In my last column, I had likened the fertilisation of a concept in the brain to the development of a foetus in the womb. In this piece, I trace how a concept develops into an articulated idea over time through the example of birth control. That is why I use the metaphor of the “life of a concept”.
Mammals usually mate with a clear goal of reproduction. They do not mate for pleasure, so far as we humans know. We, Homo sapiens, mate for pleasure and not necessarily for reproduction. Hence the quest for birth control is very old among humans; we have toyed with the concept from as early as ancient Egyptian and Vedic times. Until the 20th century, the concept revolved around physically preventing fertilisation of egg and sperm through the use of materials such as diaphragms. Public discussion about sex and its practice were taboo because social attitudes and religious beliefs discouraged openness.
That was so for centuries. Coincidentally, at about the time I was born, the subject of sex burst forth into the open and the concept of birth control developed into a chemical solution rather than the only known physical solution of blocking fertilisation.
In 1937, three professors at the University of Pennsylvania discovered a “chemical switch” during their scientific work with female rabbits. They published a paper, which stated that if a hormone called progesterone was introduced into the female body, she would stop producing eggs. And without her producing an egg, she could not become pregnant. Bingo! It was that simple.
A revolutionary social idea developed simultaneously when a college professor in Indiana, Alfred Charles Kinsey, published his research findings that human beings, both male and female, were “friskier” than they cared to admit. A graduate student at Northwestern University, Hugh Hefner, read the Kinsey findings and set out to rid America of the darkness and taboos concerning sex. Hefner went on to found Playboy magazine. This combination of chemistry and sociology set the ground to completely change ideas regarding human birth control.
From 1937, when the progesterone concept was fertilised in the brain of scientists, through the 1950s when the concept was manifested as a pill idea, and finally in the 1960s, the world approved the first contraceptive pill for marketing. This sequence illustrates well the metaphorical stages of conception, birth and innovation.
Other events around the 1940s and 1950s also shaped and influenced the crystallisation of ideas. A feisty American lady, Margaret Sanger, had for a few decades been promoting birth control by starting the first birth control clinic in 1916. She wanted to liberate women from the uncontrolled cycle of unwanted pregnancy by popularising safer and more reliable methods of birth control rather than clumsy diaphragms and time-related abstinence from sex. She wanted the 30 states in America to remove their anti-birth control laws so that innovation in birth control would be encouraged. Sanger was considered dangerous by society, which was fearful of the consequences just in case she became successful in liberating women. What would happen? Family? Marriage? Moral standards?
In the winter of 1950, in her Park Avenue apartment, Sanger met one Gregory Pincus, an out-of-the-box-thinking scientist, and made her pitch to him. Pincus had already earned a reputation for being a Frankenstein-like scientist due to his experiments with fertilisation of rabbits. Sanger asked Pincus to make a pill that a woman could consume as easily as any medicine or as easily as brushing her teeth. If so, a woman could lead an enjoyable life without worrying about pregnancy. Pincus had already developed the chemistry concept into an idea, but he had to experiment and demonstrate what he had thought. In short, Pincus was a solution looking for a problem. Of course, it was possible, he said. He needed $3,100 to engage an assistant and buy some materials. She could offer him $2,000.
Unbeknownst to both Sanger and Pincus, in Mexico, another scientist, Carl Djerassi, had already synthesised a hormone pill from wild yams. This pill could prevent ovulation in women. By 1960, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, a contraceptive pill released by G D Searle and Company.
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Time magazine reported in 1966: “No previous medical phenomenon has ever quite matched the headlong US rush to use oral contraceptives, now universally known as the pill”. The concept of birth control has had a hazardous biography over centuries, but the pill has elegantly (and controversially) emerged as a new idea in birth control, arguably qualifying as one of the biggest innovations in human history.
The author is a writer and corporate advisor; rgopal@themindworks.me