- Person
- Gregory Pincus
- Lived
- 1903–1967
- Field
- Reproductive biology
- From
- American
The story
Gregory Pincus had lost his post at Harvard in the late 1930s after a storm of hostile publicity about his rabbit experiments. In 1938, after a year at Cambridge University, he became a visiting professor of experimental zoology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his friend Hudson Hoagland invited him to work in his biology department. The two had known each other as graduate students, and at Clark they began working together.
When the United States entered the Second World War, Pincus and Hoagland turned their expertise in hormones to a practical problem: how stress and fatigue affect the people flying aircraft. Working for the US Navy and the air forces, they examined the relationship between steroid excretion, the function of the adrenal cortex and the stress of flying. The adrenal cortex is the part of the adrenal gland that releases stress hormones, and measuring the hormones excreted by aircrew gave an early laboratory picture of the physical toll that long, demanding missions took on the people who flew them.
The Dictionary of Scientific Biography records this wartime research on stress, and the Encyclopedia of World Biography lists the relationship between hormones and stress among Pincus's lasting research interests, alongside endocrine function in patients with mental disorders. During his years at Clark he was also named a Guggenheim fellow and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The wartime contracts helped keep the two researchers' work going at a difficult time, and the expertise they built up in measuring steroid hormones became a foundation of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, which they established in 1944. The foundation soon became internationally known as a centre for the study of steroid hormones, and it was there that Pincus later developed the contraceptive pill.
Pincus kept an interest in the adrenal glands and their response to stress for the rest of his career. Work like his helped establish that stress has measurable effects on the body's hormones, an idea that now informs medicine, aviation and occupational health.
Why it matters
Their work contributed to the scientific understanding of how stress affects the body, a field that today informs medicine, aviation and occupational health.
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.
- Gregory Pincus developed the birth control pillWorking from a struggling independent lab, Gregory Pincus led the research that produced the first oral contraceptive, approved by the US FDA in 1960.
- 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
- Pincus, Gregory Goodwin Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, via Encyclopedia.com
- Gregory Goodwin Pincus Wikipedia
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