The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

hospital, she would later cradle the first IVF baby. In 1985, she died of melanoma at just thirty-nine years of age, never able to fully garner the scientific recognition due to her. The study set off a public, scientific, and medical furor almost immediately. Attacks came from all sides at once. Some gynecologists did not consider infertility a disease. Reproduction, they argued, was not a requirement for wellness, so why define its absence as an “illness”? As one historian wrote: “It is perhaps difficult now to comprehend the complete absence of infertility from the consciousness of most gynaecologists in the UK at the time, of whom Steptoe was a remarkable exception…. Overpopulation and family planning were seen as dominant concerns, and the infertile were ignored as, at best, a tiny and irrelevant minority and, at worst, as a positive contribution to population control.” Much of the gynecological research in the United Kingdom and the United States focused on contraception—that is, bringing fewer babies into the world. In America, one scientific paper noted, “contraceptive development research increased over 6-fold between 1965 and 1969, and private philanthropic funding went up 30 times.” Religious groups, in turn, pointed to the special status of the human embryo: to produce one in a laboratory petri dish, intended for transfer into a human body, was to violate the most inviolable laws of “natural” human reproduction. And ethicists were hyperconscious of the legacy o...