- Person
- Gregory Pincus
- Lived
- 1903–1967
- Field
- Reproductive biology
- From
- American
The story
Gregory Pincus was born in 1903 to Russian Jewish immigrants in Woodbine, New Jersey, and became a gifted reproductive biologist at Harvard. In 1934 he achieved in vitro fertilisation of rabbits, work decades ahead of its time, but the press attacked him as a "Dr. Frankenstein" and Harvard denied him tenure. In 1944 he and Hudson Hoagland founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, which was so short of money that Pincus sometimes doubled as the lab's janitor.
In 1951 the birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger met Pincus and arranged a small grant from Planned Parenthood for hormonal contraceptive research. In 1953 Sanger and the philanthropist Katharine McCormick asked him to develop a contraceptive pill, and McCormick increased the funding roughly fiftyfold. Pincus and his colleague Min Chueh Chang showed within months that progesterone stopped ovulation in animals, and they went on to test about 200 progesterone-like compounds.
Chemists at Syntex and Searle had recently created synthetic progestins that worked when swallowed. Pincus recruited the respected Harvard gynaecologist John Rock, and because contraception was restricted by law in Massachusetts, the first human studies were run as infertility research. Large-scale trials followed in Puerto Rico from 1956, supervised by Edris Rice-Wray and Celso-Ramón García, and later in Haiti, Mexico and Los Angeles.
In 1957 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Searle's Enovid for menstrual disorders, and in May 1960 it approved the drug for contraception, the first birth control pill. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography describes it as that pharmaceutical rarity, an agent that is virtually 100 per cent effective. Pincus received international acclaim, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965, and before his death in 1967 was working with Chang on a pill to prevent implantation after fertilisation.
The pill allowed women, for the first time, to choose reliably when they would have children and to plan their lives around that choice. It helped open the way for women's wider participation in education and work, and it put family planning at the centre of public debate worldwide. Lemelson-MIT notes that although women were cautious at first, more than ten million American women came to use it.
Why it matters
The pill gave women a reliable way to decide whether and when to have children, transforming their opportunities in education, work and family life worldwide.
About Gregory Pincus
Biologist, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who led the research that produced the first oral contraceptive pill, approved in the United States in 1960.
More about Gregory Pincus
- Gregory Pincus founded a leading hormone conferenceIn 1944 Gregory Pincus organised the Laurentian Hormone Conference and edited its first 23 volumes of proceedings, a key forum for endocrinology.
- Gregory Pincus fertilised rabbit eggs in glass in 1934In 1934, at 31, Gregory Pincus achieved in vitro fertilisation of rabbit eggs, more than four decades before the first human IVF baby.
- Pincus studied stress in wartime pilotsDuring the Second World War Gregory Pincus and Hudson Hoagland studied stress and fatigue for the US Navy and air forces, measuring hormones in pilots.
- Pincus built a world centre for hormone researchThe Worcester Foundation, co-founded by Gregory Pincus in 1944, became an international centre for steroid hormone research, hosting over 300 foreign scientists.
Sources
- Gregory Pincus (1903-1967) PBS American Experience
- Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903-1967) Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University
- Gregory Pincus Lemelson-MIT
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.