The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (12 page)

But Pincus had no choice. In addition to their son, John, who was twelve, he and Lizzie now had a two-year-old daughter, Laura, as well. Goody’s career always came first, and his family would follow wherever he went. The Pincuses arrived in Worcester in the fall of 1938, just as a massive hurricane struck New England, killing almost eight hundred people and destroying tens of thousands of homes. They moved into Hoagland’s big house on Downing Street, across the street from Clark’s campus, and soon after that into a small apartment two blocks away, where giant tree trunks toppled by the storm remained
sprawled across the surrounding yard
. Pincus was assigned to work in the basement of the building that housed Hoagland’s laboratory, near the bunker where the building’s heating coal was stored. But so much coal dust accumulated on his lab equipment that Pincus found it impossible to conduct experiments. He and the other scientists working in the basement were so short of funds they couldn’t afford labels for their chemicals. “We had to take the caps off and sniff them to tell which was which,”
Hoagland recalled
. Pincus went back to work on hormones, looking at how they affected the development of eggs.

Still, trouble found him. In April 1939, the Associated Press reported that Pincus had produced two litters of test-tube rabbits from his laboratory in Worcester. “
The Clark work was reported
by Dr. Gregory Pincus,” the AP reporter wrote, “who said emphatically that he is not planning to carry it on to find out whether human babies can be made by test tubes.” But in transmitting his story from a scientific conference in Toronto to his office in New York, the AP reporter dropped an important word: “not.” As a result, millions of Americans read in their newspapers and heard over their radios that Pincus had stated emphatically that he
did
intend to try to make human babies from test tubes.
The AP corrected its error
two weeks later, but the damage had been done. Pincus was once again seen as a man with dangerous ideas.

He was operating with no safety net. He still held hope of finding a university job, and he still counted on grant money to do his work. But scandals such as this one didn’t help. Much of the government’s funding for research in recent years had shifted away from the theoretical to the practical, and so Pincus shifted, too, spending less time on reproductive issues and turning to hormones and how they might be used to help reduce stress in soldiers and make factory workers more productive. In one study, Pincus and Hoagland gave the steroid pregnenolone to laborers in a leather factory to see if it made them work harder and more efficiently,
with encouraging preliminary results
. Slowly, Pincus rebuilt his reputation. In 1944, a seminal year for his career, he and several other scientists organized a major conference on hormones. They called it the Laurentian Hormone Conference (the meetings were held annually at the Mont Tremblant Lodge in Canada’s Laurentian Mountains), and Pincus became the chairman of the conference, a position he would maintain for the rest of his life.

“Everybody is hereby introduced to everybody else,” he would say at the
opening session of the conference
. It was his way of establishing his primacy but at the same time suggesting he expected intimacy to flower among his colleagues. It was classic Pincus.

With no teaching responsibilities at Clark, Pincus was free to spend virtually all of his time on research. But he was still treated like a stepchild at the college, unchallenged and underpaid.

In 1940, Goody and Lizzie were raising their two children in a small apartment near the Clark campus. That spring,
the principal of John’s high school
called and said she could no longer keep him in school. He had fulfilled all of his graduation requirements three years early. He had to go. John told his parents he was ready for college and wished to attend Yale. With his parents’ blessings he applied—to Yale and nowhere else—and gained admission. He started classes in the fall. The $450 annual tuition (not to mention
room, board, and clothing
, because John was still growing) put a great financial burden on the Pincuses.

Lizzie grew frustrated at times—not only with the family economics but also with being relegated, as she put it, to the role of “chief cook and bottle washer.” At the time, child rearing was depicted in the press and in popular culture as an exciting challenge rather than the endless slate of chores that many women experienced. The so-called “complete woman” was a chef, hostess, storyteller, shopper, gardener, decorator, chauffeur, maid, laundress, and lover. Outside the home, a woman was not expected to have a life. Sometimes when Goody returned home from work, Lizzie would tell him in detail which rooms she had vacuumed and cleaned. In later years, her daughter Laura would wonder if Lizzie honestly expected him to care or if she was only saying it so he would appreciate
what an ordeal her home life had become
. During World War II, when thousands of women were entering the workforce, Lizzie told her husband she was thinking of looking for work as a radio announcer. She never followed up on it.

Once again, Goody showed no inclination to pursue a steady job. In fact, at the time when his family seemed to be most pressed for money, he was preparing to take his biggest risk. In 1944, he and Hoagland made a move almost entirely unheard of in the American scientific community: They founded their own laboratory, calling it the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. Although it was a challenge to explain to dentists and bowling alley operators that this new foundation would be conducting research on hormones, not curing a dreaded disease, Hoagland and Pincus proved to be excellent salesmen, and the people of Worcester responded generously. Hoagland in particular had a gift for raising money. He came from an affluent family and projected an image of sophistication. Hoagland was also no slouch as a scientist, but it was clear from the start that Pincus was the real genius and Hoagland the organization man.

At first, the scientists operated out of a room at the Worcester State Hospital, but they soon had enough money to hire a dozen workers and purchase a twelve-acre estate in nearby Shrewsbury. Even then, however, money was so tight that Pincus cleaned his own animal cages and Hoagland, shirtless in the warm summer weather, mowed the grass.

The men assembled a guerrilla army of scientists, some of them outcasts, many of them brilliant, all of them lured by the opportunity to work of their own accord, without the pressures of university committees and in the presence of Pincus, whose reputation as a renegade and creative thinker was growing among those smart enough to look past the paranoid associations made by the press. By 1951 the Foundation employed fifty-seven men and women, making it by some accounts the largest privately owned independent scientific research institution in the country. There was no precedent for such an endeavor—one that had no specific goal other than to afford scientists the freedom to explore and invent as they pleased.

Year after year, Pincus and Hoagland made it their practice to spend nearly every dollar raised, putting away almost nothing for emergencies. Ambition fueled them. They wanted every chance to do great research, even as the Foundation building’s cesspool—built to accommodate the waste produced by a family, not a scientific laboratory—went long past full and
began emitting its contents into the groundwater
. Pincus couldn’t help himself. When an experiment showed promise, he would hire more scientists and build more lab space to pursue the latest lead, worrying about
how to pay
later, if at all. A secretary hired in the early 1950s recalled showing up for work and learning that she would have no desk and no office. She got a portable typewriter,
a portable table, and a keg of nails for a chair
. “Since our general fund has remained low,” the Foundation’s business manager wrote in a report to the board of trustees in 1950, “it is reasonable to ask whether the Foundation’s remarkable
growth was either wise or necessary
.” But Pincus, who made his own office in a converted garage, never paused. He was interested in science and in action, not long-term budgets or endowments.

In those early years, Pincus shuttled his family from one low-rent apartment to another. The eleven-year-old boy who delivered the afternoon newspaper to the scientist’s apartment remembered that on weekends he would find Pincus seated in a comfortable chair in the cluttered living room or prone on the sofa napping,
always surrounded by towers of books
. For one stretch of about six months, while examining mentally ill patients at the Worcester State Hospital, Pincus and his family occupied an apartment in the asylum’s main building—the honeymoon suite, as some of the scientists called it. Pincus’s daughter Laura would wake up, get dressed for school, say goodbye to her parents, and leave for school, walking past one woman dressed in a flour sack and others obsessively shredding paper and tossing it from windows to make their own snow showers. When asked how she liked living there, Lizzie had responded wryly, “
It’s like living in a madhouse
.”

The place had once been known as the Worcester Lunatic Asylum. From the outside, it looked more like a prison than a hospital, a dark and foreboding fortress set high on a hill. Inside, it was worse. Patients were bound by straitjackets and tethered to beds. They underwent electroshock therapy, insulin shock therapy, spinning treatments (in which patients were blindfolded and spun rapidly in suspended chairs), and, under the care of Pincus, hormone therapy. Howls of pain and deranged laughter rang out at all hours, echoing down the tiled halls.

But there was nothing amusing about it. It was a frightening and dangerous place. Why would Pincus expose his family to such conditions? Because it offered a practical solution. It saved money on rent. And it enabled him to concentrate more completely on his work.

Pincus did not own a car and did not know how to drive until he was in his forties. He would take a bus or hitch a ride with another scientist to get to work each day. When he did begin driving in the late 1940s, he treated it as a competitive sport, never content to remain behind another vehicle. He was hypercompetitive in other ways, too. An accomplished Scrabble player, he refused to let his children win and played with a giant dictionary on the table to challenge combinations of letters that might not be words. At the beach, he would swim more than a mile out to sea, calm as could be as his anxious wife and children faded from sight. Even when he read for pleasure—and he devoured mystery novels, especially those written by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, reading at least a hundred titles a year—he did so as a sort of test, pushing himself to see how quickly he could guess the endings.

He played chess with his insurance agent and met informally to discuss philosophy with a few men who called themselves “
The Serious Stinkers
.” But beyond the world of science and these few recreations, Lizzie Pincus was by far the biggest influence in her husband’s life, always pushing him, always making him think, often trying his great reserves of patience. Though she did enjoy cooking and gardening, Lizzie was a far cry from the typical American housewife who stayed home, baked cookies, and greeted her husband each evening with a strand of pearls around her neck, a cocktail in her hand, and a roast in the oven. She usually slept all morning, rising around noon, leaving it to Goody to get the kids washed, dressed, fed, and off to school. Some of her friends and family believed it was a mood disorder that kept her in bed so long and made her so emotionally volatile. Although she could be energetic, witty, and charming, she was also known among friends to undergo rapid and dramatic mood swings.

By the early 1950s, the Worcester Foundation was stable enough that Pincus, after nearly a decade of living in small apartments (not to mention his family’s six-month stay at the insane asylum), felt confident enough to buy a house. Given his nature, it was no ordinary home. Located just off the town center in the village of Northborough and wedged between a bank and the town’s library, the red brick structure had a dozen bedrooms, ten fireplaces, and a furnished basement where Pincus sometimes offered free lodging to visiting scholars or students. It looked more like an old hotel than a house. Pincus paid
$30,000
for it, or about $260,000 in today’s dollars. The place was so big that the Pincuses never entered some rooms, as Laura recalled. But Lizzie loved the enormous first-floor living areas, which she decorated in a vaguely Asian theme. The large space, which included a grand piano, was ideal for dinner parties. Lizzie also enjoyed the surrounding grounds, where she planted flowers and vegetables. She was a prolific and talented cook who liked to make big batches of tomatoes Provençal, which she bottled, froze, and handed out among friends. For parties,
paid for with Worcester Foundation money
, she would cook a smorgasbord of dishes big and small, all done well in advance so that she could enjoy her company. She would circulate, a tumbler of
J&B or Johnny Walker
scotch in hand,
Philip Morris cigarette dangling
, working the room until even the driest scientists loosened up and started laughing. Sometimes she plied them with drinks, other times with salty jokes.