Hudson Hoagland

Hudson Hoagland co-founded the laboratory where the contraceptive pill was developed and found the money that made it possible. He was a physiologist who worked on the perception of time, on brain waves and on stress hormones, taught at Harvard and then at Clark University, and in 1944 left academia with Gregory Pincus to found the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in a converted house in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts - an independent institute set up because neither man had found a university willing to give them a free hand. Hoagland ran the administration and the fundraising, which in the early years meant personally soliciting local businessmen and living with a chronically empty balance sheet. Pincus ran the science. When Margaret Sanger introduced Pincus to Katharine McCormick in 1953, and McCormick began writing cheques for what eventually amounted to some two million dollars of her own fortune, it was the Worcester Foundation that received them - a private institute being one of the few places in America where contraceptive research could be done at all, since federal funding was unavailable and Massachusetts law made distributing contraceptives a crime. The oral contraceptive was developed there and trialled in Puerto Rico, and approved in 1960. Hoagland continued as director until 1968 and wrote on the biology of stress and on science and religion. He was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His son Mahlon became a molecular biologist who discovered transfer RNA. He had worked with Walter Cannon at Harvard and knew the stress literature from the inside. The Worcester Foundation was later absorbed into the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He wrote and lectured against the idea that scientific findings should be suppressed for social comfort, which was not an abstract position in the field he had chosen.

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