A farm-country childhood
Gregory Goodwin Pincus was born on April 9, 1903, in Woodbine, New Jersey, a settlement founded in the 1890s as a Jewish farming colony for immigrants from Eastern Europe. He was the eldest son among five children of Joseph Pincus and Elizabeth Lipman, both of Russian Jewish origin; his mother’s family came from the region that is now Latvia. Agriculture ran through the family. His father, a graduate of an agricultural college in Connecticut, taught at a school of agriculture and edited a farm journal, and his uncle Jacob Lipman became dean of the New Jersey State College of Agriculture at Rutgers.
The family moved to New York City, where Gregory attended public schools and was an honour student at Morris High School in the Bronx. He was remembered as brilliant and many-sided: at Cornell University, where he took his bachelor’s degree in 1924, he studied science but also founded and edited the Cornell Literary Review. In 1924 he married Elizabeth Notkin, with whom he had two children.
Harvard and the ‘test-tube rabbits’
Pincus went on to Harvard, studying genetics under William Castle and physiology under William Crozier, and received his master’s and doctorate in 1927. He spent 1929–30 in Europe, at Cambridge with the reproductive biologists F. H. A. Marshall and John Hammond and at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin with the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, and in 1931 Harvard appointed him an assistant professor. He was soon regarded as a rising star in mammalian reproductive physiology.
In 1934, at thirty-one, he reported fertilising rabbit eggs in glass dishes and transferring them back into rabbits, in vitro fertilisation, more than four decades before the first human ‘test-tube baby’. He followed it with experiments in parthenogenesis, coaxing unfertilised rabbit eggs to begin developing, and in 1936 published a major monograph, The Eggs of Mammals. The press reacted with alarm. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with its fatherless laboratory-grown humans, had just appeared, and Pincus was depicted as a Frankenstein figure turning science fiction into reality. A rabbit from his parthenogenesis experiments appeared on the cover of Look magazine in 1937, but other scientists struggled to reproduce some of his results, and sceptics nicknamed the work ‘Pincogenesis’. Harvard denied him tenure and did not renew his appointment.
An institute of his own
With the country still in the Depression and a family to support, Pincus was rescued by an old Harvard friend, the physiologist Hudson Hoagland, who brought him to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a visiting professor of experimental zoology in 1938. During the Second World War Pincus studied stress and fatigue for the U.S. Navy and Army Air Forces. In 1944 he and Hoagland founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in nearby Shrewsbury, an independent laboratory supported by grants and contracts rather than a university.
The foundation became an international centre for the study of steroid hormones, but in its early years it struggled to meet its payroll, and Pincus is said to have doubled as its janitor. In 1944 he also founded the Laurentian Hormone Conference, which became one of the leading meetings in endocrinology, and he edited its proceedings for more than two decades.
Pincus was a gifted organiser as well as an experimenter, and he made the Worcester Foundation a magnet for researchers from around the world; by the end of the 1960s more than three hundred international scientists had worked there. Its research ranged across the links between hormones and cancer, heart disease and schizophrenia, and its studies of how the body makes and breaks down steroid hormones laid groundwork that the contraceptive project would draw on.
Sanger, McCormick and a long-held dream
Margaret Sanger, the veteran campaigner who had coined the term ‘birth control’, had long dreamed of a simple, cheap contraceptive that a woman could take like an aspirin and control herself. In 1951 she met Pincus at a dinner given by Abraham Stone, medical director of Planned Parenthood, and secured a small grant for him to study hormonal contraception. Pincus was moved by Sanger’s accounts of impoverished women worn down by pregnancy after pregnancy. With his colleague Min Chueh Chang, Pincus confirmed in rabbits and rats that progesterone, the hormone that prevents ovulation during pregnancy, could reliably stop ovulation.
The breakthrough in funding came in 1953, when Sanger introduced Pincus to her friend Katharine Dexter McCormick, a biologist by training and heir to a vast fortune, who was frustrated by Planned Parenthood’s limited support. McCormick multiplied the project’s funding roughly fiftyfold and pledged to see it through to completion. Few scientific projects of the era have depended so directly on the vision and money of two women.
From rabbits to a pill
Injected progesterone was impractical as a daily contraceptive. By good fortune, chemists at two drug companies, Syntex and G. D. Searle, had recently created synthetic progestins that worked when swallowed, and both companies, wary of the controversy, nonetheless supplied them to Pincus. He chose Searle’s compound, norethynodrel. For human trials he recruited the Harvard gynaecologist John Rock, a respected Catholic physician whose infertility patients in Brookline, Massachusetts, became the first test subjects from 1953 and 1954, at the Free Hospital for Women, under the cover of fertility research because Massachusetts law banned contraception. Rock had found that a few months of hormone treatment sometimes helped infertile women conceive afterwards, which gave the trials a genuine therapeutic purpose.
Larger trials began in 1956 in Puerto Rico, which had a network of birth control clinics serving low-income women, supervised by Edris Rice-Wray and Celso-Ramón García, and later expanded to Haiti, Mexico and Los Angeles. The pill proved almost completely effective. In May 1960 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Searle’s Enovid, already on the market for menstrual disorders, as an oral contraceptive, the first in the world.
Questions about the trials
The trials have long drawn criticism. Rice-Wray reported to Pincus that Enovid gave complete protection against pregnancy but caused too many side reactions to be acceptable. Pincus and Rock disagreed, citing their Massachusetts patients and evidence that placebos produced similar complaints. Historians such as Laura Briggs have questioned how fully the Puerto Rican women, many of them poor and with little education, understood that they were taking part in an experiment, and how seriously their complaints were weighed. The early pills also contained far higher doses of hormones than later versions, and concerns about blood clots and other risks led to lower-dose formulations in the following decades.
These debates are now a standard part of the history of research ethics, and they sit alongside, not in place of, the scientific achievement.
How the pill changed the world
The impact of the pill was immense and rapid. Within a few years millions of American women were using it, and it soon spread worldwide. For the first time, a woman could reliably decide whether and when to become pregnant through a method she controlled and that was separate from the act of sex. Economists and historians have linked the pill to women’s rising enrolment in law, medicine and other professional programmes, to later marriage and childbearing, and to the transformation of women’s working lives. It became a catalyst of the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution, and it reshaped family life, demography and public debate about sexuality and religion.
The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, written by Pincus’s collaborator Min Chueh Chang, summed it up: the work had transformed family planning in every part of the world where it was systematically used. Hormonal contraception, in pills, patches, implants and intrauterine devices, remains one of the most widely used forms of birth control on earth.
Later years and legacy
Success brought Pincus international acclaim and secured the future of the Worcester Foundation. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965 and published The Control of Fertility the same year. Over his career he and his associates published some 350 papers on subjects ranging from the genetics of mice and the metabolism of steroid hormones to cancer, schizophrenia, stress and ageing. He received the Oliver Bird Prize, the Cameron Prize of the University of Edinburgh and, in 1967, the American Medical Association’s Scientific Achievement Award.
The pill was a collective achievement, and later historians have stressed the parts played by others whom the public story often overlooked: Min Chueh Chang, the Chinese-born biologist who ran the animal experiments; John Rock, whose clinical standing made human trials possible; the chemists Frank Colton at Searle and Carl Djerassi’s team at Syntex, who made the synthetic hormones; and Sanger and McCormick, without whom the project would never have begun. Pincus was the scientist who drew these strands together and drove them to a result.
He died in Boston on August 22, 1967, at sixty-four, of myeloid metaplasia, a bone-marrow disease that colleagues believed was probably caused by his years of work with laboratory solvents. His funeral was held at Temple Emanuel in Worcester. The son of Jewish immigrants raised in a farming colony, pushed out of Harvard for work that was decades ahead of its time, Pincus built his own institution and from it produced one of the most consequential medical inventions of the twentieth century.
Sources & further reading
Gregory Goodwin Pincus, Wikipedia · Gregory Pincus (1903–1967), American Experience: The Pill, PBS · Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903–1967), Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University · Pincus, Gregory Goodwin, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, via Encyclopedia.com · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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