Our producer Rigoberto Hernandez spoke with Robin Marantz, the author of Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution. She tells us about the history of IVF, from the first known artificial insemination by donor produced in Philadelphia in the 19th century, to the scientific race in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in the first so-called “test-tube baby.”
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Resource List
Henig, Robin Marantz. Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2006.
Transcript
Alexis Pedrick: I’m Alexis Pedrick and this is Distillations. In this episode, our producer, Rigoberto Hernandez, talks with Robin Marantz Henig, the author of Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test-Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution.
She tells us about the history of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, from the first known artificial insemination by donor procedure in Philadelphia in the 19th century to the scientific race in the 1960s and 70s that resulted in the first so-called test-tube baby.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Thank you so much for talking to us. I think it’d be helpful if you can help me define some terms. Like, what does IVF stand for and how is it different than, like, artificial insemination by donor?
Robin Marantz Henig: IVF means in vitro fertilization. “In vitro” means in glass, and it’s basically taking an egg and a sperm, putting them in a petri dish in the lab, and letting them fertilize and turn into a zygote—a fertilized egg. Artificial insemination is a little bit different. You get a sample just of sperm, and you inject it in one way or another into a woman and hope that the sperm travels up like it ordinarily does, and fertilizes an egg in there.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Sorry to be crude, but my editor described it as like the “turkey baster.”
Robin Marantz Henig: It has been considered turkey basting.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Okay, so actually, speaking of AID, I think is what it’s called, right? The artificial insemination by donor. The first known case is actually in Philadelphia. Could you tell us about it?
Robin Marantz Henig: The first known case of AID, artificial insemination by donor, was in Philadelphia in the 19th century. And actually done in a situation that would be totally unethical now. It was Doctor Pancoast who was faced with an infertile couple, and they didn’t know why they weren’t having babies. And in those days they always thought it was the woman’s fault. But he discovered that the man wasn’t producing sperm, but the man didn’t really want his wife to know about that, because it was a long… long-term effect of syphilis from, I think, maybe before he met her, but who knows?
In any event, Doctor Pancoast decided that maybe what would work would be to get somebody else’s sperm and put it into this woman, and she’d get pregnant that way. So he got a good-looking medical student to provide sperm, and actually used that turkey baster in a situation where the woman was unconscious and he inseminated her with somebody else’s sperm, and she got pregnant. But nobody ever really told the couple until much, much later, and then only told the husband. And the husband said, let’s not let my wife know about this.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So this is interesting because in a way it’s successful yet unethical, right?
Robin Marantz Henig: Probably a lot of things at the cutting edge of science are successful yet unethical or unethical in us looking back on it and seeing the way they were doing things. Because, really, if he had said to this woman in those days, “I would like to take some other man’s sperm and put it into you,” she wouldn’t have wanted to do it.
And for a long time, when that was done, it was considered actually adultery. You know, legally, those offspring were considered illegitimate, and the women were considered having committed adultery by having another man’s sperm in her.
Rigoberto Hernandez: In your book, you describe Prometheus, who is this character from Greek mythology. Can you tell us about him and how does he relate to IVF?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, you can tell from, you know, I mean, calling the book “Pandora’s Baby” that I look a lot to Greek mythology for inspiration. And Prometheus, who was also mentioned in the subtitle of the book Frankenstein—he was called “The Modern Prometheus.”
He relates to all of this because, according to Greek myth, he created man and gave man one bit of real information that the gods didn’t want mankind to have, which was fire, and something that you could do a lot of things with. You know, you could—you had knowledge based on fire. You could cook meat based on fire; you could destroy things based on fire. And the gods thought that that was something that only they should hold on to.
And Prometheus, who loved mankind, wanted to give man this very important tool. So I guess, you know, that’s why Mary Shelley called Frankenstein the “Modern Prometheus.” It was giving a bit of really kind of radioactive information to a cohort of people who could do with it anything. They could do great things with it, and they can do greatly destructive things with it.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So, like the fancy way of analyzing Prometheus would be to say that in the context of IVF and technologies like this, is that like it’s a dual-use technology, right? Like, you can do good or bad with it, right?
Robin Marantz Henig: What people call a double-edged sword, right? Yes. But also, that knowledge is dangerous. I think it’s a little bit of that, too. You know, there’s elements of Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden, you know, knowing something could really go badly.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley. How does that relate to IVF? Not just like big picture, but also like it was…it’s literal in some ways.
Robin Marantz Henig: It is kind of literal. It’s taking parts of a person, putting them together, and animating them. I mean, that’s what Doctor Frankenstein did with his monster. He found different pieces of human bodies, and then he used electricity to turn it into something that could actually move and eventually walk and talk and think.
What we’re talking about in IVF is taking elements of the human body—the sex cells, the egg and the sperm—putting them together, and then, in a certain situation, animating them because you’re putting them back in the uterus and it grows up and becomes this new creature.
A big difference with IVF is that it’s a fully human creature. You know, everything that goes into an IVF baby comes from its mother and its father, and it grows into a baby who looks like any other baby, who grows in a uterus. And it comes out being like any other baby who grew in a human uterus. But they weren’t so sure about that in the 70s, when they started doing it. There were a lot of scientists who thought that manipulation could very well mess things up chromosomally or some other way. And maybe we would be creating monsters not that different from Frankenstein’s monster.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Can you tell me about what is the “slippery slope fallacy” and how does that apply to IVF?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, in bioethics, people talk a lot about the slippery slope. It means basically we don’t want to do this thing, even though this particular thing doesn’t seem that dangerous or unethical, because it could easily lead to a different thing that’s even more dangerous and unethical. We don’t want to learn about how to split the atom because it could lead to the atomic bomb. You know, we don’t want to learn how electricity works because it could lead to the electric chair, that kind of thing.
And so it’s often used as an argument to prevent, kind of, innocuous research from happening because it could lead to something much more objectionable. I understand, I guess, where people are coming from, but I think that it is a fallacy because the slope isn’t that slippery. If people are paying attention, there are spots along the way where they could say, “This is where we have to stop.” You know, “we’re heading into a really bad direction. We need to stop here. That’s too far.”
Rigoberto Hernandez: But what’s interesting is that in order for people to have that discussion, the technology has to come first.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right. They have to kind of understand where it can go. They can’t only imagine it. My recollection of Asilomar is that all they were talking about was recombinant DNA and how to control it from seeping out of the lab, right? And to just make sure there were biosafety measures to keep it from infecting the world out there. But many of the things that recombinant DNA made possible are things that you do want to stop.
Same with IVF. Many of the things that IVF made possible—once you got really good at fertilizing an egg in a laboratory and putting it back in a woman—then there were ways that you could do things like human cloning or designer babies or, you know, choosing the sex of a baby. There were all sorts of things you could then do because you had the technique that was the IVF technique, that was created just to create babies for couples who were desperate for them.
Anyway, so you’re right that sometimes you can’t even visualize where the slope is going to end up. You can’t even imagine how bad and dangerous things could get until you’ve got the technique perfected first. So the slippery slope works in both ways. Sometimes people are just sort of imagining really terrible scenarios, and sometimes they’re failing to because they don’t even understand what the technology can really do.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So that gets us into, like, how IVF was developed. So, in your book, you describe the 1960s and 1970s as kind of like this “Wild West” of science. Why is that? What was going on at the time and what made these conditions happen?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, we didn’t have any oversight over this kind of research. The government wasn’t supporting this kind of work. And when you’ve got, like, the National Institutes of Health funding something, there’s often some sort of a way to make sure that the scientists are doing what they say they’re going to do, and then they’re not overstepping ethical boundaries.
In addition, in the 60s and 70s, there was no such thing as bioethics. We really didn’t even think of research, even using human cells and subjects, as something that required any kind of ethical oversight. So in a way, scientists were kind of doing whatever they were interested in doing and keeping at it.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Yeah. So you mentioned the funding. So NIH, I guess, is kind of like a—maybe not a stopgap—but perhaps like a layer to kind of dictate what research gets done and what doesn’t get done. And so are you saying the fact that IVF was not funded by NIH made a condition so that they didn’t have the balance of NIH?
Robin Marantz Henig: Right. And certainly they didn’t have those bounds later on, because once bioethics was created as a discipline in the 70s and 80s, there was a whole extra layer required of scientists who were getting federal funding for their research. They had to be approved by an institutional review board. They had to, you know, meet certain standards to get informed consent from their subjects. To do things like limit the use of human embryonic tissue, although that ended up never getting federal funding. But they would have had to sort of march to a set of requirements for anybody who was getting federal grants to adhere to. And that never became a way that IVF was funded.
So everything that was done not only in the 60s and 70s, but ever since, has been paid for by the clients. And so there’s a whole profit motive going on. For a little while, there was uncertainty about whether the IVF clinics were actually even giving accurate depictions of their success rates, or they were messing around with things to improve their success rates, like putting back a lot of embryos into the uterus so that they would get more success per cycle. And that’s not so good for a woman having 2 or 3 babies at a time. So, that level of oversight, we just never really had in this field.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So does the fact that NIH didn’t fund things, does that mean that they were less able to control it even though they wanted to control it?
Robin Marantz Henig: Yeah, you could say that. They didn’t have the kind of oversight that they would have had if their own money was involved.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Why were these agencies scared to fund something like this?
Robin Marantz Henig: A lot of it was because of the anti-abortion movement of the time. In a way that didn’t really affect the development of this research in England, although it did a little bit. But, you know, the anti-abortion movement in the US, then and now, is much stronger than in many other developed countries. So there was that, because you were dealing with a human fertilized egg. And there are people who think life begins at conception. And so you were messing around in a lab dish with a human.
So even if there were politicians and scientists who were pushing for that kind of federal funding, there was enough political pushback that that did not happen. The other reason is there’s also this sort of inherent feeling that scientists shouldn’t play God. You’re maybe next going to have designer babies or, you know, next going to do things that will manipulate the genes themselves.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So let’s talk about some of the people involved in this story. Let’s talk about Landrum Shettles. Where is he? What kind of person he is, and what’s motivating him to work in reproductive science?
Robin Marantz Henig: So, Landrum Shettles was a brilliant young physician. He won all sorts of awards. He was very promising, but he was sort of an odd duck, so he didn’t develop a big lab, he didn’t develop a big mentorship situation, or have many collaborators. He was sort of off doing his own thing, and his own thing was manipulating the human egg and doing as many things with it as he could: taking pictures of it, dividing and being fertilized, extracting it from surgical samples, trying to fertilize it in the lab, thinking about more crazy ideas about what to do with eggs, like cloning.
He made a name for himself in, I guess, the probably 60s or 70s as somebody who promoted the Shettles method of sex selection, which was basically, if you wanted to have a girl, do these things when you have sex, and if you want to have a boy, do those things. And it was a very popular book, and I don’t know if it really was any more effective than a coin toss, but people believed in him.
So he was a pop scientist. Like, he was written up in Life and Look, the big magazines of the day. He wrote popular books. He collaborated with a popular science journalist at the time to write additional popular books, including about cloning. And so he was…he was an odd duck, as I said, he just didn’t have a constituency, you know, so he was off doing things on his own.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Yeah. I think it’s worth pointing out that he did like, really cool things, like being able to create these photographs of almost like scientific quality, textbook quality images. Right? But on the other hand, like you mentioned, he also does like pop science.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right, right. So he was a funny combination. And yes, his photographs were thought to be quite impressive. They were in some textbooks.
But then when he did research that he claimed was successful, like he said that in 1962 or maybe 1961 or maybe 1964—his records were terrible—he actually successfully fertilized an egg in vitro and then let it grow up to a certain size. Which would have put him, you know, like almost 15 years before when Louise Brown was born in England. But he didn’t keep good records. So it was really hard to establish. He never really published that. He didn’t go through the normal paces that scientists go through when they’re trying to describe their developments.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Can you tell us about Robert Edwards, who is working on this very thing? So he’s in England. How does he compare to Shettles? Kind of like these. I want to use the word “foils” of each other…
Robin Marantz Henig: Yeah, well, Robert Edwards had his own, like, personality quirks. You know, he was driven and single-minded, and I think beloved by some people and less beloved by other people.
He was a mouse embryologist originally. He was a careful scientist. He was affiliated with Cambridge University. Shettles was affiliated with Columbia University. I mean, they weren’t—neither of them was a slouch academically. And he got interested in trying to figure out how to make babies possible for couples who desperately wanted babies. He, you know, encountered one in his neighborhood, which is what got him started on that.
So he did the things that scientists do when they’re trying to build a history of what kind of work they’re doing. He published a lot. He sought out mentorship, including in the United States. He had a lab. He looked for collaborators. So he was much more of a traditional scientist type.
Rigoberto Hernandez: One way in which Edwards kind of differentiates himself from Shettles is the fact that, I guess, he spoke better about what he was doing. And I mean, I guess Shettles also did spoke well because he got magazine features on him. But I think the anecdote that really encapsulates the way that Edwards is perhaps a better spokesperson for this technique is the fact that he would say, like, “I’m not trying to create life, I’m trying to help it.”
Robin Marantz Henig: Right? Life is always there. Right. I’m just trying to facilitate it. Yeah. I mean, he also had a nice British accent, which made him seem just like the right spokesman for this. But he also went through these same sort of signposts that scientists do. You know, he went to the conferences. He submitted things to peer-reviewed journals. He was not just somebody who was trying to speak directly to the public. He was speaking to the elites as well. But he also needed public funding, if at all possible. And he needed public approval, because what he was doing in England was just as controversial as what Shettles was doing here.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Yeah. This brings us to some of the supporting cast of people around Shettles and Edwards. So let’s start with Shettles. Maybe it wasn’t “supporting cast,” but maybe his antagonist, Raymond Vande Wiele. Who is he, and how does he fit into Shettle’s story?
Robin Marantz Henig: Vande Wiele was the chairman of OB-GYN at Columbia. Shettles was in his department, so he was his boss. And Shettles was a thorn on his side for a long time. Every time he published something in one of these popular magazines, Vande Wiele kept trying to rein him in and felt like he was kind of embarrassing Columbia.
Vande Wiele was much more of a buttoned-down kind of administrator type, and he didn’t want to be embarrassed. So the time that it becomes like a real antagonism is the moment in the book when Shettles thinks that he has created an IVF baby and puts it into an incubator that he borrows from somebody else because he doesn’t actually have any labs anymore, and Vande Wiele finds out about it and takes it out of the incubator, puts it on his coffee table in his office, and actually opens the top to kill it because he thinks that what Shettles is doing is premature. He doesn’t have a good track record, or an established track record of doing it successfully at all. And he has the intention of putting whatever was in that mixture back into a woman’s uterus. And that worries Vande Wiele a good deal. So that’s the main reason that the two of them are in conflict, because Shettles is off doing his own thing, and Vande Wiele wants to rein him in.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Yeah. It strikes me that Vande Wiele is saying to Shettles, “You’re not the right person. This is not the right time to do this thing,” right?
Robin Marantz Henig: Basically, right. “And this thing is something I don’t approve of anyway, personally.” Right.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So, the fertilized egg—that belongs to a couple who are from New York, who are struggling to have children, and they badly want one. So tell me, who is John and Doris Del Zio?
Robin Marantz Henig: They were originally in New York, and then they moved to Florida. And they each had children from another marriage, but Doris in particular really wanted to have John’s baby. So she went through a lot of surgery because she had blocked fallopian tubes, which are the tubes that through which the egg descends from the ovary into the uterus. So it couldn’t get through. And so first she got one opened up, and then she got the other opened up. And neither of them really worked. So she was a perfect candidate for IVF. I mean, IVF in those days existed specifically for women who didn’t have tubes that could get the egg down into the uterus.
So, she found herself at Cornell University in New York, where her doctor, William Sweeney, extracted some eggs from her. And the plan was that John then would take a taxi to Columbia University across town and bring it to Landrum Shettles and provide some sperm of his. And then Landrum Shettles would scurry off because he was a “scurrier” and take it into some borrowed lab and put the egg in the sperm together and assume that it was going to then fertilize after it was in the incubator for a few days. And then he was going to put it back into Doris’s uterus.
We don’t actually know that that fertilization ever happened. This was 1973. At that time, Robert Edwards was barely able to fertilize eggs in the lab, under very pristine conditions. It wasn’t an inevitability that you just put them together and the sperm entered the egg somehow. So it was already, like, really uncertain whether this solution was really going to turn into anything for the Del Zios. But that was the plan.
Rigoberto Hernandez: I see. In your book, you describe this very vivid scene in which the husband jumps in a cab with the eggs and runs to meet Shettles, who is just in the lobby.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right. They just meet in the hallway somewhere, because, I mean, you’d think that something like this: You’re meeting the esteemed doctor who’s going to, for the first time in history, make an in vitro fertilized egg. You’d think it would be, like, at least in his impressive office, but Shettles actually didn’t have an office.
This was part of Vande Wiele’s attempt to cut him off at the knees a little bit. He didn’t have an office. He didn’t really have a patient load. He didn’t really have much of anything. He didn’t have a lab. So Del Zio, I think, just was eager enough to just get this thing done that he didn’t really think about it. He handed him the eggs in a test tube, ran into, I guess, a bathroom to provide some sperm, came back, gave him the sperm and Shettles ran off to do his thing.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So, across the pond, Edwards is working on this, and he gets a supporting team together. And one of the people that he enlists this Patrick Steptoe, right? He is an English obstetrician and gynecologist. And what role does he play in the story?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, Edwards knows that what he really needs is a source of eggs, and he can’t get a good source in Cambridge. And he finds himself at a medical meeting where Steptoe is talking about a new way of retrieving eggs from women: laparoscopic, which is basically just making a tiny incision in their belly, looking down through a tube and using some very sophisticated technique to pull an egg out through that tube. And Edwards knew that that’s what he needed to do his research; he needed a continual supply of fresh eggs. So he hooked up with Steptoe, and they became Steptoe and Edwards, which I always think of as like a vaudeville team or something.
But they were 250 miles apart. Steptoe was in Oldham, England, which is in the north, and Edwards was in Cambridge, which was, I guess, in the mid-range. And so he was driving up and down a lot every time there was a new source of eggs. And this went on for years before they successfully figured out how to make fertilization happen, make growth happen because that’s important too. You have to figure out not just how to fertilize the egg, but how to give it enough time in the lab to grow to a certain point where you can put it back into the women.
So Steptoe’s contribution was the source of eggs. He had that technique—that laparoscopic technique. He was really good at it. So it was a match made in heaven.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So when they’re working together, I think it starts, was it in the late 60s up until like the late 70s?
Robin Marantz Henig: Probably.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So they had a long relationship. And I guess the question is: is like, what is going on in that time period that it takes so long to do IVF successfully?
Robin Marantz Henig: A lot of failures are going on. I mean, they didn’t even know which parts of natural conception were important to reproduce in the lab. You know, for a long time, Edwards thought that he needed to do something called “capacitation” of the sperm. He needed to somehow, he thought, manipulate the sperm in a way to make them strong enough to, you know, penetrate the outer layer of the egg, because that’s what happens in nature. It turns out you didn’t really need to do that in the lab. But he spent months and months. That was wasted time. So a lot of those kind of dead ends kept happening.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Edwards and Shettles, I believe that they used their own sperm in some of this.
Robin Marantz Henig: Yes. And using your own sperm in some of these experiments was kind of a time-honored tradition because it was readily available. You didn’t need to, like, go find… It wasn’t great to use your own sperm if you were trying to create a baby that would grow into an actual baby. Because then you’re just creating these actual humans. But if what you’re looking for is just a way to practice fertilizing an egg with sperm, I guess I can understand that… Why not use the one that’s right there?
Rigoberto Hernandez: Okay, so looking at it with our 21st-century eyes, that seems unethical.
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, that’s an interesting question about whether using your own sperm… I mean, they got the egg from, like, generally the operating room because it was getting removed for some other reason. Right, so they had arrangements with the surgeons to give them the leftover eggs or the leftover sections of the ovary that eggs come from. So, that was anonymous. It was a technical, you know, it was like a mechanical thing that they were working on just to see what they could do. And it was never going to grow up to anything more than a couple of cells worth before they destroyed it.
So, even with 21st-century eyes… Is using their own sperm, does that make it different ethically from using somebody else’s sperm? It wouldn’t have been the husbands either, because it was just some woman in the operating room who did, I think, sign away approval to experiment with my eggs as long as nothing comes of it. So, I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.
Certainly, if there have been directors of IVF clinics who are known to have used their sperm to create the babies for their clients who paid for it, and then babies were created, then that is clearly unethical. But this strikes me as a little bit more of a grey area.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Hmm. Well, so that brings up a question is like, what were people like Edwards and Steptoe telling their patients? This is the period before informed consent?
Robin Marantz Henig: It kind of is before informed consent. They might have been telling their patients, well, they were saying, “This is experimental. We don’t…we haven’t ever done this before.” Although they must not have made it really clear to Leslie Brown that she was the first successful one, because once she figured that out and there was a lot of press attention to her pregnancy, she was really surprised.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So let’s talk about Leslie Brown. She becomes the first person to successfully carry to term an IVF baby. Can you tell me her story?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, she’s not the first to show up in Steptoe’s office. There have been probably ten or so women who want to use this new technique. Her story is: her husband had been married before he had another child. But much like Doris Del Zio, she wanted his child, and she hadn’t had children herself. So she was pretty desperate. And she thought that Steptoe was going to be able to help her. But they didn’t give a clear explanation of what their track record was…which had been zero until her moment.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So Louise Joy Brown is born in 1978.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Can you tell me about how monumental that was for the people involved and society at large?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, it was huge for Louise to be perfectly normal. They were not sure she would be. And once she was born, for the people involved, it was a gigantic relief and also a permission to keep doing this because they, as I said, they had really been unsure about whether they were doing something dangerous. They were hoping they weren’t. It made sense that they weren’t. But it also made a little bit of sense that messing around with eggs and sperms could have some impact on the chromosomes themselves. So they were hugely relieved.
The world, you know, sort of paid a great deal of attention to her and her family. She was the baby of the century. She was going to transform our approach to family building, which is what happened, you know, once the first…well, for a long time, every time there was a new IVF baby born, it was another headline. You know, there were some born in Australia, and then there were some born in other countries in Europe, and then a few more in England. And it was always written up until 50 [babies] or so, and it was always news-making because it was so transformative as far as our understanding of what was possible.
And all of them were normal, and once enough of them seemed perfectly healthy, we stopped paying quite so much attention; we stopped worrying quite so much.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Was IVF in the public imagination in the spotlight? What was the press reaction to it?
Robin Marantz Henig: When Louise Brown was born, there was gigantic attention to it. This was in July 1978. So she was on the cover of all the news magazines, and she was called the “baby of the century.” And there were lots and lots of photos. And there was a circus at the hospital where Leslie Brown was waiting for the baby to be born.
So at that moment, there was tons and tons of attention. Leading up to it? Less so, because there weren’t a lot of moments for there to be press attention. You know, there weren’t a lot of times when anybody announced, “This is what we’re doing.” There were occasionally, when they tried to get some public money, especially when Edwards and Steptoe tried to in England, there were a spate of, like, really offended cartoons and lots of images of them playing God or of creating a… There was one cartoon I remember seeing where it was called IVF lab, and there were just like a lot of babies, so old they were smoking cigars in these vats, as though that’s what they were trying to do was grow them up in the laboratory.
I mean, there was uncertainty, a lack of clarity among the public about what IVF actually meant because it hadn’t been done and they didn’t see evidence of it being a reasonable approach to creating babies.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Yeah. Let’s go back to New York with the Del Zios and Shettles, because at this point, they’re not able to have that IVF baby.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right, that IVF baby that Shettles supposedly created for them has been destroyed by Vande Wiele. They’re devastated. So they sue Columbia and Vande Wiele. And the lawsuit takes its time wending its way through the courts and actually comes to trial the same week that Louise Brown is born in England. So, five years later, in 1978.
And I think because of the, you know, synchronicity of that, people in New York were paying a lot of attention to this trial in a way they maybe wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been this successful baby born across the Atlantic. And, and actually, the fact that there was this successful baby born also suggested to the Del Zios that theirs could have been a healthy baby, too. Of course, it was five years earlier. It was done by Landrum Shettles in a hallway. So, you know, I personally don’t think there was a fertilized egg in that solution that Vande Wiele opened up, but it changed the context of the lawsuit a little bit for there to be this healthy baby.
Rigoberto Hernandez: It seems a little unusual to sue someone for the possibility that they may have destroyed their fertilized egg when it’s not even clear that there was going to be a possibility to even make it work.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right. And they needed that as their underpinning of their lawsuit: that, yes, that was—in fact, Doris, on the stand, said, “That was my baby.” And I don’t know if they truly believed that or if they were just looking for the money. I really don’t know.
I interviewed John Del Zio many years later, and Doris wouldn’t come to the house. She didn’t want to talk about this at all. So they felt like they had been wronged somehow, and this was the way they could figure out to frame it. You know, that there had actually been a fertilized egg in there and that that experiment had actually been terminated unfairly.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Yeah. It seems interesting that, like, these two families, the Browns and the Del Zios, kind of, life diverged due to one successful IVF intervention versus the other one.
Robin Marantz Henig: Right. Well, their lives diverge, but also the timing was different.
I mean, the other side of it and the reason maybe Shettles wanted them to sue is that he would have been first. And really, the only rewards go to the first. Nobody remembers who was—who created the second test-tube baby. Although we do remember—I remember at least—who created the first American test-tube baby: Howard Jones, because he was a large figure in that field as well.
This is Howard Jones and his wife, Georgianna Jones, who was actually more of the reproductive endocrinologist scientist type. Howard Jones was more of the interacting with the patients type. And so they got a position in Norfolk, Virginia, at Eastern Virginia University that wanted to start the country’s first IVF clinic, which is not really the kind of place you’d expect that to happen, but that’s where it happened. They had to jump through a lot of hoops to get approval from the medical school there, from the state legislature, from the government at large, from the population to be able to even begin to try doing IVF in Virginia.
One of the things that they had to do, which I thought was interesting, is they had a promise that they only use eggs and sperm from married couples, that the couples not have had a child together, you know. So that made it really clear that this was their only option for creating a family, and that they could only put back one fertilized egg at a time so that they wouldn’t create—actually, that they could only make one fertilized egg at a time. That was the other part of it. Only put it back one at a time so that they wouldn’t create these multiple pregnancies, which are dangerous. You know, the families might be excited because they get sort of two for one, and then the family is built for a cheaper amount or something. But it’s more dangerous to have a twin pregnancy or a triplet pregnancy.
And the naysayers or the critics said, “Don’t create more fertilized eggs that you have to then either discard or freeze,” because that creates its own ethical quandary. “You’ve got these bits of human tissue that we think are humans. I don’t know what you think, you scientists, but we don’t want you to have to deal with that.” So for a long time, that is actually the way the Joneses worked. You know, only married couples who didn’t have children. Only one fertilized egg at a time.
And then, that’s really not very realistic. Certainly not the “one fertilized egg at a time.” And so, without too much oversight, or without too much, you know, public notice. They started doing it the way most IVF clinics do it now, which is get a bunch of eggs from the woman, fertilize as many as you can, freeze the ones you don’t put back, and decide later what to do with them.
Rigoberto Hernandez: The way that you’re describing, like, all the criteria they had to meet to do IVF, it almost makes it sound like you’re kind of arming your case, right? You have to do this, and this, and this so that we can defend it in public.
Robin Marantz Henig: Yes. So we can defend it as purely family building. Also, purely heterosexual family building, because that would never have been something that people would tolerate. And that we’re not creating these excess embryos that we have to worry about.
So yeah, it was kind of like heading off the objections from the anti-abortion activists, who objected anyway, but it was trying to head it off and negotiate a little bit. Give them as much of the restrictions as it seemed they needed.
Rigoberto Hernandez: When is the first American-born baby?
Robin Marantz Henig: She was born—Elizabeth Carr was born at the end of 1981. And Howard Jones, as I mentioned, truly did not know if she was going to be okay. He was ready for a press conference to announce her birth, and he had two different speeches ready depending on whether she was healthy and looked like, you know, you’d expect a newborn to look, or whether there was some sort of tragic outcome.
Rigoberto Hernandez: Wow. That speaks to how uncertain it all was.
Robin Marantz Henig: Yes. And that was 1981. So there had been, you know, hundreds of IVF babies born all over the world. And yet this was the first American one, and this was Howard Jones’s first one. So it was quite scary for them.
Rigoberto Hernandez: How do the concerns about IVF in this time period kind of echo again and again with issues like cloning, with CRISPR, with things that have to do with genetic engineering?
Robin Marantz Henig: Yeah. Well, they have echoed and in a way, you know, the slippery slope concerns that people raised were reasonable because those subsequent issues, like cloning or CRISPR or creating designer babies or choosing the sex of the baby, none of those would have been possible without IVF.
Rigoberto Hernandez: So I wanted to ask is about—because we’re also doing a story about CRISPR and germline editing, which implicates, like, potentially the entire—
Robin Marantz Henig: Species?
Rigoberto Hernandez: Species, yes. And when you see, uh, you need IVF for that. And perhaps that was the thing that a lot of people feared when IVF was being considered. How does CRISPR fit into your thinking?
Robin Marantz Henig: Well, I think you’re right that if you start messing with the germ line, even when it’s easy, like you can do with CRISPR, that is what the worst images of the slippery slope were. And I myself thought, well, look, once we get to germline manipulation, we’ll be able to stop on the slippery slope because that really is a whole different thing. You know, it’s one thing to kind of say, “This particular fertilized egg’s DNA is not safe; I don’t want to implant it.” But to then correct it? That’s raising all sorts of other issues.
So I’m a little concerned, actually, that, you know, just because I don’t believe in the slippery slope as an argument for not doing the beginning research doesn’t mean I think that everything should continue to its logical conclusion. I think that that could, in fact, be something that we should be thinking about putting the brakes on.
Alexis Pedrick: Distillations podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded in the Laurie J. Landeau Digital Production Studios.
Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our producer is Rigoberto Hernandez. Our associate producer is Sarah Kaplan, and our sound designer is Samia Bouzid. This episode was produced by Rigoberto Hernandez.
Support for Distillations has been provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation. You can find all of our podcasts, as well as our videos and articles on our website at sciencehistory.org. And you can follow us on social media @scihistoryorg for news about our podcast and everything else going on in our free museum and library.
For Distillations, I’m Alexis Pedrick. Thanks for listening.
