Innovation at the Margins and Structural Change in Reproductive Technology
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REVIEW ESSAY
Innovation at the Margins and Structural Change in Reproductive Technology Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Pursuit of Parenthood: Reproductive Technology from Test-Tube Babies to Uterus Transplants. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 288 pp. $29.95. ISBN-13: 978–1,421,429,847. Catherine Waldby, The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. $25.95. ISBN-13: 978–1,478,004,721 Rosanna Hertz 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
The Pursuit of Parenthood is a highly engaging account written by historian Margaret Marsh and physician Wanda Ronner that traces the medical, political and economic story of in vitro fertilization (IVF) from its early history to the present, including various auxiliary technologies. Scientists and clinicians engaged in early reproductive biomedicine repeatedly bumped up against larger political forces. The authors weave several compelling narratives around these twists and turns, including the ethical outcries about “experimental” procedures and technologies that would forever change the landscape of baby making. I begin by recounting their tale of scientists and clinicians, who are hardly household names, but whose collective pursuits would create new possibilities for baby making that would eventually lead to new kinds of biological relatedness. I next turn to Marsh and Ronner’s compelling narrative around the inability to sort out the ethical and moral issues that IVF posed, and how a little-known medical school came to be the spot where the first U.S. IVF baby was born. Finally (and not discussed in this review), the authors turn to the contemporary period and the rise of baby making as big business, the governance of assisted reproductive technologies by states, and some of the scandals by medical fertility specialists, which made front-page news and raised further questions about an unregulated industry. The early race to create the first “test tube” babies, as they were then dubbed, began with the trial-and-error attempts of
* Rosanna Hertz [email protected] 1
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA
science to remove and fertilize a human egg outside of a woman’s body. That story begins with John Rock. Rock, who had been working on embryo studies at the Free Hospital for Women in Brookline in the 1920s, was inspired by the controversial research of biologist Gregory Pincus. Pincus had successfully produced baby rabbits using in vitro fertilization at Harvard. Rock decided to try to apply Pincus’s achievements to humans. He hired Pincus’s research assistant, Miriam Menkin, to help him. Menkin, a brilliant lab technician, fertilized her first egg in February 1944 after six years of attempts. Rock liked to refer to Menkin as his “egg chaser,” an apt metaphor that described her search to find eggs in ovarian tissues left over from surgical procedures. Rock and Menkin published their findings in Science in August 1944, describing a procedure in which fully fertiliz
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