PART ONE
SOCIAL WORLDS IN THE REPRODUCTIVE ARENA
Chapter One
Framing the American Reproductive Sciences
One day in 1914, embryologist Frank R. Lillie, chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago, received from the manager of his farm a pair of twin calf fetuses with their placentas intact, still wrapped in the excised womb. The genitalia of one of the fetuses looked rather strange. Thus began Lillie's research on the freemartin, which led to the radical conclusion that embryonic sex differentiation is dependent on blood-borne hormones (Lillie 1917a,b). Freemartins were deemed to be sterile female co-twins to males, fetuses that developed from separate eggs but whose placentas had merged in utero, allowing the crossing of blood systems. Hormones, Lillie concluded, were clearly implicated in the production of sex.[1]
In 1917, George Papanicolaou, a zoologist in the Anatomy Department at Cornell University Medical School, was engaged in sex determination research. One day he decided to see whether cells scraped from the vaginal walls of the guinea pigs he was using could indicate at what stage of the estrus cycle the guinea pigs were (Carmichael 1973:47–49). The technique worked wonderfully. With it, researchers could infer the activity of internal organs, and thus analyze the biological activity of hormones on a routine basis. They could even do so over time, and the process was quick and cheap, and did not require sacrificing the animals (Stockard and Papanicolaou 1917a,b). The fundamental biological assay technique of modern reproductive endocrinological research had been constructed.[2]
During 1917, Margaret Sanger, perhaps the most prominent birth control activist of the twentieth century, was deeply involved in framing the project of achieving women's access to effective means of contraception to enhance women's autonomy. She stated the following goals: "For though the subject is largely social and economic yet it is in the main physical and
medical , and the object of those advancing the cause is to open the doors of the medical profession, who in turn will force open the doors of the laboratories where our chemists will give the women of the twentieth century reliable and scientific means of contraception hitherto unknown" (Chesler 1992:146).
On a cold Christmas morning in 1921, George Washington Corner, a physician and fledgling reproductive scientist, awoke in Baltimore to discover that it was snowing. He was in the midst of a series of experiments on the monkey Macaca rhesus at Johns Hopkins Medical School to determine the parameters of the menstrual cycle, a project that required catching each monkey every day to check the vaginal washings for red blood cells. With public transport halted by the snow, Corner walked five miles to the lab, fed the monkeys, and did his monitoring tasks (Corner 1981:164). By 1929 Corner had mapped out the hormonal action of progesterone, an essential actor in the menstrual cycle and subsequently an actor in birth control pills.[3]
One day in 1928, Harold H. Cole was hired as an assistant professor of animal husbandry at the Davis agricultural college farm of the University of California, Berkeley. He had earlier done research on the estrus cycle in the dog and cow, and for his first new project began to seek a hormone test for pregnancy in the cow and horse, based on Ascheim and Zondek's discovery of a gonadotropin in the urine of pregnant women. Using the immature rat for the assay, he and G. H. Hart soon discovered a new reproductive hormone that came to be known as pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG). PMSG then led reproductive scientists to a much broader understanding of the complex flows of reproductive hormones. The patent on PMSG funded Cole's and others' reproductive research at Davis for many years (Cole and Hart 1930; Cole 1977).
On Valentine's Day in 1934, Warren Weaver, the new director of the Natural Sciences Division of the newly reorganized Rockefeller Foundation, was developing his own agenda for research support. He framed the problematics before the foundation as follows:
Can man gain an intelligent control of his own power? Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men? Can we obtain enough knowledge of the physiology and the psychobiology of sex so that man can bring this pervasive, highly important, and dangerous aspect of life under rational control? Can we unravel the tangled problem of the endocrine glands, and develop, before it is too late, a therapy for the whole hideous range of mental and physical disorders which result from glandular disturbances? Can we solve the mysteries of the various vitamins so that we can nurture a race sufficiently healthy and resistant? Can we release psychology from its present confusion and ineffectiveness and shape it into a tool which every man can use every day? Can man acquire
enough knowledge of his own vital processes so that we can hope to rationalize human behavior? Can we, in short, create a new science of man?[4]
The Rockefeller Foundation Board answered in the affirmative.
One day in June 1953, Gregory Pincus opened the door of the fledgling Worcester Institute of Experimental Biology to welcome two women. One was Margaret Sanger, and the other was Katherine McCormack, widow of the International Harvester scion and a benefactor of many of Sanger's projects. Pincus, son of an agricultural scientist from New Jersey, had a Ph.D. in genetics and physiology from Harvard, and his reproductive research included experiments in artificial parthenogenesis. Pincus and his colleague Hudson Hoagland, both unwilling refugees from academia, had founded the Worcester Institute in 1944 and were trying to establish it as a freestanding research shop, doing various kinds of experimental work on contract for pharmaceutical companies and others. The hormone research that Sanger and McCormack discussed with Pincus that day in 1953 ultimately led to the birth control pill of which Pincus is a commonly designated "father." McCormack gave him a check for $10,000 on the spot and several million subsequently.[5]
Each of the individuals just introduced represents one of the major social worlds involved in the disciplining of reproduction in the twentieth century: reproductive scientists in biology, medicine, and agriculture; philanthropic foundations; and birth control advocates. This book offers a wide-angle view of each of these worlds and of their interrelations as, through their often uneasy collaborations, the reproductive sciences emerged and coalesced as scientific disciplines in a world often hostile to their development.
Significantly, in part due to the illegitimacy of pursuing the reproductive sciences, this disciplinary endeavor formed later than the study of other major organ systems such as circulation or respiration, though once established it grew rapidly. For example, not a single English-language book on the reproductive sciences was published until agricultural scientist F. H. A. Marshall's Physiology of Reproduction appeared in Britain in 1910. Yet by 1940, investigators in the United States had both developed and coalesced the study of reproductive phenomena into a scientific discipline in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Numerous major research centers together formed an established and growing scientific enterprise. Reproductive scientists had garnered close to $2 million in external research support from major mainstream science sponsors such as the Rockefeller Foundation. And the prestigious National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, founded in 1921, had funded basic research on reproduc-
tion generously for two decades. The committee provided legitimacy and prestige to the reproductive sciences during their formative years. By 1940, preeminence in the reproductive sciences had clearly passed from British and other European centers to the United States. In what became known as "the American century," American reproductive scientists would retain global leadership until its end.
By the 1960s, some of the major technoscientific products of the reproductive sciences had been developed and tested: estrogen "replacement" therapy for treatment of menopausal women, diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent premature labor in pregnant women and as a feed additive for beef cattle, the birth control pill, and the intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD). Moreover, these reproductive technologies were being distributed widely both in what was then known as the Third World, particularly former colonies, and in the industrialized United States through newly inaugurated federal family planning programs intended for every county (Davis 1991).
By the 1960s, then, reproduction was disciplined. The modern American reproductive sciences as a disciplinary formation were successfully entrenched and had established resources and enduring relationships with key audiences, sponsors, and consumers of their technoscientific products. This book tells what I believe are the major stories of the making of the discipline. From 1910 to 1963 there were profound changes in the orientations not only of reproductive scientists but also of their key sponsors and markets—the social worlds of birth control, population control, and eugenics movements, and of private philanthropies. All reconstructed their identities, goals, and work in relation to each other within the wider arena focused on reproduction. They mutually articulated new positions and commitments that were transformed into quid pro quos, and those relationships persist today.
This book attempts to answer the questions: How was this disciplinary project accomplished, by what actors, under what conditions, in whose interests, and with what historical and contemporary consequences? The formation and coalescence of the American reproductive sciences involved complex intersections of a stunning array of actors—human and nonhuman.[6] Scientists of impeccable background and others who were marginalized—Bohemian free lovers, major foundations, rats, guinea pigs, birth control advocates and opponents, cows, opossums, eugenicists, women's and men's bodies (both dead and alive), schools of medicine and agriculture, freemartins, stallion urine, primates, plastics, vaginal cells, sexologists—each and all and many others were involved. From the outset, the intersections among them formed an arena in which many social worlds were in contestation. This arena was a site of considerable and sustained controversy that shaped the disciplinary project itself. The controversy continues to this day.
In the remainder of this chapter, I frame some keywords used throughout the book, discuss five crosscutting themes, and provide a brief overview and user's guide to the book.
Keywords
Keywords dwell on the boundaries between ordinary and technical discourse. They are often "bedeviled by semantic shadows" (Keller and Lloyd 1992:2). For Raymond Williams (1976) they refer to commonly used terms plagued in their usage by multiple current and historically varying meanings. Because the keywords of this project are laden with particular and dense meanings, they are best clarified in advance. They include disciplining, reproduction, modernity, "the problems of sex," basic research , and technoscience .
Disciplining
I argue that reproduction was disciplined in several senses between 1910 and 1963. First, in the sense of disciplinary formation, a scholarly specialty in reproduction was essentially initiated after 1910. A nucleus of reproductive (in contrast with evolutionary, developmental, and/or genetic) problems was then increasingly addressed by researchers in sufficient mutual communication and interaction for reproductive science to be identified as a distinctive social world.[7] By 1940, recognizable collective lines of work by identifiable workers were pursued in disciplinary centers of research in each of the three professional contexts of biology, medicine, and agriculture.
But disciplines are complicated sites. They are often rife with conflict as well as cooperation, marked by competing paradigms of concern and competing hierarchies of power. Different constituents often have different agendas and even different overall projects in mind. Here the term disciplining becomes inflected with connotations of exercising control over participating individuals and groups both within the discipline and related to it—sharing its wider arena of concern. Disciplining thus can involve policing and enforcing particular perspectives. It can operate not only from the top down but also from the bottom up, sideways, and orthogonally. It can be directed at "allies" and "enemies" as well as at implicated strangers and the nonhuman. Disciplines mark territories and usually seek to do so vividly. They are simultaneously constitutive and controlling.[8]
In modernity, the focus of the collective disciplinary project of the reproductive sciences was also disciplining in another and more specific sense: as exercising control over reproduction itself. The fundamental goal was the development of modern technoscientific means and mechanisms through which human beings could exercise increasing control over their
own and other species' reproduction. Control over the timing, means ("artificial" or "natural"), and frequency of conception, and especially its prevention, was at the heart of the modernist reproductive project. This assertion, of course, raises issues of who "controls" or "disciplines" whose reproduction, evoking Foucault's (1975, 1977) analysis of biopower. He argues that the two key sites of modern biopower are the body and population. There has been considerable scholarly attention to the former in the late twentieth century. As we move into the twenty-first, I suspect this volume will be part of a refocusing of attention on the latter (e.g., Haraway 1995; Greenhalgh 1996; Ginsberg and Rapp 1995).
Reproduction
Reproduction here refers to the sexual reproduction of predominantly mammalian species. Both nonmammalian and plant reproduction were also studied assiduously during the early twentieth century, but I do not discuss them.[9] But the term reproduction , like sexuality (Foucault 1978), is itself a historical conception, though not included in Williams's (1976) Keywords . Here I provide only a brief glimpse of these instructive complications.
In 1782, John Wesley commented on Buffon's natural history that Buffon "substitutes for the plain word Generation , a quaint word of his own, Reproduction , in order to level man not only with the beasts that perish, but with nettles or onions" (Jordanova 1995:372). This is the earliest mention of the changing terminology. The processes of creation of new life that had linked humans to God were thereby shifted linguistically to abstract biological processes that marginalize human agency. Jordanova further notes that "having children" then becomes conceptually linked to copying, as in reproduction furniture. She argues that the concept was in transition over the eighteenth century, moving from home and nonprofessional domains to public and professional ones. Much of the symbolic import of generation was then hidden behind the new scientific and rationalized discourse.[10] Strathern (1992:23) sustains this point, noting that we end up with a cultural discourse that leads us to "imagine the very reproduction of persons in a non-relational way." I agree that the symbolic and relational aspects of reproduction do not remain quiescent but continue to burst forth in controversies over reproductive sciences, technologies, and interventions.
Duden (1991:28) links this terminological shift to other disciplines, arguing that "it was medicine, demography and political science which replaced the expressions of generatio —whether Latin or vernacular—with 'reproduction.' Prior to this new definition, there simply was no term in which insemination, conception, pregnancy and birth could have been subsumed." This new definition separated the older scientific nomenclature of the nineteenth century, where the inner landscape was imprinted with the
names of its anatomist discoverers, from the new functional terminology of demography and political economy. Conceptually, Duden argues, reproduction emerged and was linked to the context of production as that term moved into the center of political economy around 1850. Thus even the term reproduction itself is modern and inflected by economics.
One of the recurrent problems of the twentieth-century reproductive scientists I studied was their own lack of clarity in terminology, leading to misunderstandings that persisted for years (and, some would argue, that still persist intentionally) (e.g., Lillie 1932; Allen 1932). For present purposes, I have used the following terms as carefully as possible:
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All of these, of course, are complex, multiple, ultimately interactive, and meaningful boundaries among them are blurred.[11]
I have used reproductive sciences as a generic term to include, umbrella-like, all of the following: reproductive physiology, reproductive endocrinology, nonpathological gynecologic and obstetric research, urologic and andrologic research, and animal science and veterinary science addressing reproductive phenomena. That is, a core argument of this book is that reproduction was disciplined simultaneously in three professional domains: biology, medicine, and agriculture. I needed an overarching term to refer to the enterprise in its broadest senses, as the specificities not only can be narrower but also were historically politicized. For example, when George Corner, with whom I started the book, was quite senior, he said, "I never did and still do not see any reason to call myself anything more than an anatomist" (Raacke 1983:931), despite being known for his reproductive physiology of the female cycle and endocrinological work. Today many (but not all) in the field, broadly conceived, use the term reproductive sciences .
Modernity
The reproductive sciences between 1910 and 1963 constituted a modernist enterprise par excellence.[12] Modern approaches sought universal laws of re-
production toward achieving and/or enhancing control over reproduction. During the modern era, the reproductive processes focused on most intently by reproductive scientists and clinicians included menstruation, contraception, abortion, birth, and menopause; agricultural reproductive scientists also focused on artificial insemination. Control over reproduction was and still is accomplished by means of Fordist mass production–oriented emphases on the rationalization of reproductive processes, including the production and (re)distribution of new goods, technologies, and health care services that facilitate such control. The engineering of new technologies to enhance control over reproduction, to be mass-produced and distributed, was and remains the modernist goal, ever widening and deepening the global consumer pool.
In sharp contrast, postmodern approaches to reproduction are centered on transformation of reproductive bodies and processes, seeking to flexibly redesign those very bodies and processes to achieve a variety of goals. The reproductive processes focused on since the 1960s are conception and (in)fertility, pregnancy, heredity and clinical genetics, and male reproduction. In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are the central postmodern reproductive technologies in both clinical and agricultural settings. Redesign of bodies is achieved through strategies of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989) of reproductive capacities. These include fertility and sex preselection services, genetic and fetal screening, counseling, and treatment. The economic aim is to create new market niches for elaborated reproductive services.
In short, the common distinction embodied in the phrase "the new reproductive technologies," which began to appear in scholarly as well as popular media in the 1970s, constituted a significant boundary, starting a new era. The "new" reproductive technologies are the postmodern transformative ones (including artificial insemination, even though it was developed earlier). George Corner (1981:165) reflected in his autobiography: "The world is agog with the news of the first 'test-tube' baby. I hardly need to point out that the success of that procedure and similar methods such as artificial insemination in corpore mulieris depends basically upon knowledge of the primate cycle that has been worked out since the beginning of the century by a few embryologists and gynecologists in Europe and America, of whom I am one." The test-tube baby moment can be viewed as the beginning of postmodern reproduction. As Franklin (1995:326) notes, there have been "significant shifts in the cultural grounding of assumptions about 'the facts of life.'"
While the modernist reproductive body is Taylored, the postmodern body is tailored. However, there is considerable traffic across the varyingly constructed boundaries. In fact, I argue strongly for the simultaneity of even premodern (primarily herbal) approaches to controlling reproduc-
tion with modern and postmodern approaches. Modern modes of control over reproduction are requisite (and usually presumed available) for the implementation of postmodern approaches. There is a historically dynamic and cumulative, not an exclusive, relation.[13]
Both modern and postmodern approaches to reproduction are achieved through technoscientific reconfigurations of "nature" that intervene by going "beyond the natural body" (Oudshoorn 1994). Over the past century, the desire for control over reproduction expanded the legitimacy of the scientific study of reproductive processes, which, essentially in tandem, supported the legitimacy of human intervention in reproductive processes—of both other species and our own. Here representation in the lab is followed almost immediately by intervention (Hacking 1983) in the field, coop, sty, pasture, operating room, and bedroom. The legitimacy of both representing and intervening in reproductive processes remains contested. However, technoscientific capacities for intervening have expanded from modernist "control over" reproductive processes in both humans and animals to postmodernist "manipulation of" both processes and products (e.g., Austin and Short 1972/1986). In fact, the human/nonhuman distinction is of decreasing relevance to reproductive and genetic scientists as reproduction is more fully rationalized. Only as the century-plus-long visions of collaborative scientific creations via genetic screening and therapies used conjointly with reproductive technologies are enacted now and in the future will the dreams of Warren Weaver and many others for "a new science of man" come to full fruition.
This study begins in modernity in 1910, the year in which Marshall published his Physiology of Reproduction, signaling the formation of an explicit field of endeavor or line of work in the reproductive sciences in Western Europe and the United States. I am not arguing that scientific problems of reproduction were ignored prior to 1910 (see, e.g., Gasking 1967; Farley 1982), and I discuss turn-of-the-century work and approaches at some length in chapter 2. But it was after 1910, especially in the United States, that research on reproduction became focused on an organized, coherent set of problems with both a clearer scope and clearer boundaries with other disciplines.
I end my examination of the formation and coalescence of the American reproductive research enterprise around 1963. For many sciences in the American context (e.g., physics, chemistry), World War II was a boundary line between historic eras, but this was true only in a very limited sense for the reproductive sciences. Because of their highly controversial status, the reproductive sciences did not benefit until the 1960s from the federal largesse that began immediately after the war through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:372–85). I end my story when the new, modern, scientific
methods of contraception, developed with private rather than federal support, were first distributed under U.S. government sponsorship both in the United States and internationally. At about this time, significant new federal and private funding began to flow directly to the reproductive sciences and contraceptive development; then, arguably, the modern era began to segue into postmodernity, and a different set of stories about the reproductive sciences began to be enacted.
"The Problems of Sex"
Three lines of scientific research were developing and expanding simultaneously in the early twentieth century, all of which were blurrily associated with the term "the problems of sex": (1) sexology, or sexuality research, which focused on behavioral activities and aspects including gender, primarily in humans but also in nonhuman primates and other animals;[14] (2) the reproductive sciences, which focused on the biological, medical, and agricultural aspects of sex and reproductive systems; and (3) contraceptive and fertility research, which focused on directly developing enhanced control over human reproduction through prevention and/or enhancement of conception by means of technoscientific interventions.[15]
Constructing strong boundaries among these three lines of research was itself a major effort of reproductive scientists during this period. Points of intersection and boundary construction with the other two lines of work are therefore addressed at some length. Chapter 4 examines how reproductive scientists from biology and medicine diverted the founding mission of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex from its initial focus on studies of human sexuality—sexology—to a new emphasis on basic reproductive biology, especially reproductive endocrinology. In chapter 6 I take up the ferocious construction of the boundary between what was to be legitimate academic reproductive science versus explicitly applied contraceptive research. The latter was almost completely exiled from the academy until after 1963.
Basic Research and Technosciences
I have largely limited my scope to what has been traditionally termed "basic" research work undertaken by investigators in biology, medicine, and agriculture on aspects of mammalian reproduction, as well as work viewed by such individuals as directly contributing to fundamental knowledge of mammalian reproduction. These modern investigators sought knowledge of basic reproductive laws and functions.
By "basic" research, I mean investigations toward understanding "normal" reproductive form and function through morphological, anatomical, physiological, endocrinological and other biochemical approaches. For
such research on humans, Fletcher and colleagues (1981:286) use the interesting term "normality studies," referring to investigations of the biology of nondiseased humans. Such a term would also be appropriate for agricultural investigations of basic mammalian reproductive functions in domestic species.
Thus my focus on "basic" research largely excludes investigations of disease, pathology, and treatment interventions. In reproduction as elsewhere, the "normal" is constituted in distinction from the "pathological" (Canguilhem 1978; Foucault 1978). And certainly many reproductive scientists in fact focused on diseases and other pathologies and/or hoped their work would contribute to effective interventions (e.g., Pratt 1932). But for reasons of scope, I generally exclude such work. However, in chapter 6 I do address research on contraception, assuredly considered "applied" research by reproductive scientists and assuredly sought as a technoscientific intervention into normal processes.
But the meanings of the term technosciences here are more complicated than mere reference to applied research. First, the term challenges traditional notions that basic research produces technologies in a unidirectional fashion. Instead, the two are loosely viewed as co-constitutive, as hybrid (Latour 1987). Second, it challenges the notion that there is in fact some pure form of research that is totally distinguishable from its application (e.g., Kline 1995). Most life sciences research undertaken in the twentieth century has at least been informed by applied concerns, if not guided by them. The term technoscience thus signals these complications. Pickstone (1993b:438) also argues that the term has a "specific historical meaning for fields where knowledge, and practice and the economy were intimately related, where knowledge was saleable," where science involved "the creation and sale of knowledge products."
Considerably greater cultural authority generally accrues to basic scientists than to applied scientists or the developers of new technologies. On the other hand, the latter may glean greater fiscal rewards, especially through ties to industry, which have tended to become more direct across the century.
Themes
This book tells multiple stories about the reproductive sciences. I center my investigation on the theme of disciplinary formation, examining relations among the heterogeneous social worlds involved and implicated in the wider reproductive arena. Other crosscutting themes include illegitimacy, controversy, and boundaries; gender and the technosciences; and the control of life through the rationalization of reproduction in modernity.
Disciplinary Formation
Recent approaches to examining disciplinary formation and the production of new knowledge in science and technology studies and beyond have challenged earlier assumptions that science and scientific knowledge were somehow different and better (truer) than other kinds of knowledge, somehow asocial in terms of the actual contents of science, and somehow less politically and economically driven in their constitution, institutionalization, and practices than the social sciences, the arts and humanities, or, for that matter, business. These newer studies often assumed that adequate accounts of disciplinary formation require addressing both what were called "internalist" and "externalist" dimensions, including theories, ideas, people, research materials, instruments, institutions, research funding, and contiguous fields. They were concerned with concrete practices, constructed boundaries, and constitutive contextual elements of any and all kinds that appeared empirically salient.[16] Rosenberg (1979b) has termed these more inclusive approaches studies of "the ecology of knowledge" and its production.[17]
A crucial orthogonal angle of vision has focused intently over the past decade or so on private funding sources such as patrons and foundations as central organizing and intervening agencies in the formation and development of disciplines and specialties, especially before World War II. Some of these scholars view foundations as the visible hand of capitalism intervening to control the production of knowledge for their own good. Others foreground foundations' commitments to solving social problems through the application of science.[18] Foundations and philanthropists are certainly central actors followed about in the stories told here. While they undoubtedly had agendas, their actions and commitments were heterogeneous and complicated, open to multiple readings and resistances, a point to which I return in conclusion.
Most recently, additional inflections have been added to understandings of disciplinary formation by "new knowledge studies" critically inquiring into processes of knowledge construction. These approaches study both concrete practices and institutions. In addition, they place greater emphasis on the circulation and consumption of both academic and nonacademic (official/unofficial, approved/subjugated) knowledges. Concern centers on the institutionalization and professionalization of official knowledge production, including articulations among universities, governments, foundations, and interest groups. There also has been special interest in boundary transgressions (e.g., Klein 1996; Gieryn 1995). Drawing extensively on Foucault, the new knowledge studies additionally seek to specify what goes unstudied—what Evelynn Hammonds (1994) calls "black (w)holes"—sites
of particular tensions of omission. What goes unstudied may not be seen or perceived, or it may be refused—worthy of note regardless. The new knowledge studies have a radically heterogeneous character: "Disciplinarity is about the coherence of a set of otherwise disparate elements: objects of study, methods of analysis, scholars, students, journals, and grants to name a few. ... [D]isciplinarity is the means by which ensembles of diverse parts are brought into particular types of knowledge relations with each other" (Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan 1993:3).[19] Those relations are, then, the objects of study.
Issues of "internal" and "external" approaches to the histories of science and technology have, over the years, been moved alternately between foreground and background. Shapin (1992:351) asserts, and I agree, that it does not suffice merely to wave a wand and state that neither extreme is worthy; instead, we still need "systematic exploration of the complex situated practices historical actors have used to construct their internal and their external domains." But, with Pickstone (1993b), I would add that ways of knowing are themselves cultural formations, and that we also need to examine how others construct sciences and their productions. That is, most sciences and technologies implicate other actors who also should be taken into account.
In the historiography of disciplinary formation, Abir-Am (1985) takes up the basic problem of whether any representation of a science is intrinsically hagiographic, as any advertising can be deemed good advertising. She also asserts that in many scientists' "insider history" accounts, differences and conflicts are papered over (rather than focused on) to further empower the historical disciplinary claims that are being made. Abir-Am calls for a more elaborated analysis of power, conflict, and hierarchy within histories of sciences as ways of opening those histories to the important questions of how things might have been otherwise.
The social worlds and arenas approach, discussed next, allows for precisely such questions. It takes a nondeterminative, empirical approach to disciplinary formation and technology development.
Social Worlds and Arenas
I view the reproductive sciences as social worlds—communities of practice and discourse. My goal is to provide historical sociological portraits of these worlds and of the other major social worlds with which they related in the broader American reproductive arena—philanthropic and birth/population control worlds. I seek to capture the fundamental identities of these worlds and to specify their relationships in Park's (1952) tradition of relating the "Big News." I do not map the reproductive sciences as a self-
contained discipline, for that would be partial at best. Rather, I view the reproductive sciences as "situated knowledges" (Haraway 1991), appropriately examined within the broader arena in which they were formed and where they "matter" most.
The roots of social worlds theory lie within the Chicago school of sociology and its symbolic interactionist concerns with the making of communities and organizations and with studying their ecologies in particular ways.[20] The commitments of individual actors to collective action, to group work of some kind (be it state building, social movement organizing, or doing reproductive science), structurally situate those individuals. Social groups (such as disciplines and skilled occupations) are then conceived as "social wholes" (Thomas 1914) that make meaning together and act together locally on the basis of those meanings. Social worlds are, for Mead, Strauss, and myself, "universes of mutual discourse."[21]
Social worlds form fundamental "building blocks" of collective action and are the principal affiliative mechanisms through which people organize social life. Society as a whole can be conceptualized as consisting of a shifting mosaic of social worlds that both touch and interpenetrate.[22] Participation usually remains highly fluid. Some participants cluster around the core of the world and mobilize those around them (Hughes 1971:54). These "entrepreneurs" (Becker 1963) typically remain at the core over time. Social worlds and subworlds themselves become units of analysis in the study of collective action.
The concept of an arena of concern and action, composed of multiple social worlds, is central to my view of the reproductive sciences. In arenas, all the social worlds that focus on a given issue meet and interact. The collective actors/social worlds involved in an arena can be stunningly heterogeneous. In arenas, "various issues are debated, negotiated, fought out, forced and manipulated by representatives" of the participating worlds and subworlds (Strauss 1978:124). The analyst needs to elucidate which worlds and subworlds come together in a particular arena and why, what their perspectives are, and what they hope to achieve through collective action.[23]
In arenas, establishing and maintaining boundaries between worlds—including gaining social legitimation for the worlds themselves and a variety of claims-making activities—are key activities (Aronson 1984). Indeed, the very history of a social world is commonly constructed in the boundary-making process (Strauss 1982).[24] We can also ask whether there are implicated actors —individuals and/or groups or nonhuman entities—who, while they do not participate actively (for whatever reasons), are the targets of or will likely be affected by actions taken within the social world or arena (Clarke and Montini 1993). For example, women as the primary users/consumers of the technoscientific products of the reproductive sci-
ences are usually implicated actors in this arena—not present but clearly targeted.
I use the term enterprise (Estes 1979) here to capture and emphasize several particular aspects of the overall reproductive sciences endeavor. The reproductive sciences can be constructed as a set of "going concerns" (Hughes, 1971:53), commodities in a marketplace with producers, audiences, sponsors, and consumers. To some, using such business terms will seem inappropriate. But lines of scientific work resemble other lines of work and owe their continued existence to organized markets and funding for that work. Latour's (1983, 1988) interpretation of Louis Pasteur's transformation of the countryside into his "laboratory" can be viewed as an analysis of the organization of markets for bacteriological research. Sapp's (1983) analysis of competition for control of the field of heredity is similar. Social movements within professions and disciplines, commonly framed as scientific reform movements, are often efforts to organize new markets for the work (Bucher 1988). In short, there is a political economy of disciplinary formation, which market analyses can illuminate. Recent studies of disciplinarity and knowledge production, discussed previously, also echo such concerns (Becher 1989:129–49).
Three features of the social worlds and arenas approach are particularly salient to the study of disciplinary formation. First, the approach includes all the key actors in the arena, analyzing their properties and perspectives along with the key issues confronting the arena as a whole. This approach not only follows the scientists (Latour 1987) but also attempts to follow everyone and everything else (human and nonhuman) in the situation or arena.[25] Second, the arenas approach is deeply situational and contingent, with contexts and conditions empirically fleshed out, close to the anthropological tradition of thick description. Interactionists assume that things could have been otherwise and try to examine especially consequential moments, turning points, trajectories and careers (of concepts, people, technologies). Histories matter.
Third, in social worlds analysis there is movement to and fro among what have been termed "internal" (scientific, theoretical, methodological) and "external" (social, cultural, economic, institutional) elements. It is the relations among all these elements, typically heterogeneous, that are most intriguing. For it is here in the complexities of dense situations that disciplinary coherence is constructed. It is these ongoing relations that I attempt to portray in this book, taking up the contents and practices of the reproductive sciences from the practical value of "golden hands" in performing intricate lab surgeries such as rat hypophysectomy (removal of the anterior pituitary gland) to the negotiations between reproductive scientists and birth control advocates over decades. The social worlds/arenas approach
enables me to elaborate for the reproductive sciences what Rosenberg (1979b) called an "ecology of knowledge" and the conditions of its production.
Illegitimacy, Controversy, and Boundaries
A third theme of this volume concerns the enduring illegitimacy, marginality, and controversial status of the reproductive sciences as a discipline. I underscore the consequences of controversy for the construction of the boundaries of the discipline, for its practitioners, and for women as the major consumers of its technoscientific products. I use the term illegitimate to feature both playfully and seriously the construction of reproductive sciences as "bastard science" and to show how its sustained practice generates sustained controversy. The reproductive sciences are marked on the one hand by great potency in the world and on the other hand by shame.
I both contradict and complicate Foucault's analysis of the relations between the reproductive sciences and sexology. I quote him for clarity's sake below (Foucault 1978:54–55, emphasis added). The two claims that I complicate are italicized:
When we compare these discourses on human sexuality with what was known at the time about the physiology of animal and plant reproduction, we are struck by the incongruity. Their feeble content from the standpoint of elementary rationality, not to mention scientificity, earns them a place apart in the history of knowledge. They form a strangely muddled zone. Throughout the nineteenth century, sex seems to have been incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation. From one to the other, there was no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration ... [W]e would have to see something more than uneven scientific development ... the one would partake of that immense will to knowledge which has sustained the establishment of scientific discourse in the West, whereas the other would derive from a stubborn will to nonknowledge.
In contrast to Foucault, I argue that the reproductive sciences were quite late to develop in a modern fashion compared with disciplines centered on other major organ systems. Further, the reproductive sciences were and remain illegitimate science precisely because of their historical and specific relations to sexuality and sexology. The "immense will to knowledge" of Western science in terms of investigating reproduction was actually relatively quiescent until well into the twentieth century.
Moreover, for the "will to knowledge" to express itself, not only did there need to be explicit support for the formation of the reproductive sciences, specifically the birth control, eugenics and neo-Malthusian movements. The
very boundaries between what would count as studies of sex (sexology) and studies of reproduction (the reproductive sciences) also needed to be negotiated and constructed. What this ultimately involved was what could be considered a division of labor between these two disciplines emerging in the early decades of the twentieth century. This division of labor concerns what Foucault (1978:103–5) discussed as:
four great strategic unities which, beginning in the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex. ...
1. A hystericization of women's bodies ...
2. A pedagogization of children's sex ...
3. A socialization of procreative behavior ...
4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure ...
Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century—four privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian [contracepting] couple, and the perverse adult.
I argue that the division of labor ultimately negotiated allocated to sexology and psychiatry some aspects of the hysterical woman, children's sexuality, and perverse pleasures. The Malthusian couple and the project of the socialization of procreative behavior fell to the reproductive sciences, along with those aspects of the hysterical woman deemed related to the menstrual/reproductive cycle. (Foucault planned later volumes that would have taken up each of those four topics/objects of knowledge.) This division of scientific labor largely persists.
The study of reproduction was, and for many remains, transgressive. Throughout their disciplinary efforts, reproductive scientists regularly and routinely confronted the fundamental problem of the illegitimacy of reproduction as a focus of scientific work. Because the entire field was deemed at least problematic and at worst reprehensible by various constituencies, its very institutionalization was marked by surprising and shifting alliances, episodic organizational efforts, a constant vigilance, and strong desires for enhanced legitimacy. Rather than follow the more common patterns of emergent disciplines of establishing a freshly and explicitly focused society, journal, and routine funding sources, relations with other social worlds from professional organizations to funding sources have been negotiated and renegotiated over time as circumstances of legitimacy shifted. Much has been indirect, tentative, and temporary that, for other emergent scientific disciplines, was direct, explicit, and fairly permanent.
How reproductive scientists negotiated the challenging social opposition to the construction of an autonomous scientific enterprise is a core theme
of this book.[26] Some of the major actors chose to address the illegitimacy of their science directly. In 1921, for example, they chose to name the most prestigious institution in the interwar American reproductive arena the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. And they chose to talk and write explicitly about "the problems of sex." Yet the legitimacy problems of the reproductive sciences have not abated. If anything, "the problems of sex" are now even more hotly, openly, and explicitly contested. The public debate about abortion in the United States over the past decade, coupled with terrorist acts and murders of abortion providers, has brought home again and again how contested these topics are. Abortion is but the tip of the iceberg.
What then is the iceberg? The cultural primacy of sex and reproduction in most human beings' lives on the planet in terms of manhood, womanhood and adulthood places the concerns of sexology and the reproductive sciences at the heat of social life. Further, the embeddedness of reproductive phenomena in family and kinship systems, commonly fundamental to the very ordering of life itself, maintains its cultural centrality (Strathern 1992). But these are not easy issues, and in modernity anxieties about sexuality, reproduction, and families abound. Parenting, like sexuality, can be construed as both sacred and obscene. Issues so central to life itself tend to be contested with a stunning extremity. Franklin (1993) points out that the new reproductive technologies have been used not to challenge but rather to reinforce traditional familial and kinship formations. These conceptive technologies are often made inaccessible to homosexuals, inserting homophobia where it had not dwelt. The center requires the margins.
Boundaries are core elements in the analysis of disciplinary formation and knowledge production. But in controversial, marginalized, outlier disciplines, things are more complicated, and transgressions and gerrymandering are rife. Further, the reproductive sciences exhibit multiple boundaries of concern, all of which are somehow problematic. First is the boundary between science and society, usually claimed by science.[27] Second are the boundaries delimiting one scientific discipline from another, typically most important during disciplinary emergence (e.g., Keating, Cambrosio, and McKenzie 1992). Third are the boundaries constructed within a discipline between what is to count as "basic" versus "applied." Fourth, especially in modernity, are the boundaries between the "normal" and the "pathological" (Canguilhem 1978; Fletcher, Fletcher, and Greganti 1981). Fifth are the boundaries of hierarchy, prestige, and cultural authority within a discipline, which typically are highly consequential for individual careers. Last are the boundaries of hierarchy, prestige, and cultural authority among scientific disciplines so consequential for both individual and disciplinary careers—the rank ordering of the sciences themselves (e.g., Whitley 1982).
We enter the historical story of the reproductive sciences as all of these
boundaries are about to be constructed or reconstructed within the cultural terrain of the sciences established in the late nineteenth century. The boundary between the embryonic reproductive sciences and society is faint and shifting. It is transparent and hence easily transgressed and vulnerable to gerrymandering by political groups. Getting contraceptive research into the laboratories was, after all, Sanger's transgressive goal. The boundaries between scientific disciplines are central to the story because the establishment of the boundaries around genetics and developmental embryology also clarified the parameters of the reproductive sciences. Another boundary between disciplines was contested—that between the reproductive sciences and sexology—which we will watch reproductive scientists assiduously construct in the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. The basic-versus-applied distinction was also problematic for disciplinary formation, as illustrated by the fact that the boundary between the reproductive sciences and contraceptive research remains contested and liminal.
The issues of marginality have been studied extensively in cultural, artistic, and social practices (e.g., Ferguson et al. 1990). Transferring this project to the sciences, looking at a marginal science and the kinds of boundary work involved in establishing and maintaining such an enterprise, tells us much about boundaries themselves and the construction of legitimacy. A core theme of this book, then, is the marginality of the reproductive sciences as they have been ignored, overshadowed, and otherwise made invisible by other sciences during the twentieth century. Such invisibling, especially by other life sciences like genetics, has been a strategy to prevent these other sciences from becoming contaminated by clear association and thereby risking marginalization.
Further, due in part to this marginalization, the formation of the reproductive sciences has been among the most ignored by scholars, despite the discipline's importance to and intervention in millions of human lives throughout the world in even its most remote corners (e.g., Tsing 1993). Although investment in reproductive research has been limited, it is likely that the technoscientific products produced downstream, such as contraceptives, have affected more individuals per dollar invested than any other technologies, with the possible exception of large technological systems such as electricity, telecommunications, and transportation. Gender is implicated.
Gender and the Technosciences of Reproduction
Intensive research on sex, gender, and the technosciences, one of the social worlds in which I participate, has been under way since the 1970s. A core project here has been examination of the construction of sex/gender
differences both within and across disciplines from the social sciences to the natural sciences and from classical times to the present. Such studies are intrinsically comparative, both within and across sexes and genders (Jordanova 1993). We have learned much about gender and sex from dissecting classical anatomy, physiology, gynecology, neuroendocrinology, neurology, genetics, space biology, and the rhetorical, material, and other practices of many sciences.[28]
It is difficult to conceive of a more sex- and gender-constructing and maintaining discipline and set of practices and discourses than those of the reproductive sciences, and this is another theme of the book. Through studies of these sciences, feminists have begun to address the socially constructed character of the concept of sex as used within the life sciences. That is, the earlier distinction feminists made between sex as biological/natural and gender as cultural/social/political/economic has itself been exploded. Today both concepts, sex and gender, are understood as social constructions. The constructions of nature done by scientists can and do, of course, take material concerns—"real bodies"—into account, as constructions of cultural and social phenomena can do as well. It is the meanings attributed to both nature and culture that are indelibly social, cultural, and deeply historical as well. The attributions are, after all, done by humans. In the case of gender, social scientists have been the primary researchers, while in the case of sex, life scientists have done the bulk of the construction work. But these are matters of emphasis and not exclusion. The concepts of sex and gender deeply implicate each other (Oudshoorn 1996c; see also Oudshoorn 1994, 1995, 1996a,b).
Focusing on the modern reproductive sciences, Borell's groundbreaking work demonstrated the centrality of both sex and gender to early British endocrinology, as the "male" and "female" hormones were being identified and birth control came to the forefront of concern. Oudshoorn has focused on the consequences of the organizational relations of the clinic, the laboratory, and pharmaceutical companies for the development of sex hormones and a new conceptualization of "the gendered hormonal body" in the Netherlands and Europe. Her work demonstrates how enhanced access to women as patients was central to both the production of knowledge and the subsequent distribution of technoscientific treatments that go "beyond the natural body." Hall focused on the construction of American reproductive endocrinology, while Rechter examines early clinical applications of the "male" and "female" hormones and their representation in popular media.[29] Long (1997) has examined how medicine produced what it calls a "controlled vocabulary" for the category "woman" in the early twentieth century. She asks how medicine established a linguistic hegemony over gendered subjects and objects, noting that the Index Catalogue of America's National Library of Medicine had no entry for "Male" or "Man" until
1955, while "Women" are constant subjects of attention. Martin's (1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992) work attends to the use of metaphor in these vocabularies past and present. The production of sex itself has also been an especially rich topic.[30] Further, U.S. and transnational women's health movements have been increasingly influential concerning the biomedical inscription of bodies, (re)creations of gender, and dynamics of male dominance through science, technology, and medicine.[31]
We are now able to grasp analytically how sex and gender not only are constructed and produced within disciplines but also are made robust by simultaneous alignments across multiple disciplines. That is, we can see how one discipline can rely on another's "conclusions" as foundational in the production of its own knowledge.[32] This has been a pattern of considerable import in the sciences, especially in relation to gender. Yet disciplinary axes of sexing and gendering are intrinsically unstable and changing, and require regular rearticulation and reframing to maintain their cutting (i.e., classificatory) edges. Hence much work in the sciences as well as on the sciences remains focused on sex and gender. Problems of sex and gender, like race, do not resolve.
Evelyn Fox Keller argues that we need a new taxonomy for this area of study. She suggests (1995:32) it be schematized as "those studies examining the history of (1) women in science; (2) scientific constructions of sexual difference; and (3) the uses of scientific constructions of subjects and objects that lie both beneath and beyond the human skin (or skeleton)." In the first two, the focus is on women, sex, and gender in science. In the last, currently of considerable concern, the focus is on "gender in science," trading "between historical studies of gender, language and culture in the production of science." My emphasis in this book on the organizational culture of the reproductive sciences during their formation and coalescence addresses this very point.
Keller (1995:33) goes on: "Metaphors of gender can be seen to work, as social images in science invariably do, in two directions: they import social expectations into our [scientific] representations of nature, and by so doing they serve to reify (or naturalize) cultural beliefs or practices." Most feminist studies of the technosciences have focused on the latter, emphasizing the negative effects of such reifications on women. Some other feminist studies, and my project is included here, instead take up the influence of social expectations of gender on the course of scientific knowledge per se.[33] In particular, I discuss the effects on the reproductive sciences of the insistence on retaining the "male" and "female" hormone designations, and the related, broader struggles between a reductionist endocrinological and a more physiologically oriented biology of sex (see chapter 5).
Much feminist research on the technosciences, as elsewhere, places
women or gender at the analytic center as the objects and/or subjects of inquiry, in attempting to compensate for prior omissions. I have chosen instead to examine sciences and technologies of particular relevance to women, those that often have profound consequences for women's lives. That is, I have sought here to understand the social and technical implications of the organization of the American reproductive sciences per se for women during the twentieth century. Rather than study downstream effects on women, I study the upstream production of knowledges and technologies. These implications are discussed most explicitly in chapter 6 on the development of means of contraception in negotiations with heterogeneous groups concerned with birth control. As Fausto-Sterling (1990:14) has stated: "We don't understand all that much about how science functions as a social activity, one in which ideology plays a part in the creation of the science and the science, thus created, feeds back upon the ideology." The historical moment of disciplinary formation is, of course, especially significant in terms of the very frameworks of conceptualization established. What kinds of knowledge will be produced, and how will it be distributed and used in terms of sex and gender?[34]
Controlling Life
The last major theme of the book seeks to situate the rationalizing of reproduction in modernity, which I see as one strategy within a larger modernist movement toward enhanced control over life itself. Modernity consists of many efforts to rationalize and industrialize a variety of life processes.[35] The phrase "controlling life" is from Philip Pauly's (1987) important book on Jacques Loeb and his disciples in the early and mid—twentieth century, for whom an "engineering ideal of biology" was central. Loeb is an almost mythic character in the history of the life sciences, symbolizing scientific beliefs that biological processes can be fully reduced to physics and chemistry and then reengineered by humans for the good of mankind. Interestingly, one of his disciples was Gregory Pincus, a "father" of the birth control pill. Pincus was a reproductive scientist extraordinaire and a key actor as scientific statesman in the formation of the transnational reproductive arena that has come to maturity over the last several decades of the twentieth century.
But while this book is properly situated within ongoing conversations about rationalization, social control, and biological engineering in studies of twentieth-century life sciences, the term control must be problematized. Control is complex and multiple, unstable and difficult. Where did the modernist framework for "controlling life" come from? How did it come to be applied to a model of biology in general and to heredity, evolution, and
reproduction in particular? The concept of control through knowledge in the life sciences has a long history to which I will return.
Foucault (1975, 1978) queried most earlier notions of social control by asserting that power is fluid and everywhere, with "positive" and "negative" potentialities of resistance and liberation as well as repression and domination. The title of this book plays on Foucault's use of the term disciplining to connote not only formation of a scientific discipline but also the possibilities of containment and control through knowledge—for liberatory, repressive, unanticipated, and unknown other purposes. Many individuals and groups were seeking to control life at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I would venture that even more do so at its end. Because reproduction is socially, culturally, and economically central to the very shape of individual lives, as well as a serious focus of national, corporate, and other global interests, it is a particular site where the desire to control life is vividly manifest. All of the social worlds examined in this book sought to enhance control of life in general and of reproduction in particular. They had varied goals, and power was far from equally distributed among them. But these are complicated stories of negotiations and trade-offs rather than simpler sagas of repression and denial.
In the life sciences, Pauly (1987:4) has argued that "there is a real history to the idea of scientific control of life" distinctive from more general ideas. While well into the nineteenth century, "the limits on biological manipulation were more notable than the achievements," this has been reversed by the end of the twentieth. Humans now have the capacity to create life itself through recombinant DNA biotechnologies. Indeed, what is life—nature—is now negotiated, and the boundaries between nature and culture are blurring and shifting.[36] But Pauly is concerned, as I am in this book, with the beginnings of disciplinarities of biological—including biomedical—control over life itself. He traces a shift in biology from concern with evolution, the organization of organisms, and other "metaphysical" topics to new concerns with experimental control of organisms toward enhancing the capacity to "manipulate" them—to control life itself. The utility of science and technology in achieving liberatory social engineering was an ideal often articulated romantically and idealistically by both left and right, progressives and conservatives, at the turn of and well into the twentieth century.[37] Regardless of political agendas, however, the reins of control usually remain in the hands of scientists, engineers, and related elites, although the politics can be very complicated.
I will argue that the reproductive sciences provide yet another instance of such arguments for control by a variety of elites. First, for reproductive scientists, disciplined knowledge yields the power for successful intervention in life itself. In her early study of the Committee for Research in Prob-
lems of Sex, Hall (1978:14) found "implicit models of human society managed by scientists in the interests of human fulfillment." The capacity for scientific management is at the heart of rationalizing and industrializing processes. Indeed, Austin and Short (1972/1986) titled their major reproductive sciences text Manipulating Reproduction , describing in the same volume the means of such manipulation in both humans and farm animals. The human/nonhuman distinction has, in fact, become decreasingly relevant to the sciences and technologies of reproduction. However, the issues of whose control over whose reproduction, under what conditions, and so on, are especially salient to understanding twentieth-century reproductive sciences.
In some important senses, this book can also be read as a case study of elite philanthropic endowment of an emergent discipline—a discipline requisite for the sequence of core projects of twentieth-century life sciences of controlling race, population, heredity, and evolution (Haraway 1995).[38] It frames Rockefeller concerns with the biochemical/endocrinological vision of life, known in the 1920s as "sex and internal secretions," which both preceded and then ran in tandem with the molecular vision of life. Kay (1993b:17) argues that the Rockefeller Foundation, influenced by Jacques Loeb's project of developing an engineering standpoint toward the control of life, sought to develop a "mechanistic biology as the central element of a new science of man whose goal was social engineering." This was very much the "new science of man" articulated by Warren Weaver with which I began the book—the reproductive sciences, genetics, and what Weaver himself later dubbed "molecular biology."[39] What Weaver managed for the Rockefeller Foundation was investment in the middle phase in a broader twentieth-century shift described by Keller (1993:56) as "a change in aim from representation to intervention (or from description to control) ... to the particular conception of intervention or control that promises mastery over the making and remaking of life. ... [T]he project of 'refashioning life,' of redirecting the future course of evolution, is recast as a manageable and doable project." The reproductive sciences are requisite for that project.
But it was not only scientific, corporate, and foundation commitments to rationalization, social control, and engineering that aided and abetted the development of the American reproductive sciences. The control of nature is also the control of self (Keller 1992a). Historically, lay people too have avidly sought enhanced control over their own reproduction.[40] Lay people—both women and men—have applied means of (social) control of many kinds, including biomedicalized means of control over reproduction. They have constructed social movements such as the birth control movement, a key actor in the formation of the American reproductive sciences. Instrumental rationalities of control and intervention were the goals in
modernity for many people—elites and others. In the heterogeneous materialities of ordering and controlling life, there are no simple means of control—and certainly no innocent ones. Who gets to decide about the design and distribution of the means of control remains the central question.
Overview And User's Guide
This book is a prism, offering many stories of the reproductive sciences, which will be read through many lenses with varied individual's and groups' concerns and agendas in mind. It is a story of the construction of a new line of scientific research in the United States between 1910 and 1963—the American reproductive sciences. My focus is on how certain scientists in specific locales came to envision a set of problems of reproductive research, how they organized themselves to work on those problems, and how they interacted among themselves and with their audiences, sponsors, and consumers to sustain this research and develop it into a recognized discipline—an enterprise. In short, I am interested in their processes of coherence. How and why did these social worlds connect and remain interactive, coherent, and viable across a fairly long time and dramatically changing circumstances, including considerable cultural hostility?
The turn-of-the-century era was one of fundamental changes in the organization of the professions, academia, and the life sciences. In chapter 2 I describe the situations in professional biology, medicine, and agriculture into which the reproductive sciences would soon enter. New approaches to the production of knowledge both in the life sciences and in the institutions in which scientific research increasingly took place—academia—are framed. I also introduce the birth control, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian movements, all of which helped to counter the illegitimacy of pursuing problems of reproduction in science.
Chapter 3 frames the emergence of the American reproductive sciences, particularly their early emphasis on physiological problems—largely the estrus and menstrual cycles of mammals. The American reproductive sciences gained initial impetus from British initiatives such as the naming of internal secretions as blood-borne messengers paralleling the nervous system and the first monograph of the discipline, Marshall's (1910) The Physiology of Reproduction . Soon distinctively American aspects of the reproductive sciences emerged in embryological work, very much at the heart of early-twentieth-century American biology. Two key sets of experiments on which much subsequent work was based are described in detail: Lillie's freemartin research and Papanicolaou's vaginal smear.
Chapter 4 focuses on the other major social world in the reproductive arena during the formative era—the National Research Council Commit-
tee for Research in Problems of Sex. Supported by Rockefeller funds, this committee was the major funding source of the emergent discipline for several decades. Here reproductive biologists actively seized the means of studying reproduction from sexology. They redirected the mission of the committee from its initial goals of sponsoring social science–based human sexuality studies intended to ameliorate social problems to the investigation of biological and biomedical topics in reproduction. And they did so for over twenty years during which much of the foundational biological and medical research on reproduction was accomplished. The key strategy used by reproductive scientists here and elsewhere in their efforts to build a legitimate and autonomous discipline was arguing for basic research on reproductive phenomena.
Chapter 5 describes how between ca. 1925 and 1940 the reproductive sciences coalesced as a line of work focused on a biochemical endocrinological problem structure. I examine how reproductive endocrinology became the "model research" of the enterprise, providing it with much sought after legitimacy through direct links to nascent biochemical approaches in the life sciences and to the widely advertised scientific "promise" of general endocrinology. During this period, international preeminence in the reproductive sciences passed to investigators in the United States. The signal event of this transfer was publication by American researchers of the second "Bible" of the reproductive sciences, Sex and Internal Secretions (Allen, ed., 1932, 1939). The nature of the reproductive sciences enterprise as an active intersection of efforts in biology, medicine, and agriculture is also discussed as are the benefits provided by the new discipline to each profession.
Chapter 6 analyzes reproductive scientists' use of strategic arguments for basic research with a wide variety of birth control advocates from about 1915 to 1963. During this period, a quid pro quo was negotiated between reproductive scientists and birth control advocates. There were major shifts in the kinds of contraceptives birth control advocates sought vis-à-vis the kinds that reproductive scientists in the United States would actually investigate. Almost all of the key actors in the reproductive arena changed their positions on contraception dramatically during this period. Due to reproductive scientists' strategies in these negotiations, scientific means of eventually won the day. This work paved the way for reproductive scientists to become integral parts of family planning, population control, and infertility research worlds, where they remain today.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the development of the reproductive sciences enterprise was its success at garnering significant amounts of external research funding during the years prior to federal government sponsorship of basic research and despite its taint of social and scientific illegitimacy. In chapter 7 I examine the often surprisingly prestigious fund-
ing sources committed to the quite socially risky business of supporting reproductive research from ca. 1910 to 1963, along with some of the sources of research support that usually remain invisible, such as industrial sponsorship. I also note recent funding patterns.
Chapter 8 could have been titled "One Hundred Years of Illegitimacy." It examines the sustained illegitimacy of the scientific pursuit of reproductive phenomena that has confronted individual researchers and the enterprise as a whole throughout the twentieth century. Here I discuss some of the key causes and particular consequences, along with some scientists' strategies for managing their often compromised positions. Readers to whom the impropriety of the reproductive sciences seems particularly important might want to begin with this chapter.
The final chapter offers a detailed summary of the book and a concluding examination of the themes. At heart, Disciplining Reproduction is about efforts to control life—human and nonhuman—by rationalizing reproduction. This has been partially, and only partially, accomplished through the shared commitments of multiple worlds and individuals to the production of new knowledge and the consumption of new technoscientific products and interventions.
Chapter Two
Situating the Reproductive Sciences
All scientific work is situated in professional, technical, and institutional social worlds. This chapter offers snapshots of the key social worlds at the turn of the twentieth century that were salient to the subsequent formation of the modern reproductive sciences. Three quite different professional worlds became "homes" for the American reproductive sciences: academic biology, medicine, and agriculture. As the new century unfolded, all of these worlds drew deeply from new physiological approaches to life sciences research called the "new biology," and these scientific professional worlds were themselves located in dramatically changing universities. In the portraits offered here we see the spread of rationalized and industrialized approaches to life in all these sites.
Foucault (1975) has argued that in our studies of the production of knowledge we should examine both what does and does not take place. Another focus of this chapter, thus, is why the reproductive sciences did not appear earlier, along with studies of other major organ systems. A core argument of this book is that reproductive topics were so illegitimate to pursue scientifically and socially that the reproductive sciences emerged "late" compared with disciplines focused on other major organ systems, most of which were "disciplined" by the late nineteenth century. The illegitimacy of reproductive topics was challenged by multifaceted birth control, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian movements in the early decades of the twentieth century, key social worlds in the American reproduction arena also introduced in this chapter. The lay and medical birth control movements brazenly placed women's needs and desires for contraception on the public agenda ca. 1915. Eugenics and demography (the scientific study of populations) then began to establish the propriety of such topics both in the academy (especially among life scientists) and more broadly. Thus by
World War I, several powerful sectors of society sought and supported enhanced control over nature—and women—in many forms, from control over populations and reproduction to improved agricultural production.
These portraits situate the embryonic American reproductive sciences in the first two decades of the twentieth century in professional (biological, medical, agricultural), scientific (the "new biology"), institutional (university), and activist (birth control, eugenic, neo-Malthusian) social worlds. Even in the brief introductions performed in this chapter, we can begin to see the mutual disciplining, reciprocal relations, and negotiations among these worlds as they continually repositioned themselves to take advantage of changing conditions.
Professional Worlds: Biology, Medicine, And Agriculture
At the turn of the century, higher education was expanding and the professions were proferating, building on earlier efforts. Graduate education took on its modern form from ca. 1890 to 1920. Soon scientists were able to construct recognizably modern professional careers in academic science, in research, and in clinical and applied practice settings in these emerging institutions. The professions were also consolidating as market-based occupations. Universities were being transformed into knowledge production industries, or what Servos (1976) has called "knowledge corporations." The sciences themselves were becoming professionalized and industrialized. That is, the sciences qua institutions resembled less the hobby-like worlds they had been and were becoming more akin to industries with specialized markets, a trend that has continued throughout the twentieth century.[1]
A fundamental feature of the professionalization of a science lies in the field's capacity to exert control and authority over a research domain (Freidson 1968, 1970). This includes scientists' own development of the boundaries or parameters of an area of scientific study, claims to authority or jurisdiction over it, and recognition of those claims by significant others (home institutions, sponsors, audiences, and consumers of the research). Professionalization processes are integral to and overlap with specialization processes.[2]
An important point regarding relations to markets is that the scientific disciplines moved into professional stature both within and outside ivy-covered university walls.[3] After receiving university-based training, researchers could construct careers and consultancies in academia, private industry, and/or government. But both the most esteemed positions and control of the profession remain largely within universities and professional associations. As is also true of law and medicine, ongoing tensions exist among the multiple segments of scientific professions, and the reproduc-
tive sciences have been no exception.[4] In the specific case of the reproductive sciences examined here, there were extensive consumer market demands for scientists' professional services as well.[5]
Consolidating the professional positions of biology, medicine, and agriculture proved problematic well into this century.[6] Professional scientific associations, which grew dramatically in numbers and in specialization, helped consolidate positions in the university and beyond (Kiger 1963). These disciplinary and specialty organizations both multiplied and divided the allegiances of academic scientists. As Herbst (1983:203) has remarked: "As service and research rather than teaching became the professors' chief occupations, their loyalties turned from their college and students to their specialty and their colleagues. As they shaped for themselves a new professional identity as scientific investigators, they came to compare themselves to army officers who loved their branch of the service but felt little or no attachment to the post on which they served." The "field" was generally embodied in the professional associations in which scientists were active. Such associations situated scholars more deeply in their professional worlds, and, then as now, one's "real" colleagues could be scattered thousands of miles away without losing their disciplinary effects.
A number of patterns of professionalization in biology, medicine, and agriculture at the beginning of the twentieth century had significance for reproductive scientists. In each professional domain, the reproductive system had been relatively unexplored and therefore constituted a new territory, a new frontier for research. By 1910, few organ systems remained unclaimed as research territories, since tremendous advantages accrued to pioneers. Visible career lines are necessary for scientists to regard a new research area as worthy of their investment and commitment (Coleman 1985:63), and the openness of reproductive research was irresistibly appealing to the curious, ambitious, and daring.
Biology
At the turn of the century, professional biology was an emergent discipline well on its way to becoming a "new fundamental unit of American academic culture" (Pauly 1984:369).[7] Important spokesmen described biology as a fundamental intellectual focus around which many related fields could be arrayed.[8] The framework it offered included, first, an emphasis on basic concepts such as protoplasm, the cell, and evolution, with research problems ranked in order of feasibility and importance (with embryology, cytology, and physiology of invertebrates at the forefront with evolution). A second emphasis was on the development of instruments, techniques, and approaches that relied on the technology of the microscope and controlled experimentation. This biological framework was not rigid but offered an
emergent core of concerns with distinctive American (and particularly East Coast) inflections. This core was aided and abetted by a biologists' "summer camp" at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod, which many contemporary biologists—and later foundation executives—visited at least occasionally.[9]
A few key scientists actively forged the biological discipline, including such Johns Hopkins graduates of the 1880s and 1890s as E. B. Wilson, E. G. Conklin, and T. H. Morgan.[10] Though from a different background, Charles Otis Whitman shared these scientists' vision of biology and sought to ground it in the university, calling for expanded graduate work in biology in 1887. Frank Rattray Lillie, later to become a leading American reproductive scientist, was Whitman's premier student. Whitman's model zoology department is outlined below:
|
Whitman extensively incorporated newer physiological approaches, and he further noted, "I must mention one of the most inviting fields, ... namely Experimental Biology."[12] Pauly (1984:371–72) has argued that this new biology was constructed as basic to other lines of research work in two ways: "Biologists convinced their university constituencies that their research problems were the most advanced and far-reaching of the life sciences, and that their concepts and techniques were the best introduction to a large number of areas of more sophisticated study" for graduate and medical schools alike. Within the academy, graduate programs were established in biology first at the private or independent universities, with the public land-grant schools mostly following suit after the turn of the century (Cravens 1978:20). Between 1870 and 1900, biology departments began at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Clark, Chicago, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Yale, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, and Princeton.[13]
But there were also tensions, first between biology and medicine. This "new biology" was independent of medicine, conceived to achieve a fresh integration of physiological and morphological (cytological) concerns (Pauly 1984). Yet the professional goals that medical educators then defined for themselves were key to the establishment of these new depart-
ments. Medical reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in fact promoted independent biology departments as part of their efforts to raise scientific standards of professional medical education. Ironically, then, these independent departments prospered in institutions where they were established in anticipation of scientifically based medical schools but where those schools subsequently did not fully develop, largely because of insufficient financial support prior to ca. 1900. Such flourishing biology departments included those at Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Columbia. In contrast, where medicine prevailed over biology (for example, at the University of Pennsylvania), biology became "ephemeral" (Pauly 1984:370, 392). Biology thus arose as a professional discipline in part because there was an ideal of "biomedical" science that foundered where universities were persistently unable to transform that ideal into the reality of scientifically based medical schools. As it turned out, the science that biologists developed—a biology independent of medicine—was quite different from what medical reformers initially envisioned.
The extension of biological sciences into the new agriculturally oriented land-grant colleges and their development in such "applied" settings gave the "new biology" a uniquely American character. Undergraduate courses in general biology became the institutional norm and then became the basis of support for graduate programs at both private and public institutions. And, central to the subsequent development of reproductive research, this new biology, especially at the land-grant schools, provided a fully scientific biological training base for the later development of animal agricultural science.[14]
This early era was one of major institution building outside the academy as well, and biologists created several types of institutions to support their work. First were the marine and lake biological laboratories such as the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod and the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York (sponsored by the new Carnegie Institution of Washington).[15] Second was the establishment of a wide array of new professional biological associations and journals, listed below:[16]
Major Associations
American Society of Naturalists (1883)
American Society of Zoologists (1890)
Botanical Society of America, Inc. (1893)
American Society for Microbiology (1899)
Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine (1904)
Entomological Society of America (1906)
American Society of Biological Chemists (1906)
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (1912)
Major Journals
Journal of Morphology (1887)
Journal of Comparative Neurology and Zoology (1891)
Biological Bulletin (Woods Hole) (1899)
Journal of Experimental Zoology (1902)
Genetics (1916)
The scientific identities and contents of these societies and journals changed over the years as various strands of the "new biology" took hold among different groups. Rather than reflecting strictly bounded worlds, these associations and journals also overlapped considerably with those in medicine and agriculture. As Churchill (1981:188) has noted: "A tight parallel cannot be guaranteed. These institutions reflect the revolts and evolutionary developments of the past as well as the present: they may be the offspring of fads, crusades, or individual needs, but once raised to maturity and independence, they lead their own peculiar lives." Indeed, new biological research possibilities developed within a broad and diverse base of institutions that proved crucial for both diffusing the ideas of the "new biology" and supporting those doing biological work.
Medicine
Two intimately linked processes characterized American professional medicine at the turn of the twentieth century: the establishment of medical monopoly over health care and a shift to "scientific medicine." Here I briefly examine these processes in general medicine, then discuss their particular expression in obstetrics and gynecology as the sites of reproductive medicine.
The professionalization of American medicine in the early twentieth century focused on upgrading allopathic, or "regular," medical education toward the goal of creating what Abraham Flexner called "better and fewer doctors" (Larson 1977:163). Sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Flexner Report of 1910 recommended upgrading medical schools by expanding the scientific basis of medical training for practitioners. It urged developing full-time medical school faculty members and supporting laboratory-based medical research by that faculty and by outstanding students. Medical specialization would allow further medicalization of new bodily parts and processes.[17]
Institutionally, medical professional associations exploded at the turn of
the century. Most also had journals focused on clinical medical science.[18] Major professional medical associations are listed below:
American Medical Association (1847)
American Physiological Society (1887)
American Association of Anatomists (1888)
American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists (1901)
American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (1908)
American Society for Clinical Investigation (1909)
American Society for Experimental Pathology (1913)
Hospitals were also built and medical school expanded to encompass new research disciplines and laboratories. Major autonomous medical research institutions were founded, notably the Rockefeller Institute (1901) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School (1913).[19]
The shift to scientific medicine, then, represented a move from heroic therapeutics and individual case studies to experimental approaches to medical problems and, subsequently, to controlled clinical trials to assess safety and efficacy across multiple individuals.[20] In two particular areas, professional medicine had radically improved its services by the late nineteenth century: bacteriology and immunology had enhanced the control of communicable diseases, while the practice of anesthesia and asepsis had tremendously improved surgical success rates. Anesthesia was initially used around 1846, and asepsis had become largely routine by ca. 1890.[21]
From both within and outside medicine, then, a strong rhetoric developed in support of scientific medicine. The Flexner Report of 1910 called for the reform of medical education, and the foundations, especially the Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies, played a major role in promoting and supporting these reforms.[22] The shift to scientific medicine "provided a socially legitimate means of limiting access to the medical profession and regulating competition from poorly trained physicians and medical sects" (Kohler 1979).
During the early decades of this century, a further differentiation began between medicine as clinical practice and as medical science or academic medicine. This generated a "two-track" medical education system based on Flexner's push for full-time medical faculty who both taught and undertook original research.[23] The Rockefeller Institute, for example, had been founded on the principle of linking the delivery of care to the ill with basic and clinical research in a single institutional setting. As Florence Sabin (1934:273) put it, there the patient was "a real part of the material of the research." In a variety of ways, basic medical science during this period was biology in medically sponsored niches. This activity has become known as
academic medicine practiced by medical scientists. In fact, George Corner, with whom I began this book, called himself not a doctor or a physician but a medical scientist—a status that scarcely existed in the United States when he was a medical student.[24]
Over the past decade or so there has been considerable debate about the actual scientific bases of "scientific medicine."[25] Regardless, medicine used pro-science rhetoric in the early twentieth century much like the American Medical Association had used antiabortion rhetoric inthe second half of the nineteenth century (Mohr 1978)—to gain legitimacy and cultural authority. It was a most successful strategy.
Medical efforts to gain jurisdictional monopoly over the reproductive realm during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were extensive, as an array of alternative providers, especially lay midwives, needed to be displaced to achieve such a monopoly.[26] But the reproductive realm offered sufficient new possibilities for medical research and practice to make the effort worthwhile. The specialty of gynecology was formally organized into the prestigious American Gynecological Society in 1876; the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists formed in 1888; and a combined AMA Section on Obstetrics and Gynecology was established in 1911.[27] Gynecologic practice of the early 1880s had been limited largely to the speculum. In the 1890s, anesthesia and asepsis led to the "opening of the abdomen," and "gynecology rapidly became a surgical specialty. So rapid was the development that there were fears that gynecology would disappear as a separate field and be merged into general surgery; it was claimed in 1905 that 'the specialty is so well advanced that there is not very much more progress to be made in it'" (Stevens 1971:79, 201).
Thus by the turn of the twentieth century, reproductive anatomy and surgery formed the core of gynecologic theory and practice.[28] Then, between ca. 1890 and 1940, obstetrics and gynecology medicalized childbirth, pregnancy, menopause, and (to a lesser extent) menstruation, rendering them as disease processes and thus the legitimate territory of specialist physicians (Oakley 1984; Wertz and Wertz 1977). This medicalization initially centered on hospitalizing childbirth, at the same moment when hospitals were expanding (Starr 1982). The development of the teaching hospital during and after World War I furthered these processes, as did the introduction of anesthesia for labor. Over the next half century, lay midwives as pregnancy and childbirth care providers were eliminated in the United States.[29]
During the 1920s, one key concern of newly enfranchised women of the feminist movement centered on maternal health, and they pushed for the provision of federally funded health care for women and children. The Sheppard Towner Act briefly provided "well baby" care. While opposed by the AMA and terminated in 1929, this act simultaneously raised women's
reproductive health issues in a major public forum and enhanced the specialty status of gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics.[30] Asepsis in childbirth remained highly problematic until well into the 1930s. While infant mortality rates had been reduced, in 1930 the United States ranked twenty-fifth in the world in maternal mortality rates, behind even Uruguay. This led to major medical organizing efforts around maternal health issues in the 1930s, including a White House conference in 1933, at the same time that reproductive research was coalescing. Medical interest in maternal health, initially relatively slow to develop, reflected the broader effort to expand medical jurisdictions and reproductive specialties. A number of physicianled organizations emerged to address these issues including, in 1923, the National Committee on Maternal Health, which sought to enhance medical control over maternal health generally and over contraception particularly.[31]
During the 1930s, obstetrics and gynecology merged more thoroughly, fusing women's reproductive health care under one specialty and further segmenting that specialty from both general practice and general surgery. The establishment of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1930 consolidated the medical monopoly over female reproductive health, instituting needed reforms but also instituting medical care based on medical intervention in nonpathological processes.[32] In the United States in 1923, there were 696 full-time obstetrics/gynecology specialists; by 1949 there were 5,074 (Stevens 1971:162).
The shift to scientific medicine in gynecology and obstetrics was largely from surgical anatomy to reproductive physiology. It involved the development of functional (physiological) understandings of reproductive systems and processes to increase potential nonsurgical therapeutics.[33] Ironically, these alternatives were developed largely by anatomists and physiologists (Long 1987).
Medical reformers wanted science to reign in all segments of the profession (Sabin 1934). One of the major reformers in obstetrics and gynecology was J. Whitridge Williams, head of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's Department of Obstetrics, who started campaigning for more anatomical and pathological studies of the female generative tract in the 1890s.[34] In his 1914 presidential address to the American Gynecological Society, Williams delivered a "scathing reproach" to his colleagues because, in reviewing articles in the society's Transactions , he had failed to find a single "fundamental" contribution to obstetrics. There was "an entire absence of reference to the biochemical aspects of pregnancy," while obstetricians and gynecologists placed "technical virtuosity"—largely in surgery—above serious attempts "to extend the limits of knowledge."[35] Williams's students, among others, remained less than enthusiastic about basic research on both educational and economic grounds; they were ill prepared for it, and it did not
pay well.[36] In 1925, Williams lamented that in obstetrics and gynecology, most American medical schools remained a half century behind those in Germany (Longo 1980:223).
The call to research on reproduction was amplified by Williams's colleague at Johns Hopkins, Franklin Paine Mall, head of the anatomy department. In 1913, Mall offered his student George W. Corner an assistantship for teaching and research in anatomy at the same time that Corner was offered a prestigious internship in gynecology under Howard Kelly at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. To convince Corner to come to the anatmony department, Mall argued for a "sounder scientific base in the clinical branches of medicine," telling Corner that he could "do more for the future of gynecology by basic research on embryology and the physiology of the reproductive system than I could if I merely followed ... the static program of the distinguished gynecologists." Corner became a convert.[37] One year later, after his initial anatomic research, Corner (1958a:30) recalled:
I had a much better idea of the normal female reproductive cycle and the concomitant changes in the ovaries and cervix than did the average intern; indeed I may say that I knew more about the physiology of the reproductive organs than did the chiefs of the service, Howard Kelly and Thomas S. Cullen, world renown leaders as they were in pelvic surgery and pathology. Gynecologists' ... efforts to treat the functional disorders of menstruation and sterility were mere puttering, scarcely advanced beyond the procedures of the Hippocratic era. How could we hope for anything better when we simply did not understand the human cycle?
While developments in surgery had allowed obsteric and gynecologic interventions of form, the new reproductive physiology would allow medical interventions of function—a new medical specialty territory far more ambitious than "mere puttering." Anatomists and physiologists, largely but not always located in medical schools, were the medical reproductive research pioneers (Long 1987). The years from 1920 to 1945 saw the gradual diffusion and acceptance of improved gynecologic and obstetric training (Longo 1980:223; 1981). By the 1930s, clinicians increasingly demanded reproductive physiological research results (e.g., Ehrenfest 1937) and were especially interested in organotherapeutic agents based on reproductive endocrinological research. By this time scientific medicine was also more clearly segmented into basic and clinical lines of research around reproduction.[38] Considerable clinical payoff would derive from basic reproductive research in medicine—on women.
In sharp contrast, however, if we attempt to "chercher l'homme" in early twentieth century medicine, we come up empty-handed. Moscucci's (1990) history of British gynecology accounts for the absence of a male reproductive specialty as reflecting, first, the thorough articulation of a distinctive
and medically problematic "female nature" and embodiment culturally available to practitioners by the eighteenth century. No parallel framing of a medicalizable male then existed. Second, she argues that radical intervention in women's bodies was already common practice, from childbirth to "unsexing" via ovariotomies for cysts. In contrast, tampering with men's bodies was less radical: testicles were not removed for hydrocele but were palliatively drained (Moscucci 1990:134). The term andrology as the parallel to gynecology was used as early as 1891 in reference to a Section of Andrology of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons but it quickly disappeared (Niemi 1987:201). Male penile and related reproductive problems long fell within the jurisdiction of urology. Not until 1975 was the American Association for Andrology founded, with its Journal of Andrology beginning in 1980. In many sites, however, urology remains the male reproductive medical specialty.
Agriculture
Anticipating that readers may be unfamiliar with the history of agriculture, I provide here a general orientation, paying specific attention to animal agricultural research. By the end of the nineteenth century, economic conditions were becoming favorable for research, leading to increased food production for growing urban, industrial populations (Rossiter 1979). The fundamental goal was to improve farm and ranch production so that fewer workers could supply food to workers in other sectors of the economy (Busch and Lacey 1983). The processes of rationalization, industrialization, and professionalization characteristic of turn-of-the-century biology and medicine also began to affect agriculture, as did the creation of monopolies. Throughout this era, but especially after World War I, American farming was transformed from a subsistence to a commercial enterprise, firmly focused on increasing production (Fitzgerald in progress). Marcus (1988) asserts that there was a shift from a belief that "good character" built good farms to a belief that special knowledge about agriculture needed to be produced, transmitted, and systematically applied. The very organization of agriculture changed from a relatively homogeneous occupational group to one stratified by region, by farm size, and especially by product.
In medicine and agriculture, both applied fields, science provided a rhetorically "neutral" basis for the elimination of certain practitioners as these fields modernized and professionalized. The fields were left to those who would apply the fruits of science in their ever more specialized work. In medicine, institutional forces squeezed out "irregular" or alternative practitioners, including midwives and homeopaths, while in agriculture, smaller, poorer, less mechanized farmers succumbed to competition and market forces (then as now).[39] Large-scale farmers who specialized around
specific commodities such as dairy products or corn also most actively promoted and accepted the contributions of agricultural sciences. These sciences in turn accepted such farmers as sponsors, audiences, and consumers—ready markets for their research (Busch and Lacey 1983:26–27; Rosenberg 1976). The advantages of specialization are vividly captured in the following excerpt from a homegrown poem read to the North Dakota State Dairymen's Association in 1910 (Danbom 1989:175):
PULLIN' TITTS
Ay ban a yust gude farmer,
For more an saxteen year;
Av raise some wheat and corn
An ay fat some hog and steer.
An ay watch dat farmer business close,
for whare de money gits,
An ay find it comin' quickest
Van you ban pullin' titts.
Though fraught with problems and conflicts, professionalization and institutionalization began early in American agriculture. Agricultural research in the United States started largely at the initiative of American chemists trained in Germany. They had direct experience with German agricultural experiment stations and understood the benefits of institution building in their own fields. They committed themselves to both agricultural colleges and experiment stations as research sites.[40] In 1862, Congress formed the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA); in 1875, Connecticut established the first state agricultural experiment station, and others soon followed (Rosenberg 1976:148).[41] In 1884, the Bureau of Animal Industry was founded, focusing initially on control of contagious diseases (Wiser 1987). And in 1887, through the Hatch Act, the federal government provided each state with $15,000 per year for support of an agricultural experiment station, thus entering into the research business. This act changed the USDA from a centralized agency into a network of semiautonomous research institutions with nodes in every state.[42] The establishment of federally funded, local and state agricultural extension agents in 1914 added a further layer of middlemen to these arrangements. Federal funding for agricultural research quadrupled during the 1880–1920 period (Rossiter 1979; True 1937), though it was cut during the Great Depression era (1933–40) (Pursell 1968).[43] The ability of agricultural scientists and their "imperious" large-scale farmer constituencies to gain federal support for their research represents a highly successful early example of the socialization of the costs of research to improve production; similar efforts in other emerging professional fields did not fare as well.[44] Agricultural chemistry was a major focus of work at the agricultural experiment
stations during the late nineteenth century—especially fertilizer and soils analysis in response to widespread instances of fertilizer fraud.[45]
Chronic tensions in the American agricultural research world around the turn of the century resulted from competing demands—from the practical needs of producers and breeders, to the organizational demands of the agricultural colleges and experiment stations, to the scientific and professional expectations of emergent disciplinary groups, to scientists' own research and career goals and needs.[46] Specialization entered agriculture and agricultural sciences early. Rossiter (1979:212) calls this "force-fed" specialization, achieved through the combined activities of agriculture, science, and government. It was commodity-oriented or commodity-specific research. A fundamental bifurcation thereby occurred along plant-versus-animal lines, with further divisions by type of crop or animal as the specialty areas. The predilections of scientists, along with pressures from specialized client/producers (e.g., corn growers, cattle ranchers, chicken farmers) and their specialty associations, all contributed to these segmentations (Busch and Lacey 1983:27–28).
Animal agricultural science (hereafter animal science) was then unsur-prisingly organized by type of animal (swine, poultry, sheep, beef and dairy cattle), with researchers typically specializing in only one.[47] Subdivisions within the Bureau of Animal Industry, whose primary research facilities were established in Beltsville, Maryland, around 1910, also reflected these segmentations (Byerly 1986).
Below is a list of major American organizations and the associated journals in both general agricultural research and animal agriculture.[48]
United States Department of Agriculture (1862); Journal of Agricultural Science (1905)
American Veterinary Medical Association (1863)
Society for Promotion of Agricultural Science (1880)
Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (1880)
Bureau of Animal Industry of the USDA (1884)
American Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations (1887)
Association and Experiment Station Veterinarians (1897)
American Breeders' Association (1903–13); American Breeders' Magazine (1910–13)
National Association of Dairy Instructors and Investigators (1906), later American Dairy Science Association (1917); Journal of Dairy Science (1917)
International Association of Instructors and Investigators in Poultry Husbandry (1908), later American Poultry Science Association; Poultry Science (1921)
American Society of Animal Nutrition (1908–12), later American Society of Animal Production (1912); Journal of Animal Science (1942)
American Genetics Association (1913); Journal of Heredity (1913) Genetics (1916)
Agricultural Committee, National Research Council (Division of Biology and Agriculture) (1917)
Section on Genetics, American Society of Zoologists (1921–31)
Genetics Society of America (1931)
American Breeders' Service (artificial insemination) (1941)
Society for the Study of Reproduction (1967); Biology of Reproduction (1968)
Compared with biology and medicine, animal science generally lagged behind in developing agriculturally based "new biological" research. That is, the "new biology" was imported into agriculture rather than being "homegrown" (Rosenberg 1967). Cravens (1978:20–21) notes that experimental approaches in biology developed far more rapidly in private graduate universities than in public or land-grant universities largely because the private institutions did not have to curry favor with special interest groups, including agriculturalists seeking immediate results. Private universities also had stronger financial support. But, "The state universities and land grant colleges provided full time appointments for the graduates of the private doctoral programs and enrolled far more undergraduate students. ... [S]ome of the state universities soon rivaled the private universities for prestige" (Rosenberg 1967:38–40). In the decade before World War I, rapid expansion and the lack of trained personnel led to frequent faculty vacancies in agricultural colleges (Rossiter 1986:44). Thus although American animal agriculture professionalized earlier, it initiated experimental research later than biology or medicine, especially in the area of reproduction. This was in sharp contrast to the situation in Great Britain, where agriculturally based scientists pioneered in reproductive physiology and endocrinology during the decades before World War I (e.g., Hogben 1974). There it was much more scientifically legitimate and prestigious to do research in agriculture—on both applied and basic topics—because the nobility and the landed gentry had long been involved in agricultural research and innovation (e.g., Borell 1985; Medvei 1982). As we shall see in chapter 3, there lay the origins of modern reproductive sciences, to be elaborated subsequently by Americans.
Animal science in the United States focused on three lines of research work during the turn-of-the-century era: disease, nutrition, and breeding. Bacteriologists and veterinarians undertook disease research, including work on tuberculosis (Rosencrantz 1985), hog cholera (Stalheim 1988), and other specific economically harmful conditions, and remained clus-
tered around the USDA (Rossiter 1979:230–33). The American Society of Animal Nutrition encouraged research and attempted to standardize methods and share information (e.g., Benedict 1910; Aronson 1979, 1982; Marcus 1988). Despite changing its name to the American Society of Animal Production in 1912, "its goals and the content of its meetings remained stagnant and the field became a scientific backwater" (Rossiter 1979:229).
Animal nutrition and husbandry, the predecessors of animal science, then splintered and regrouped in almost contradictory ways. On the one hand, what had been "animal nutrition" (the study of foodstuffs and animal metabolism) was absorbed shortly after 1900 into the more medically oriented science of biochemistry. But it was then conducted with laboratory animals and in university and medical school settings (Rossiter 1979:228). Such studies were also integral to zoological anatomy and physiology (e.g., Evans 1939). On the other hand, the two very clearly applied fields of poultry husbandry and dairy husbandry began to flourish. These gave rise to a cluster of subsciences focused on egg and milk production and were organized ambitiously at agricultural experiment stations and colleges (Rossiter 1979:228; Bugos 1992; Cooke 1997).
This segmentation left the rest of animal husbandry (focused largely on beef cattle, sheep, and swine) to nonscientifically trained husbandmen who worked on improved breeding practices through record keeping (Rossiter 1979:228). Husbandmen (and they were men) more commonly were employed at agricultural experiment stations than zoologists or biologists.[49] In 1903, academic scientists joined with practical breeders to form the American Breeders' Association, which ultimately was taken over by eugenicists and transformed itself into the American Genetic Association in 1913, losing considerable scientific support and membership (Kimmelman 1983; Rossiter 1979). Breeding the best to the best was long the focus of breeding efforts, with a strong emphasis (promoted by the USDA and widespread eugenic thinking) on purebred stock. Mendelian genetics began to be applied after ca. 1920, based largely on Sewall Wright's (1921, 1922) work with guinea pigs and Jay Lush's elaboration of this work for agriculture.[50] The value of the "unseen carriers of heredity" was considered by some breeders ca. 1910 to be "far above that of gold" (Sapp 1983:318). At this point, reproduction per se was not problematized beyond assessing fertility. Rather, focus was on deciding which animals should reproduce and controlling who could reproduce with whom. For example, discovery of the high heritability of feedlot weight gain in cattle made the use of large bulls important in beef production (Byerly 1986:75).
The focus of animal agriculture is on improved animal production. This involves the industrialization of domestic animal reproduction, which re-
quires diverse activities, including, according to the Bureau of Animal Industry, breeding, nutrition, improved means of handling and transportation, prevention of cruelty, improved means of utilizing animal products, promotion of export trade in both animals and products, disease prevention and treatment, promotion of veterinary education, and collection of statistical and economic data. The bureau also sponsored boys' pig clubs and girls' canning and poultry clubs, encouraging the division of animal farm labor on the basis of gender.[51]
Gradually during the 1910–40 era, but mostly after 1925, animal science began to include reproductive research and its applications in breeding livestock. A host of reproductive problems were addressed, including the fertility cycle, pregnancy diagnosis, the role of nutrition in fertility, spermatogenesis, fertilization, and problems of infertility. This knowledge quickly was applied toward the development of artificial insemination and other reproductive technologies that could improve both quality and quantity of breeding and production. There were early attempts at sex preselection and studies of the heritability of twinning, both of which are desirable in cattle production.[52] There was also a shift from "all-purpose" cows to cows bred specifically for beef or dairy production, offering "mouth-watering heaviness or full-uddered promise" (Kimmelman 1987:250) to serve national interests andto enhance exports, especially of cheese. But it is important to remember that in animal agriculture, routine practice was and remains the prompt culling for meat of specific animals performing inadequately at dairying or studding. Thus while improvements in breeding and reproduction were highly desirable, they also needed to be highly and immediately cost-effective.
The first book-length treatment of reproduction including domestic animals published in the United States was Patterns of Mammalian Reproduction (1946) by S. A. Asdell, professor of animal physiology at the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell. Works fully focused on reproduction in domestic animals came somewhat later in the United States (e.g., Nalbandov 1958; Cole and Cupps 1959) than their British counterparts (e.g., Hammond 1925, 1927). A. V. Nalbandov, a reproductive scientist trained in agricultural institutions in the 1930s, has argued that in the American context, the potential for "direct practical applications" of reproductive research in human contraception and in artificial insemination and pregnancy for domestic animals provided considerable impetus for the reproductive research effort.[53] Increased federal funding of agricultural research led to improved production at this time, which gradually included reproductive science (Busch and Lacey 1983; Rossiter 1979).
In conclusion, it is important to emphasize that the boundaries between basic and applied research were blurred within agricultural sciences,
as well as among agricultural, biological, and medical research. Rossiter (1979:240) notes that "applied" is not an accurate description of agricultural research at this time, since agricultural scientists "dealt with practical problems that arose in certain economic contexts, but they were not really 'applying well-established theoretical principles to practical problems.'" Kimmelman (1983:174) echoes Rossiter's analysis, arguing that agricultural scientists' understanding of practical applications encouraged early acceptance of scientific theories such as Mendelism and scientific methods such as biometry. In sum, animal agriculture created considerable legitimacy for the emergence of reproductive research because breeding more and better food animals was a clearly articulated and essentially noncontroversial national goal. In return, as one agricultural researcher said, the "scientist is a better Santa Claus for the farmer than the politician" (Finlay 1990:45).
The "New Biology"
Rationalizing and industrializing processes also affected approaches to scientific work. At the turn of the century, boundaries between various specialties within the life sciences were so blurred as to seem almost invisible. The intensive specialization or rationalization characteristic of modern knowledge in industrialized societies was just beginning (e.g., Oleson and Voss 1979). This specialization involved segmentation, intersection, and realignment of lines of scientific work and of approaches taken in that work. These processes were manifested in overlapping shifts of emphasis that can be summarized as follows:
from naturalist field and laboratory observational approaches to experimentation as the common modus operandi of research work;
from research design based on case and field studies to controlled and quantitative experimentation;
from morphological to physiological approaches (from problems of form to those of function);
from comparative morphological dissection with gross anatomy and histological analysis to physiological experiments with cytological and biochemical analyses;
from an organism- or species-based problem structure to an analytic, problem-based problem structure.
These shifts thus involved realignments of both substantive foci and analytic approaches in multiple lines of research work in biological, medical, and agricultural sciences, though the specifics varied from one science to
another. All of these shifts were vital to the construction of an ambitious reproductive research enterprise over the next decades.
One of the most interesting phenomena of early-twentieth-century life sciences is that the highly permeable boundaries among these sciences allowed researchers to move through a variety of problem areas, adopting and adapting various approaches for use in their own work. There were no institutional gatekeepers delineating boundaries. Scientists' moves were thus not necessarily viewed as interdisciplinary.[54] As Whitman, a key articulator of the "new biology," noted: "It is hardly necessary to point out that science has long since ceased to respect territorial stakes as a means of defining its sphere of activity. On a territory no larger than a bacterium a dozen sciences may work in perfect harmony and find no occasion for envying or claiming one another's work. Chemistry is not Botany when it looks at a plant, or Zoology when it enters the animal domain."[55] Researchers constructed the "new biology" out of this flux.
Physiology has its origins in mid-nineteenth-century medicine, especially in the French laboratory of Claude Bernard (1865/1957; Lesch 1984). By the mid-nineteenth century, European physiologists had won their independence from medical anatomy, largely through adoption of an experimental approach to the study of vital processes (Geison 1979:67; Coleman 1985). Physiology developed very slowly in Britain and the United States, and research physiologists "remained essentially parasitic on the larger medical enterprise from which they had emerged" (Geison 1979:68; 1978). However, their experimental approaches were adopted and adapted broadly by other lines of work in late-nineteenth-century life sciences (e.g., Geison 1987; Fye 1987). As Coleman (1971:162) has summarized: "Function displaced form as the goal of biological inquiry. ... Ideals long the valued possessions of physiology—precise, meaning quantitative, delineation of organic phenomena; experimental control over those phenomena; aspirations toward prediction of those phenomena—were extended to most and perhaps all domains of biology."
How these broad shifts in research approaches occurred has been debated; specifically, was there a "revolutionary change" in the ways scientists worked? Never a unilinear set of changes, these clear shifts of emphasis did not exclude other approaches.[56] Farber (1982b:152), for example, objects to the notion of a shift from natural history to physiology; since the roots of physiology lay more in medicine and chemistry, they should be viewed as "parallel traditions," which, at the turn of this century, "partly were hybridized, partly were transformed independently, and partly were synthesized."
The parade toward the "new biology" was led by developmental mechanical (Entwicklungsmechaniker ) approaches applied in the embryological work of Roux and Dreich in Europe. These ideas and experimental physiological
approaches quickly were imported into the United States, becoming the focus of considerable work at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and elsewhere. It is important to the development of the American reproductive sciences that embryology was the locus of initial physiological work in biology in both Europe and the United States as it was embryologists who pioneered in the physiology of reproduction in the United States.[57]
The shift within biology from morphological to physiological approaches was accompanied by another shift from histological (tissue-level) to cytological (cellular-level) frameworks. A later shift introduced cell biological (biochemical) and, beginning in the 1930s, molecular biological approaches. If the first set of shifts was from problems of biological form to those of function, the second set concerned levels of action of function—examination of changes in the structure of tissues, cells, and cellular contents. Beginning in the late 1890s, a large number of American biologists, already trained in the techniques of cytology and embryology, began to move into new and transparently applicable domains as they sought to expand their constituencies. Their first area of interest was heredity and breeding, which by 1915 they transformed into the field of genetics.[58]
Almost in tandem with physiology, by the late nineteenth century biochemistry was ascendant. As physiological approaches were integrated into biology and medicine in the United States, biochemical approaches were also, if slightly later. Biochemistry became established in both biology and medicine at this time, and physiological approaches increasingly included biochemistry far more than they had previously.[59] There appear to have been two converging lines of work drawing biology and physiology toward biochemical approaches. One line, developed particularly in Britain, was the study of internal secretions (later termed hormones and endocrinology ). The eminent British endocrinologist Sir Edward Sharpey-Shafer used the phrase "the new physiology" to emphasize the tremendous significance of internal secretions, which rapidly changed the perception of the central problems of physiology (Borell 1978:282). The fundamental shift was from seeing the nervous system as the primary regulator of bodily processes to seeing blood-borne chemicals as sharing such bodily roles (Borell 1976a,b,c). The second line of work consisted of chemical studies of the function of the living cell and its contents. The leading advocate of cellular biochemical and biophysical approaches in the United States at the turn of the century was Jacques Loeb, who sought to fully explain vital processes solely through chemistry and physics (Pauly 1987). Fundamental tensions then emerged in both biology and medicine between those who shared Loeb's mechanist reductionism and advocates of what were called broader "biological" explanations of phenomena. These tensions were rehearsed in the reproductive sciences as well.
Institutional Sites: Universities And Laboratories
Perhaps the most notable feature of the early industrialization of knowledge production was that universities became the primary loci of basic research.[60] Prior to the late nineteenth century, scientific research was minimal and was done largely on an ad hoc basis by amateurs and some quasi professionals, with minimal fiscal support. The newness of research within university settings was captured vividly in a report of the Ogden Graduate School of Science to the president of the University of Chicago in 1902: "The idea that investigative work is one of the great functions of a university is one which has but recently come to due recognition in America; but it has been widely adopted during the last decade, and promises to be a controlling factor in the future development of universities."[61] This was the beginning of what has been called the "American century," and research, especially in universities but also in institutes and industry, was to be its heart.
Intellectual history is rife with studies relating the emergence of American graduate education in science to German and other models of education and inquiry.[62] The combination of more effective laboratory techniques and broad claims that science could improve the human condition set powerful economic and intellectual efforts toward empirical inquiry in motion. A research boom occurred by the turn of the century, accompanied by what Vesey (1965:264–66) called "the academic boom of the early nineties." Clark, Stanford, and the University of Chicago all opened between 1889 and 1892. With Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, these universities reflected the full-scale entry of industrialists and mercantilists into the business of education, as all were funded by individual wealth (DeVane 1965). Broader philanthropic support grew steadily: in 1920, the total endowment of higher education was about $570 million; by 1940, it was nearly $2 billion (DeVane 1965:75). Business and industry were routinely investing in higher education to support their own research needs.
Undergraduate and graduate education became increasingly desirable for the upwardly mobile middle classes (Coben 1979:230). There was growing demand for professional training for an expanding number of occupations (Beer and Lewis 1974). University enrollment in the United States was about 22,500in 1860, about 100,000in 1900, and about 489,500 in 1930.[63] Enrollments in graduate schools also increased dramatically. In 1861, only 3 Ph.D.'s were granted; by 1920, this number grew to 615; in 1934, seventy-four institutions granted 2,024 Ph.D.'s; and in 1940, a total of 3,290 Ph.D.'s were granted.[64] This upsurge in enrollments, especially in the sciences at the graduate level, occurred in part as a response to increased opportunities for professional scientists and highly trained scien-
tific technologists in industrial research and development laboratories (Birr 1979; Coben 1979:229), as well as in applied areas such as agriculture (Rossiter 1986).
The shared, if tacit, model of organization to which university administrators turned during this growth era was that of American business. Many universities rapidly acquired a highly bureaucratic form, with departments headed by chairmen, schools headed by deans, carefully ranked faculty, and so on.[65] Powerful, nonfaculty administrations came to resemble the upper levels of corporate management, and were deeply concerned with educational markets (Vesey 1965:305–6).
The development of laboratories was crucial in the industrialization of basic science research and its location in universities. Universities as institutions gained a monopoly on basic research production by providing these physical plants—the requisite infrastructure for the production of modern scientific research. Organizationally, laboratories provide centralized, organized, and rationalized access to the research instruments and materials necessary to the production of scientific knowledge (Borell 1989). For example, Latour (1983) called a key article on Pasteur's work in nineteenth-century France "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World," signaling the requisite infrastructure for global transformation. Similar sentiments were articulated routinely by scientists at the turn of the century. Universities thus became "factories" for the production of knowledge based on scientific research.[66] At the same time, applied research and product development were taken up in a wide variety of academic and industrial laboratories and agricultural settings.[67] Research itself was increasingly rationalized on the basis of market-oriented principles. Sources of research support shifted dramatically from the individual/private means of scientists themselves to collective/public means or foundations more closely tied to specific extrascientific goals. But financial arrangements typically remained ad hoc for many years.[68]
The industrialization of research brought about new institutional forms, new divisions of labor, and new careers in science. While industrialization usually has connoted the proletarianization of a labor force, in the sciences we see both professionalization at the upper end of the hierarchy and the emergence of new classes of workers (graduate student-researchers and technicians) lower in the hierarchy. Such a division of scientific labor occurred in both academic and nonacademic scientific research settings. The majority of technicians' work focused initially on organizing and maintaining instruments, equipment, and materials used in the research. All these, and especially in vivo materials, required extensive and increasingly specialized labor for their maintenance as new standards for research were elaborated.[69]
As scientists began to raise funds for research on their own behalf and
began to build their own institutions, they needed to articulate that work and its value to wider, less technical, audiences. This led to the emergence of "scientific entrepreneurs," scientists who promoted their own research groups both on their own campuses and in appeals to external funding sources (Rosenberg 1976: Rossiter 1979). Many of these individuals became key figures in establishing, shaping, and maintaining the extra-academic science institutions that proliferated at the turn of the century, from marine biological stations to the National Research Council. Research groups represented by particular entrepreneurs were often transformed by sponsoring organizations into "centers" of research—clearly demarcated funding entities with the entrepreneurs as recognized leaders. The Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, primary funding sources for research in the life sciences at this time, strongly promoted the development of such scientific entrepreneurs and such a "team" or "center" approach, in the reproductive sciences as elsewhere.[70]
Physiological and biochemical approaches brought racical changes to local and national research laboratories. Physiological approaches led to a number of changes in the biomedical research infrastructure (Clarke 1987):
increased demand for in vivo and fresh materials;
increased demand for quantities of same species materials rather than single specimens of multiple species;
development of colonies for on-site access to desired research materials;
increased demand for elaborated scientific instruments;
development of biological supplies and equipment industries;
development of personnel—technicians of several varieties—to manage the labs.
It is in the laboratory itself that the industrialization of science is clearly manifest in the social and infrastructural organization of scientific practices (e.g., Clarke and Fujimura 1992).
Nationally, the newer approach to biomedical research was incorporated in the funding philosophies of the major foundations. Warren Weaver's description of his program in "vital processes" at the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s serves as an excellent summary: "Modern physiology is often concerned with cells, single nerve fibers, and tissues rather than with whole organs. The refined modern techniques are permitting a breaking up of impossibly complicated problems into simpler component parts."[71] Given this programmatic agenda, Weaver also explained: "To indicate inclusion rather than exclusion, we will interest ourselves particularly in work in genetics; in hormones, enzymes and vitamins; in cell physiology; in nerve physiology; in psychobiology; and in the whole range of problems specifically and fundamentally involved in the biology of reproduction."[72] Thus
the "new biology" had generated considerable institutional support by the 1930s.
Markets And Controversies
Two distinct yet related features of the reproductive sciences predated and shaped the era of their emergence. Qua science, reproductive research was both "late" and "improper." I argue here that certain countervailing and legitimating conditions, specifically explicit markets for reproductive research, were requisite before the field could emerge.
The "Lateness" and "Illegitimacy" of the Reproductive Sciences
Modern reproductive research emerged later than research on other major organ systems such as circulation or respiration. Endocrinologist and medical historian Medvei (1982:360) states that there had been little progress in reproductive anatomy, morphology, or physiology from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Alan Gregg of the Rockefeller Foundation noted of his Harvard Medical School days, "I remember in 1914 in our class on physiology that I asked Doctor Cannon why there was so little attention given to the physiology of reproduction."[73] The most common explanation for this later emergence is the social illegitimacy of the topic of reproduction. Other explanations stress the retarding effects of technical or conceptual problems within the reproductive sciences themselves.[74]
The "illegitimacy argument" suggests that reproduction, largely because of its association with sexuality, was not a proper subject to pursue in polite society and that scientists therefore avoided explicitly reproductive problems in their work. Judicial efforts to understand the social mechanisms of racial and sex discrimination in the United States have utilized a concept that effectively captures such interactive processes—the notion of "chilling effects." The illegitimacy of the reproductive sciences demonstrates that similar effects may be experienced by natural and social science researchers in their problem selection processes. "Inappropriate" selections may have negative consequences throughout an individual's career, such as loss of status, funding problems, ridicule, and ostracism. "Chilling effects" can also surround whole disciplines such as the reproductive sciences.
In 1928, Vernon Kellogg of the National Research Council explicitly connected the lateness of reproductive science to its illegitimacy: "Systematic scientific study of the fundamental problems of sex and reproduction has not kept pace with medical, education and social needs. This has been due in part to the social taboos which have surrounded the subject and in part to its complexity."[75] Further, many early scientists who did select reproductive problems felt they were placing themselves somehow "beyond the pale"
of propriety; others who were more peripherally associated with reproductive research projects feared censure even for that limited involvement.[76] The uproar caused by Alfred Kinsey's research in the 1950s demonstrates the persistent opprobrium adhering to sexual topics (Pomeroy 1982). That a career in the reproductive sciences is still subject to sexual comment and innuendo was brought home to me by the routine preemptive joking of contemporary reproductive scientists. For example, a bumper sticker on the office door of a researcher whom I interviewed read "Reproductive Physiologists Do It for a Living," and the softball team of one reproductive sciences lab is named the "Nads" so that their supporters shout "Go, Nads!" from the bleachers.
In contrast to these illegitimacy arguments, Asdell (1977:x) focuses on technical and scientific reasons to explain the lateness of reproductive research. For mammals, the nonexistence of eggs that could be seen without the aid of a microscope and the time gap between mating and the ability to recognize the products of conception in the uterus were obstacles that could be surmounted only by the invention of suitable visual aids and the formulation of the cell theory. Yet the cell theory was developed in the 1840s, and adequate improvements in microscopy had occurred by the 1870s (Coleman 1971). The point remains—much of the reproductive histology and cytology of the early twentieth century could have been done in the late nineteenth century. Asdell (1977:x) continues his technical argument by noting that the method of reproductive control by hormones was itself so late a discovery that the delay of reproductive research is not surprising on this account alone. However, there were earlier discoveries of the effects of blood-borne tissue extracts such as Berthold's work in the mid-nineteenth century, which he quickly abandoned (e.g., Medvei 1982) and, to our knowledge, no one else took up. Part of this issue (as described in detail in the following) was the social and intellectual sway of reigning neurological theories of the control of physiological processes. Moreover, many physiological, if not biochemical, aspects of reproduction could have been examined—yet they were not. The technical arguments may be necessary, but they are not sufficient to explain the "lateness" phenomenon.[77]
Another set of reasons for the "lateness" of reproductive research, I would argue, was the weakness of organized markets for that research. Specifically, at the turn of the century reproductive medicine was focused on, if not obsessed by, gynecologic and obstetric surgery, and was quite successful with it. For the nonce, problems of function and nonsurgical therapeutics were not "interesting" and could be comfortably ignored. Moreover, biologists, agricultural scientists, and animal breeders were focused on, if not preoccupied with, problems of heredity (and, for biologists, evolution as well). Until they clarified mechanisms of heredity, problems of reproduction were not viewed as pressing. In fact, what turned out to be some key
reproductive investigations, such as those of Frank Lillie, originally were conceived as explorations of problems of heredity through embryology. Further, Pauly (1984) argues that up to ca. 1900, biologists were busy entrenching their discipline in academia and only later sought to expand their constituencies by way of genetics. But reproduction was and remains significant to lay people, and a new set of markets for reproductive research soon emerged—the birth control, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian movements.
Birth Control, Eugenics, and Demography/Population Control Movements
In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt attacked birth control, arguing that the tendency toward smaller families was decadent, an indicator of moral disease, and a practice that would lead to (white) "race suicide" (Gordon 1976:136). The weight and publicity given to Roosevelt's views immediately made birth control a matter of national public controversy. At least reproduction was "our of the closet" of social impropriety—a matter of public discussion and debate. While Roosevelt's comments were particularly remarkable because he was president, British and American birth control, neo-Malthusian, and eugenics advocates were also becoming increasingly organized and vocal on reproductive issues during the early years of the century (Gordon 1976; Reed 1984–85). In addition, strong moral reform movements focused on vice, venereal diseases, and alcoholism also raised sexual issues in social discourse (e.g., Bullough 1994).
All of these activities, but especially the birth control, neo-Malthusian, and eugenics movements, challenged the view of reproduction as an improper social and scientific topic by introducing a more public forum on human reproductive issues. Moreover, the social stature of many of the advocates—elite groups of scientists, physicians, and the educated middle classes from other professions—further legitimated reproductive topics, eventually including the reproductive sciences. As we shall see, by 1963, birth control advocates, neo-Malthusians, and eugenicists established a quid pro quo with each other and with reproductive scientists under the banner of "family planning and population control." But earlier in the century they helped pave the way for reproductive research with their own distinctive and often conflicting activities. Because each of these movements is an actor in this story of the reproductive sciences and the broader reproductive policy arena, I introduce them here.
Birth Control Movements . Briefly, birth control advocacy was spearheaded by neo-Malthusians at the turn of the century as one solution to problems of overpopulation, though this movement was much stronger in Great Britain than in the United States (Ledbetter 1976). Contraception was even called "neo-Malthusianism" (Sanger 1971:108). The initially separate American
feminist lay birth control movements of the first half of this century were in part a response to the difficulties and dangers of abortion, which, though illegal, was a common form of "birth control" in the absence of contraception. After 1915, feminist efforts generated a nationally organized movement composed of many local and a few national organizations. During the years 1915–18, birth control as a topic regularly captured a level of national attention not again achieved until the 1930s due to Margaret Sanger's and others' imprisonments, hunger strikes, clinic raids, and political and religious organizational responses (Chesler 1992:130). Between 1915 and 1920, Margaret Sanger transformed herself from a radical socialist feminist to a liberal humanist advocate of contraception as a woman's right and became the major leader of this movement. Her organization, the American Birth Control League, was founded in 1921. Subsequently birth control became an increasingly liberal and centralized cause (Gordon 1976: Reed 1983; Chesler 1992).
During the 1920s, lay birth control advocates were joined by a medically led birth control movement under the aegis of the National Committee for Maternal Health. Their specific goal was medical control over contraceptive practices, and members eventually included many reproductive scientists (Reed 1983). Many of the arguments put forward by such individuals and groups in both lay and medical movements were essentially economic—calls for reductions in the numbers and improvements in the "quality" of lower-class persons to reduce drains on government (there were significant pushes for socialized medicine, workers' compensation, and the like at this point) and to improve industrial production (e.g., Sanger 1920). Birth control was deemed a necessity of modern life.
Eugenics Movements. Defined by Sir Francis Galton in Britain in 1883, the "science" of eugenics transposes agricultural perspectives on the breeding of plants and animals to humans.[78] In extending stock improvement strategies to the highest reaches of the "Great Chain of Being," Galton stated: "We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all the influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had" (Bajema 1976:76). It was not until 1906 that William Bateson supplied the name "genetics" (Gardner 1972:406), and most concerns about human breeding and heredity went under the name "eugenics" until at least that time (Ludmerer 1972).
While not explicitly eugenic, research on reproduction fell within the domain of the scientific concerns of eugenicists because it was conceptually contiguous. That is, it was in part through understanding and control-
ling reproduction that eugenic goals could be achieved. The "promise" of eugenic science lay in public policy arenas on social problems such as immigration, insanity, retardation, alcoholism, reproduction, and population. Here eugenic science offered biologically based solutions that could compete in policy arenas against the environmentalist or "nurturist" solutions offered by progressive and socialist reformers. The goal of "better people through better breeding" had existed within eugenics for some time before 1900. The movement allowed this sentiment to be mobilized, especially among natural scientists: "Most were interested in eugenics because it offered a 'scientific' solution compatible with the world view of the naturalistic mind" (Ludmerer, 1972:14). In both Great Britain and the United States, most leading scientists, including reproductive scientists, were members of the eugenics societies. In the United States, the officers and membership of the organizations read like a Who's Who of American science at the time, especially the biological and agricultural sciences.[79]
Within the eugenics framework, individuals were categorized as either aristogenic (having "good" genes) or cacogenic (having "bad" genes) based on criteria that varied among eugenicists.[80] Eugenic science offered two major directions for action based on these assessments. Positive eugenic programs called for more children from the "fit," or aristogenic, who essentially were so defined by their membership in a higher social class and the white/Caucasian "race." Negative eugenic programs focused on reducing the numbers of the "unfit," or cacogenic. At the turn of the century, such programs included the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" and limits on immigration to prevent more "unfit" people from entering the country (Haller, 1963). While scientific eugenics focused on hereditary traits (essentially genetic questions), popular eugenics often glossed over this fine point in its designations of who was "fit" or "unfit" to reproduce. There was much confusion and contention—both scientific and popular—about what kinds of traits could be inherited, an area of scientific debate that remains heated (e.g., Kevles 1985).
One of the most debated issues in the eugenics movement during the first decades of the twentieth century was whether birth control was potentially eugenic (e.g., McLaren 1978). Not all eugenicists favored contraception as a means of negative eugenic programming to limit the reproduction of the "unfit," although some, like the British Malthusian League, did (Ledbetter, 1976). Others, however, feared that contraception would also be used by "selfish" women of the "fit" category who should bear more, not fewer, children, and they opposed it on this principle (Gordon 1976). In both Britain and the United States, segments of the eugenics movement favored compulsory sterilization by the state and/or voluntary sterilization (e.g., Blacker 1961; Landman 1932). It was not until the 1920s that Ameri-
can eugenicists began to accept birth control as a potentially eugenic activity. Their acceptance was due in no small part to their having been seriously courted by leaders of the birth control movement, including Margaret Sanger.[81] It was at this juncture that research on reproduction moved to the center of eugenicists' scientific concerns. At the same time, birth control advocates, eugenicists, and public health activists concerned about issues of contraception and population became serious and organized audiences and consumers of the reproductive sciences. Ironically, as chapter 6 documents in detail, the majority of reproductive scientists eschewed most contraceptive research as inappropriate work until well after World War II.
Demography/Population Studies and Movements. Around the turn of the century, analyses of evolutionary, hereditary, and an array of socioeconomic issues began to lead to analyses of whole populations rather than individuals.[82] The eugenics movement was especially important in developments sited at the intersection of the social and natural sciences. Eugenic societies and organizations provided important professional scientific and interdisciplinary meeting grounds where population issues, including reproduction, were addressed. The neo-Malthusian movement was also central, given its claims about problems of overpopulation. Many of the quantitative and statistical methods developed by eugenicists such as Karl Pearson became integral to demography and population studies spawned by neo-Malthusians and population experts.[83] The ambitious institutional infrastructure the new field of population studies developed largely in academia and privately funded institutes. The key population events and institutions are documented by the following list.[84]
International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences (1900–25; six conferences)
[Kellogg] Race Betterment Foundation (1913)
Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems (1922)
National Research Council Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration (1922)
U.S. Immigration Restriction Act (1924)
World Population Conference (1927)
International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population (1927)
[Population] Research Division of the Milbank Memorial Fund (1928)
Population Reference Bureau, New York University (1930)
Population Association of America (1931)
Office of Population Research, Princeton University (1936)
International Planned Parenthood Federation (1948)
Population Council (1952)
Department of Demography and Human Ecology, and Center for Population Studies, Harvard School of Public Health (1962)
Population studies addressed a variety of reproductive issues, ranging from birth and death rates to maternal and infant mortality studies. Both implicitly and explicitly, many population researchers sought control over population growth through control over reproductive processes. Reproductive biology and medicine were viewed as major sources of such control. For example, at the organizing meeting of the Population Association for the United States, Dr. Henry Pratt Fairchild summed up its mission: "We are all convinced of the importance of having an association to consolidate the population interests of this country. ... [T]here is ... a lack of coordination in this field. ... [W]e are in a position to take up the phenomenon of population as one of the great factors of human welfare to be rationally manipulated, just as we manipulate the other factors in human relations."[85] By about 1940, family planning/population control research and advocacy became the banner for an amalgam of birth control, eugenics, neo-Malthusian, and population/demographic movements (Gordon 1976:391) in their long-term relations with reproductive scientists.
Summary
In the two decades after the turn of the century, the stage was set for segmentation of a new area of scientific specialization—the reproductive sciences. Personnel were trained, and institutional bases and laboratories were established in the three professional settings where the reproductive sciences would form—biology, medicine, and agriculture. Table 1 summarizes the changing situations in these professional worlds. The fantastic growth of graduate education and of both private and public universities provided support for the specialization inherent in the development of the reproductive sciences enterprise. Agricultural scientists apparently were less tarred by the brush of studying reproductive phenomena because manipulating food animals was widely accepted. The growing social movements of birth control, eugenics, and neo-Malthusianism served as emergent and organizing markets—audiences, sponsors, and consumers for reproductive science—for further biological and medical endeavors. Moreover, by raising reproductive topics as appropriate to open public forum, prestigious movement activists also countered the illegitimacy that had slowed the study of reproduction throughout the Great Chain of Being—including humans.
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