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Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the Problems of Sex

University of California Press

One day in 1914, embryologist Frank R. Lillie, chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago, received from the manager of his farm a pair of twin calf fetuses with their placentas intact, still wrapped in the excised womb. The genitalia of one of the fetuses looked rather strange. Thus began Lillie's research on the freemartin, which led to the radical conclusion that embryonic sex differentiation is dependent on blood-borne hormones (Lillie 1917a,b). Freemartins were deemed to be sterile female co-twins to males, fetuses that developed from separate eggs but whose placentas had merged in utero, allowing the crossing of blood systems. Hormones, Lillie concluded, were clearly implicated in the production of sex.1

In 1917, George Papanicolaou, a zoologist in the Anatomy Department at Cornell University Medical School, was engaged in sex determination research. One day he decided to see whether cells scraped from the vaginal walls of the guinea pigs he was using could indicate at what stage of the estrus cycle the guinea pigs were (Carmichael 1973:4749). The technique worked wonderfully. With it, researchers could infer the activity of internal organs, and thus analyze the biological activity of hormones on a routine basis. They could even do so over time, and the process was quick and cheap, and did not require sacrificing the animals (Stockard and Papanicolaou 1917a,b). The fundamental biological assay technique of modern reproductive endocrinological research had been constructed.2

During 1917, Margaret Sanger, perhaps the most prominent birth control activist of the twentieth century, was deeply involved in framing the project of achieving women's access to effective means of contraception to enhance women's autonomy. She stated the following goals: "For though the subject is largely social and economic yet it is in the main physical and

medical , and the object of those advancing the cause is to open the doors of the medical profession, who in turn will force open the doors of the laboratories where our chemists will give the women of the twentieth century reliable and scientific means of contraception hitherto unknown" (Chesler 1992:146).

On a cold Christmas morning in 1921, George Washington Corner, a physician and fledgling reproductive scientist, awoke in Baltimore to discover that it was snowing. He was in the midst of a series of experiments on the monkey Macaca rhesus at Johns Hopkins Medical School to determine the parameters of the menstrual cycle, a project that required catching each monkey every day to check the vaginal washings for red blood cells. With public transport halted by the snow, Corner walked five miles to the lab, fed the monkeys, and did his monitoring tasks (Corner 1981:164). By 1929 Corner had mapped out the hormonal action of progesterone, an essential actor in the menstrual cycle and subsequently an actor in birth control pills.3

One day in 1928, Harold H. Cole was hired as an assistant professor of animal husbandry at the Davis agricultural college farm of the University of California, Berkeley. He had earlier done research on the estrus cycle in the dog and cow, and for his first new project began to seek a hormone test for pregnancy in the cow and horse, based on Ascheim and Zondek's discovery of a gonadotropin in the urine of pregnant women. Using the immature rat for the assay, he and G. H. Hart soon discovered a new reproductive hormone that came to be known as pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG). PMSG then led reproductive scientists to a much broader understanding of the complex flows of reproductive hormones. The patent on PMSG funded Cole's and others' reproductive research at Davis for many years (Cole and Hart 1930; Cole 1977).

On Valentine's Day in 1934, Warren Weaver, the new director of the Natural Sciences Division of the newly reorganized Rockefeller Foundation, was developing his own agenda for research support. He framed the problematics before the foundation as follows:

Can man gain an intelligent control of his own power? Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men? Can we obtain enough knowledge of the physiology and the psychobiology of sex so that man can bring this pervasive, highly important, and dangerous aspect of life under rational control? Can we unravel the tangled problem of the endocrine glands, and develop, before it is too late, a therapy for the whole hideous range of mental and physical disorders which result from glandular disturbances? Can we solve the mysteries of the various vitamins so that we can nurture a race sufficiently healthy and resistant? Can we release psychology from its present confusion and ineffectiveness and shape it into a tool which every man can use every day? Can man acquire

enough knowledge of his own vital processes so that we can hope to rationalize human behavior? Can we, in short, create a new science of man?4

The Rockefeller Foundation Board answered in the affirmative.

One day in June 1953, Gregory Pincus opened the door of the fledgling Worcester Institute of Experimental Biology to welcome two women. One was Margaret Sanger, and the other was Katherine McCormack, widow of the International Harvester scion and a benefactor of many of Sanger's projects. Pincus, son of an agricultural scientist from New Jersey, had a Ph.D. in genetics and physiology from Harvard, and his reproductive research included experiments in artificial parthenogenesis. Pincus and his colleague Hudson Hoagland, both unwilling refugees from academia, had founded the Worcester Institute in 1944 and were trying to establish it as a freestanding research shop, doing various kinds of experimental work on contract for pharmaceutical companies and others. The hormone research that Sanger and McCormack discussed with Pincus that day in 1953 ultimately led to the birth control pill of which Pincus is a commonly designated "father." McCormack gave him a check for $10,000 on the spot and several million subsequently.5

Each of the individuals just introduced represents one of the major social worlds involved in the disciplining of reproduction in the twentieth century: reproductive scientists in biology, medicine, and agriculture; philanthropic foundations; and birth control advocates. This book offers a wide-angle view of each of these worlds and of their interrelations as, through their often uneasy collaborations, the reproductive sciences emerged and coalesced as scientific disciplines in a world often hostile to their development.

Significantly, in part due to the illegitimacy of pursuing the reproductive sciences, this disciplinary endeavor formed later than the study of other major organ systems such as circulation or respiration, though once established it grew rapidly. For example, not a single English-language book on the reproductive sciences was published until agricultural scientist F. H. A. Marshall's Physiology of Reproduction appeared in Britain in 1910. Yet by 1940, investigators in the United States had both...