Fifties (47 page)

By the forties she was like a commander who had won but did
not know it, in part because her enemies were still on the battlefield. But even within Catholic middle-class circles, the questions of how to limit the size of a family, how to have a normal sex life, and how to remain a good Catholic were ever more troubling.

By 1950 she occupied the center of thinking on the issue and her opponents were increasingly regarded as fringe elements. A new urban young middle class was evolving, one that was independent of the ways of their parents and increasingly sympathetic to social and scientific advances. Now she regularly railed against the fact that contraception remained, in her mind, appallingly primitive and that there had not been any significant developments in a century. That was proof to her that men dominated the world of science and medicine.

It was around this time that she renewed an old friendship with Katharine Dexter McCormick, a woman who had admired her for some forty years. McCormick, Dr. John Rock once noted, was “rich as Croesus. She had a
vast
fortune. Her lawyer told me she couldn’t even spend the interest on her interest.” She was a member of a distinguished family and her father, who understood her intelligence, had pushed her to go to MIT, where, in 1904, she became the second woman to graduate.

Soon thereafter she married Stanley McCormick, son of Cyrus McCormick, founder of International Harvester. They must have seemed the perfect couple, combining brains, breeding, and good looks. But Stanley McCormick was stricken by acute schizophrenia, which shattered any chance for happiness. Katharine’s interest in birth control may have come from her belief that schizophrenia was genetic and her fear that she might conceive children who bore the same illness as her husband. She remained married to Stanley McCormick until his death in 1954.

She started corresponding with Sanger in 1948. As soon as she gained control over her husband’s estate, she started giving generously: $5,000 in 1951 and then $150,000 annually. Like Sanger, Katharine McCormick saw the issue of birth control as part of a woman’s right to control her own body and life and thus escape the kind of servitude that came with poverty and unwanted children. She was not interested in birth control per se; she was interested in it only as it affected women. When in 1958 a scientist mentioned to her the possibility of creating a pill that men could swallow, she wrote Sanger, “He was rather shocked when I told him I didn’t give a hoot about a male contraception, that only female research interested me.”

In March 1952, Sanger brought McCormick together with Gregory Goodwin (Goody) Pincus. (“No,” she had written Sanger in answer to an inquiry. “I have heard nothing of the research of Dr. Pincus ... I am glad to see anything about this line ...”) Pincus was a brilliant pathfinder in the field of genetics, and Sanger’s challenge, his colleague Oscar Hechter thought, was meant to appeal to his most basic instincts: “You have the power to change the world by doing this.” Then in his late forties, Goody Pincus was never a man to turn down a challenge. He loved to compete, and he hated to lose. His gracious, charming manner concealed an almost steely hardness that guided him professionally. In fact, he wanted to succeed not just in science but in everything he did. When he played Monopoly or gin rummy with his son, the games would often end in comical arguments or good-natured mutual accusations of cheating. He learned to drive only when he was in his mid-forties (before that he had not been able to afford a car, one friend noted), but then he drove with a vengeance. He saw all other cars as potential challengers and felt compelled to pass them. When his wife would complain and tell him to slow down, he would say, “But this is just a cruising speed.”

Born in 1903 in Woodbine, New Jersey, Goody Pincus was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who lived in a Jewish farm colony founded by the Baron de Hirsch Fund, a German-Jewish philanthropy. The fund aimed to spare Russian Jewish immigrants potentially grim lives as peddlers, but the recipients of its largess were somewhat uneasy about the future their benefactors had planned for them as part of “a contented Jewish peasantry.” Joseph Pincus, Goody’s father, ran the local farm, lectured to Jewish farmers all over the East, and for a time was editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper
The Jewish Farmer.
Joseph’s wife, Elizabeth Lipman Pincus, was the secretary to the superintendent of agronomy on the colony. As a boy, Goody was fascinated by animals and told his father he wanted to be a farmer when he grew up; his father told him there was no money in farming. The oldest of six children, Goody was always studying or reading and usually seemed pleasantly preoccupied. “What time is it, Goody?” his sister Sophie once asked him. Without looking up from his books, he answered, “What time is what?” The Pincus home was filled with intellectual energy and curiosity and Goody always seemed to be at the center of it. Evelyn Isaacson, a cousin, remembered a typical evening: John, the youngest of the children, then about six, turned to Goody, then about sixteen, and said, “Goody, I have three questions for you.” “What are they, John?” asked the obliging older brother. “One, why are we
here? Two, why were we born? And three, there is no God.” The family believed Goody was a genius. His I.Q. was said to be 210. He remained fond of animals and eventually majored in biology at Cornell. He continued his studies at Harvard graduate school under William Castle, the leader of the first generation of American geneticists, and W. J. Crozier, a protégé of the famed biologist Jacques Loeb. Genetics seemed a perfect vocation for someone with Pincus’s immense talents. The field was just beginning to explode as scientists forged breakthrough after breakthrough.

Goody Pincus’s early work involved parthenogenic (that is, fatherless) rabbits. In 1934 Pincus announced that he had achieved
in vitro
(that is, inside a test tube) fertilization of rabbit eggs. Pincus took great joy in his work and was uncommonly candid about it. That candor might have served him well in other fields, but in genetics it got him into trouble. His work, as James Reed has written, “scared people, creating visions of Frankenstein-Brave New World nightmares.” The
New York Times
headline ran: “
RABBITS BORN IN GLASS: HALDANE-HUXLEY FANTASY MADE REAL BY HARVARD BIOLOGISTS
.” The
Times,
as Reed noted, “pictured Pincus as a sinister character bent on hatching humans in bottles.”

But that was nothing compared to an article in
Colliers
entitled “No Father to Guide Them.” The article managed, as Reed noted, to combine antifeminism, anti-Semitism, and a phobia of science. Pincus was depicted as a kind of Rasputin of the science lab, bent on evil deeds. A photo showed him, with a cigarette dangling from his lip, holding up a rabbit that was clearly soon to be sacrificed. In Pincus’s world, the author, J. D. Ratcliff, wrote, “man’s value would shrink. It is conceivable that the process would not even produce males. The mythical land of the Amazons would then come to life. A world where women would be self-sufficient; man’s value precisely zero.”

In reality, Pincus was the gentlest and most orthodox of men, a devoted husband and father, who left little poems behind on the pillow for his wife when he went to the lab in the morning. Still, the publicity did not sit well at Harvard. Pincus was already something of a controversial figure: He was Jewish in an age when American academia was still largely anti-Semitic; and his critics claimed he was too ambitious for his own good (and theirs). In 1936 Harvard, celebrating its tercentenary, cited Pincus’s work as one of the university’s outstanding scientific achievements in its entire history. The next year, when Pincus was thirty-two, it denied him tenure. He was devastated, even though he knew university politics were responsible. Fortunately, his old colleague Hudson Hoagland had just gone
to Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, as the chairman of its biology department. Clark was a small school with a long tradition of scientific excellence. Enraged by Harvard’s cowardice and pettiness, Hoagland invited Pincus to come as a visiting professor.

From the start Hoagland had a vision that went far beyond the tiny three-man biology department at Clark. He began to build a research center with talented young scientists who were drawn by his and Pincus’s reputations. M. C. Chang, for example, was delighted to come to Worcester. A talented young Chinese who received a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1941, he had read Pincus’s book
The Eggs of Mammals
in 1936. “A path-finding book, done when he was only thirty-three years old,” Chang said years later. “
Everyone
in our field knew about him. You must remember that until then no one knew mammals had eggs.” Soon Clark’s research team numbered fifteen scientists, all of them considered brilliant by their peers and many of them nationally renowned. Their salaries were underwritten by dint of Hoagland’s vigorous fund-raising in the Worcester community. Their lab was a converted barn. Hoagland’s people did not, however, have faculty status and could not eat at the faculty dining room. Wallace Atwood, Clark’s relatively conservative president, hated Hoagland’s end runs, and he got back at him by denying Hoagland’s staff, generally the most distinguished people on campus, such small privileges.

Atwood preferred the kind of academic atmosphere—with its committee meetings, departmental politics, and academic pettiness and jealousies—that Hoagland and Pincus wanted to leave behind. Since Clark’s only contribution to their work was Hoagland’s rather small salary and a limited amount of space, they became independent of the university in 1944 and founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. As its co-directors, they estimated an annual budget of about $100,000, and declared its purpose to connect new biology to practical medicine.

The two men complemented each other. Hoagland’s son noted years later that his father never seemed as happy as when he was working directly with Goody Pincus. Hoagland was immensely skillful in tapping into the Worcester establishment for money. He persuaded businessmen to contribute $25,000 for an old mansion, which became their headquarters. Much of their funding came from a patent held by a local businessman for the hard ties that held shoelaces together at the end; the running joke in Worcester was that they were operating on a shoestring. The staff was young and confident, full of the excitement that comes with having no limits.

Pincus served as father figure and mentor by dint of his remarkable
scientific accomplishment and curiosity. Once, a staff member found him operating on a rabbit and asked what he was doing. “Putting cow’s eggs in the rabbit,” Pincus answered. “Why?” the friend asked. “I’m curious to see what will happen,” answered Pincus. At first their funds were so limited that Pincus cleaned the animal labs, Mrs. Hoagland was the bookkeeper, Hoagland cut the lawn, and Chang was the night watchman. When a local Worcester businessman saw Hoagland, stripped to the waist, cutting the lawn, he added a groundskeeper’s salary to the budget. In 1950, Chang won an award of a thousand dollars for a paper on fertilization of rabbit eggs from the American Sterility Society. The award allowed him to buy his first car. That same year Oscar Hechter, another research associate, won an award from the Endocrinological Society. “We don’t have to worry about money and salaries anymore,” an enthusiastic Pincus told Hoagland. “Our staff members can live on their awards.”

They were among the early leaders in this country in steroid research. In the late forties, Hechter had won the CIBA award for a paper on producing adrenal hormones, but in the race to produce cortisone, the Worcester group was beaten by the scientists at Upjohn—at least partly because Worcester’s major benefactor, the Searle Pharmaceutical Company, was not particularly supportive. When the next great challenge came—the development of a drug for contraception—the intensely competitive Pincus swore they would not be beaten again.

Pincus already had a sense that hormones could be used to control reproduction, from his work in mammalian reproduction. As a young lab assistant he had been intrigued by what happened when too many rats were placed in the same cage—they attacked each other. His own ideas about the problems of human overcrowding, friends thought, stemmed from those experiments. He asked the people at Searle to finance research in contraception, but again the answer was not encouraging. In fact Albert Raymond, Searle’s director of research, came down hard on him. According to Pincus’s notes of the meeting, Raymond told him: “You haven’t given us a thing to justify the half-million that we have invested in you ... yet you have the nerve to ask for more for research. You will get more only if a lucky chance gives us something originating from your group which will make us a profit. If I had unlimited funds I would undertake a large program in the steroid field, but I don’t have such funds and the record to date does not justify a large program.”

If the attitude at Searle reflected the wariness of a large corporation
to be involved in something as sensitive as contraceptive research, still the Worcester Foundation was remarkably isolated from the prejudices of the era. Its funding sources were varied, the contributors in the local community were generally liberal, and it had no board to answer to. That did not mean that the people at the foundation were not wary. One night in the early fifties a woman knocked on the door of Pincus’s house. She was desperate, almost out of control. She was pregnant, she said, and needed help. Could he help her? Pincus was very gentle with her, his son John noted, but kept his distance. It was, he was sure, a setup; he knew of other such incidents.

So when Mrs. Sanger and Mrs. McCormick came along, it was a godsend. From the start, Pincus was optimistic about what could be accomplished and how soon. He had met Mrs. Sanger, it was believed, at the home of friends and colleagues in Planned Parenthood in the winter of 1950, and Mrs. Sanger had asked him if some sort of drug was possible to stop conception. He hedged slightly and said that yes, there was. Out of that conversation came the first grant from Planned Parenthood. It was after an early meeting with Mrs. Sanger and Mrs. McCormick that Pincus first envisioned the device as a pill, and one that would probably use progesterone in some manner to block ovulation. When he arrived home, he was so excited that he told his wife he had discovered a new device for contraception. She tried to caution him: Women like Mrs. Sanger were bright and intelligent, but they were living in a fantasy world. “Lizuska,” he said, using the Russian diminutive for Elizabeth. “Everything is possible in science.”