincus was doing exactly that. At the same time, though, his benefactors at Harvard were losing power. The university’s new president, James B. Conant, disapproved of the way William Crozier had been training biologists like Pincus and B. F. Skinner, who would go on to become one of the most
influential psychologists and behaviorists
in the world. Soon, the Crozier-led department of physiology was abolished. The timing for Pincus in particular was poor. In 1933, when Conant became president,
Pincus’s contract was only barely approved
.

The following year, Pincus announced to the National Academy of Sciences that he had fertilized rabbit eggs in a test tube, transplanted them into the body of a host mother, and brought the baby rabbits to term. This was typical of the kind of aggressive science that Crozier had encouraged in his students, but it was radical at the time. Crozier wanted his students to recognize the fundamental problems in biology and think about how to solve them. Pincus—the son of a farmer turned teacher who had always pushed his fellow farmers to adopt modern techniques to improve their crops and herds—discovered he had a knack for such work. He wrote in a grant application at the time that his goal was to
apply his
in vitro
technique to humans
. Almost immediately, his work began to attract an unusual amount of attention beyond the academic community.

It should have been a warning to Pincus when the
New York Times
, citing his work for the first time in a 1934 article, carried the headline, “R
ABBITS
B
ORN IN
G
LASS:
H
ALDANE-
H
UXLEY
F
ANTASY
M
ADE
R
EAL BY
H
ARVARD
B
IOLOGISTS
.” The headline was false. Pincus had conceived the rabbits in test tubes and then transferred them to living rabbits, which were sacrificed and studied before the embryos could grow to term. No animals were being born in glass. But it didn’t matter. The newspaper went on to portray Pincus as a sinister scientist trying to grow babies in bottles. The article compared Pincus to the fictional biologist Bokanovsky in Huxley’s
Brave New World
, who fertilized human eggs in test tubes:

At Harvard are two Bokanovskys
in the persons of Professors Gregory Pincus and E. V. Enzman [Pincus’s collaborator in the study], who have actually taken a step toward realizing the . . . fantasy. Not babies but rabbits have been developed in glass bottles. “We believe that this is the first certain demonstration that mammalian eggs can be fertilized in vitro,” Pincus and Enzman remark.

The
Times
was prescient in at least one respect, explaining that Pincus’s technology might eventually emancipate women from the demands of childbirth, separate love from reproduction, and empower the eugenics movement. Pincus claimed in interviews at the time that he was interested only in science, not the implications for humans, but that wasn’t true. His work was not theoretical. He was not simply seeking to better understand the workings of sperm and egg. He was engaged, as one writer put it, in “
the tinkering of a biological Edison
.” He was inventing new ways to make babies.

Soon came another story on the same subject, again in the
Times
, “
BOTTLES ARE MOTHERS
,” and another Huxley reference. “
Brave New World
,” wrote the
Times
, was mere satire and “may seem amusing to one who knows little of trends in biological research.” But when human babies are someday “reared in glass vessels by laboratory experts . . . Gregory Pincus of Harvard is
bound to receive his meed of the praise
.”

After fertilizing rabbit eggs and restoring them to their mothers, Pincus took another step forward: letting the eggs become embryos while remaining in the glass. So far, the newspaper reported, his attempts had failed, but he was getting closer. His new understanding of hormones would be the key. Only recently had scientists discovered that hormones controlled growth, and much of the process remained a mystery. Curious, Pincus planted his fertilized rabbit eggs in a solution that included the hormones estrogen and progesterone. “He expected neither failure nor success,” wrote the
Times
. “A good scientist expects nothing; he just watches and draws conclusions.” Pincus saw blood vessels forming in the dish after forty-eight hours and a tiny part of the egg that would become a heart. He saw the cells split normally. He counted 128 cells. Instead of a rabbit embryo, though, something irregular and monstrous took shape. It died after fifty-six hours, but such failure was to be expected. Pincus was pleased because the results justified more study. What role, precisely, did the hormones play? Was a mother needed to make them work?

Certain he would soon find answers, he stayed the course. In 1936, Pincus and his colleague Enzman announced that they had achieved parthenogenic development of a rabbit ovum—in other words, they had begun the reproductive process without any fertilization, simply by manipulating the environment surrounding the eggs. Not long after that, Pincus went a step further, saying he had not only achieved parthenogenic development of eggs but had transplanted the eggs successfully into surrogate female rabbits. His “immaculate conceptions,” as the press called them, made for more headlines. Newspapers all over the country printed the startling results of Pincus’s work, often with headlines like this one:
“M
ANLESS
W
ORLD
?”
which, not surprisingly, some people found unsettling.

Later the same year, 1936, Harvard marked its three hundredth anniversary with a pamphlet listing the greatest scientific discoveries made by its faculty in three centuries of study. Pincus’s work made the list. That same year, he published his groundbreaking book
The Eggs of Mammals
, dedicated to his professors Crozier and Castle, a book that recited the history of man’s hunt for eggs:

Pfluger, 1863
—cat; Schron, 1863—cat and rabbit; Koster, 1868—man; Slawinsky, 1873—man; Wagener, 1879—dog; Van Beneden, 1880—bat; Harz, 1883—mouse, guinea pig, cat; Lange, 1896—mouse; Coert, 1898—rabbit and cat; Amann, 1899—man; Palladino, 1894, 1898—man, bear, dog; Lane-Claypon, 1905–1907—rabbit; Fellner, 1909—man.

Pincus challenged his fellow biologists to join him in exciting new discoveries that appeared close at hand. “The enormous variety and richness of material that is available and untapped should provide an extraordinary temptation to exploitation now that a beginning has been made in the development of technical facilities for the manipulation of this material,” he wrote. “I emphasize that only a beginning has been made.” He sounded like a man setting off on a great journey, excited by the possible adventures that lay ahead.

With each new discovery, each audacious claim, and each speech before a scientific body, Pincus attracted more attention in the mainstream press. “
The social implications of Dr. Pincus’s
advance are not easily grasped,” said an editorial in the
Times
.

Parenthood is still associated much with love. Much of the lyric poetry of the world deals with the wooing of maids, and much of the music and painting that has been given to us by greatest artists are but expressions of the urge that makes grass sprout and lilacs burst forth in the Spring. The more imaginative biologists are not dismayed by looking at a glass vessel and saying: “That’s my mother.” Serenades will still be strummed on guitars, Romeo and Juliet will still part reluctantly on the balcony. . . . Love will simply be divorced from parenthood if the biologists are right.

Newspapers all over the country carried reports of Pincus’s research.
Time
magazine criticized the scientist for sacrificing so many rabbits merely so their cell divisions could be counted. When reporters asked what his work would mean for humans, Pincus said he was not concerned with such things. He meant that he was interested in pushing science to see where it would take mankind, and that he had no intention of holding back his research because some might be afraid. But that attitude did nothing to calm fears. If anything, it made Pincus sound even more dangerous. And the publicity was about to get worse.

On March 20, 1937,
Collier’s
magazine published a feature story on the scientist’s work with a strangely lit photo of Pincus, cigarette in his mouth, smoke curling overhead, looking down with dark, hooded eyes at a rabbit held in his arms. If the reader of the magazine got the impression that Pincus’s rabbit was not long for the earth, it was understandable, because it was also true. The article began:

In the huge Biological Laboratory
—a building which represents several of Harvard’s fifty-two million dollars’ worth of real estate—a 33-year-old scientist leaned over a microscope. His name might have been borrowed from a cop in a detective novel: Gregory Pincus. But what he saw has possibilities more thrilling than anything a detective-story writer ever imagined: a world in which women would be a dominant, self-sufficient entity, able to produce young without the aid of a man.

The article, perhaps striking anti-Semitic notes, described Pincus as a scientist with “dark penetrating eyes narrowed to slits” and a “heavy mop of black hair.” It warned: “The mythical land of the Amazons would then come to life. A world where women could be self-sufficient; a man’s value precisely zero.” A critic of Pincus’s work was quoted in the article saying that if babies were made in test tubes, it “would be the ruin of women.” Pregnancy not only improved a woman’s looks, this critic noted, but also improved her nervous system.

Suddenly, Pincus was being portrayed as a revolutionary or, worse, a deviant.

Soon after the
Collier’s
article appeared, Harvard gave Pincus the news: He would receive a grant to study for one more year at the University of Cambridge in England, and then he would be finished. Harvard was cutting its ties with the young scientist. Pincus believed he was dumped because he had talked too much about his work, particularly to the mainstream press, and because his findings frightened many. No doubt the ouster of Crozier after Conant’s arrival hadn’t boded well. He wondered if his religion also hurt him. Another factor behind the dismissal may have been Pincus’s tendency to publish too soon, as other scientists were unable to replicate the experiments. Then there was the simple fact that he was dealing with sex.

Pincus was thirty-four and had already published a groundbreaking book, as well as a number of attention-grabbing scientific studies. He was on the cusp of what promised to be a brilliant career teaching and conducting research at one of the wealthiest and most prestigious universities in the world. Just like that, it was gone. Pincus may have been the victim of small-mindedness and anti-Semitism, but he was also undone by his own outsized ego.

He scrambled. He applied for jobs but received no offers. He arranged a meeting with Albert Einstein. He asked some of his wealthy and influential cousins for help. But he couldn’t find another college willing to hire him.

He appealed to his former classmate, Hudson Hoagland, who had left Harvard and gone to work at Clark University in Worcester, where he had taken over a three-man biology department. Hoagland was a tall, thin man with a bald head, chiseled jaw, and round glasses. Like Pincus, Hoagland saw scientific mysteries everywhere and felt it his calling to solve them. Once, when his wife had a fever,
Hoagland drove to the drug store
to get her aspirin. He was quick about it, but when he returned, his normally reasonable wife complained angrily that he had been slow as molasses. Hoagland wondered if her fever had distorted her internal clock, so he took her temperature, had her estimate the length of a minute, gave her the aspirin, and continued to have her estimate the minutes as her temperature dropped. When her temperature was back to normal he plotted the logarithm and found it was linear. Later, he continued the study in his laboratory, artificially raising and lowering the temperatures of test subjects until he was certain he was right: higher body temperatures make the body clock go faster, and his wife had not been unjustifiably cranky.

Clark, while not as prestigious as Harvard, was renowned as one of the nation’s finest schools for graduate education, which is why in 1909 it had invited Freud and Jung to lecture in observance of the school’s twentieth anniversary. It is also why Hoagland thought Pincus might thrive in Worcester. “
Knowing his brilliance
,” Hoagland wrote in an unpublished memoir, “I was incensed that he had not been reappointed and promoted at Harvard and was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that academic politics, including some anti-Semitism, jealousy toward Pincus on the part of some, and antipathy of various colleagues toward Crozier and his group were the reasons for this discontinuance.” When Clark said it had no money to hire Pincus, in large part because the Great Depression was straining its finances, Hoagland took matters into his own hands. A rabbi in New York who knew the Pincus family introduced Hoagland to Henry Ittleson, founder of CIT, a holding company that had grown rapidly in the 1920s by financing wholesale suppliers of consumer goods such as automobiles and radios. Ittleson, along with two other donors, agreed to sponsor Pincus’s work at Clark for two years. At the time Hoagland had a small grant from G. D. Searle & Co. to study the effects of anticonvulsant drugs in animals, and he asked the pharmaceutical company to transfer it to Pincus, promising that their money would be well spent on this genius’s work. Hoagland scraped together enough money for the hire, although Pincus would still be paid far less than other professors at the school and far less than he would have earned at Harvard. He would also be forced to work with a much smaller research budget than he was accustomed to.