Gregory Pincus

Gregory Pincus led the research that produced the contraceptive pill and organised the trials that proved it worked. Born in Woodbine, New Jersey in 1903 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in an agricultural colony, he studied at Cornell and took a doctorate at Harvard in genetics and physiology. In 1934 he achieved in vitro fertilisation in rabbits. The publicity was hostile — the press compared him to Frankenstein and invoked Brave New World — and Harvard denied him tenure in 1937, effectively ending his conventional academic career. He and Hudson Hoagland founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in 1944, in a converted house, funding it precariously through contract research. In 1951 Margaret Sanger, the birth control campaigner, met him and asked whether a cheap, reliable, woman-controlled contraceptive was possible. He said it was. Katharine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, then funded the work personally, eventually to around two million dollars — private money that no institution would have supplied. Pincus, with the biologist M. C. Chang, established that injected progesterone suppresses ovulation. The synthetic progestins made by Carl Djerassi at Syntex and Frank Colton at Searle worked orally, which made a pill feasible. The gynaecologist John Rock, a practising Catholic, ran the clinical work and gave the project medical respectability. The large trials were conducted in Puerto Rico from 1956, where contraception was legal and regulation lighter. Participants were not told the drug was experimental, and side effects were dismissed — a serious ethical failing widely criticised since. Enovid was approved for contraception in 1960. Pincus died in 1967.

• Lived: 1903 CE – 1967 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: biologist, scientist