PART THREE
COALESCING THE ENTERPRISE

Chapter Five
Coalescing the Discipline
Endocrinological Approaches, 1925–40

Following a formative era focused on a physiological problem structure from about 1910 to 1925, the American reproductive sciences coalesced around reproductive endocrinological problems manifest in all three professional worlds—biology, medicine, and agriculture—from about 1925 to 1940. Whereas the period of disciplinary formation period was one of articulation of a set of problems for the reproductive sciences and the beginnings of careers in the field, the later period was one of deepening investments and consolidation as an enterprise of social worlds within a broader arena centered on reproduction. This is a saga of the coalescence of a scientific social world that the required both legitimacy and autonomy from other sciences and powerful funding sources to survive, much less flourish. Ultimately, during this period, global supremacy in the reproductive sciences shifted to the United States, indelibly marking their success.

I first describe the rise of reproductive endocrinology as model research and the "heroic age of reproductive endocrinology" (Marrian in Parkes 1966a:xx), including the major foci of the reproductive sciences between 1925 and 1940. One of the key factors shaping this era was the discovery of the production of reproductive hormones in the anterior pituitary gland. This became the site of the intersection of reproductive and general endocrinology. I next analyze this intersection as the core physiological and sociological juncture of the coalescence of the reproductive sciences around endocrinological problems. Ties to general endocrinology provided the reproductive sciences enterprise with scientific and social legitimacy and considerable cultural authority; endocrinology has continued to dominate the field.

One of the major landmarks in the history of the modern reproductive sciences in the United States was publication of Sex and Internal Secretions:

A Survey of Recent Research (Allen, ed., 1932). Both the book and most of the research on which it was based were sponsored by the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. After discussing the importance of this book and aspects of its reception, I review the disciplinary professionalization of the reproductive sciences in biology, medicine, and agriculture, including the establishment of societies and journals. Interactions across professional boundaries are noted and the mutual benefits of efforts in each professional area to the enterprise as a whole are evaluated. Yet tensions existed, and I also discuss schisms along organismic versus physicochemical lines. Last I delineate what the reproductive sciences did for biology, medicine, and agriculture, including the consequences for each professional field in terms of enhanced basic, clinical, and applied offerings. All five themes of this volume are evident in this chapter: the reproductive sciences as intersecting social worlds, disciplinary development, boundary crossings, gender issues, and the control of (human and nonhuman) life through disciplining reproduction.

The Heroic Age Of Reproductive Endocrinology

Guy Marrian called the years 1926–40 the "heroic age of reproductive endocrinology" (Parkes 1966a:xx), while Alan Parkes (1962b:72) described the period as an "endocrinological gold rush." During this period, the chief naturally occurring estrogens, androgens, and progesterone were isolated and characterized, and the hypophyseal (anterior pituitary), placental, and endometrial gonadotrophins were also discovered.^[1] Parkes (1966a:xx) has argued that we will never again see another such period in reproductive endocrinology. It was also a most competitive time, "a period of keen rivalry and of fierce competition for priority: and everyone concerned was guilty of publishing too much and too frequently" (Marrian 1967).

Table 3 provides an overview of the foci of the reproductive sciences from 1925 to 1940. Some problems from the formation era continued to be pursued, such as the estrus and menstrual cycles, fertilization, and sex differentiation, but with increased emphasis on endocrinological aspects rather than physiological processes. Newer topics included testicular function and artificial insemination, fertility and sterility, and the properties and biological activity of all of the sex hormones. Most important, the simple one-gland, one-hormone, two-sex segregated construction of the internal secretions of sex (with the testis producing the male hormone and the ovaries the female hormone) was disproved. A much more complex feedback theory, predicated on a diversity of hormones common to both males and females, took its place (see Price 1975). I will comment on only a limited number of the research areas listed in Figure 2, as others have recently

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framed the concepts and priorities of discovery (Greep and Koblinsky 1977; Gruhn and Kazer 1989).

First, table 3 demonstrates that not all the research done on reproductive topics was endocrinological in nature. For example, research on the menstrual cycle, begun prior to 1925 and continuing throughout the coalescence period, was only partially endocrinologic. Scientists continued to pursue what came to be called biological or physiological (as opposed to "purely" endocrinological) problems. Corner (1923, 1927, 1933), Hartman (1930, 1931, 1932a,b, 1933, 1936, 1939), Bartelmez (1933, 1937), Hertig and Rock (McLaughlin 1982), and others studied a variety of menstrual cycle questions.^[2] These more physiological researches led to sterility and infertility problems as a strong line of postwar research (American Foundation 1955 II:135–98) and became the basis upon which fertility control by hormonal contraception (the Pill) could later be built.^[3]

Second, in the scientific discourse on reproductive hormones that began this century, there was (and remains) a startling reification of "male" and "female" hormones. That is, despite consistent research findings that both types of hormones are characteristically found in both males and females, monolithic hormonal attribution by sex has been intentionally sustained, largely by simplification strategies (Star 1983). Specifically, beginning during this period, the estrogenic hormones were constructed as "female," while the androgenic were "male."

Part of this reification of gonadal hormones as sexed was a theory developed in the more social writings of the British reproductive scientist Walter Heape. His theory, asserting that the two supposed "female" and "male" hormones were "antagonistic" to one another, was imported into reproductive endocrinology. In fact, the term "sex antagonism" was then in fairly common cultural usage (Chesler 1992:169), pointing to social phenomena that today are encompassed by the phrase "the battle between the sexes." Heape wrote a book called Sex Antagonism , in 1913, which "dealt with male/female conflicts such as the women's suffrage movement, which was of great concern to men raised in a Victorian society. In 1914 he published Preparation for Marriage , one of a series of books on human reproduction and the family, sponsored by the Church of England" (Biggers 1991:174). Heape was one of many scientists who published on topics beyond the pale of science, and who sought through such border crossings to use the cultural authority of science to keep women "in their place" (e.g., Russett 1989).

Within the theory of sex antagonism as it was later framed in reproductive endocrinology, some dysfunction (physiological and/or behavioral) was presumed to result if both male and female hormones were found in the same individual (Hall 1974). The most common dysfunction supposed to result was, not surprisingly, homosexuality. The strongest advocate of antagonism theory during the coalescence era was Eugen Steinach

(1861–1944) in Austria. Steinach focused mainly on hormones of the testis; in addition to studies of their biological activity, he pursued research on rejuvenation reminiscent of Brown-Séquard's ingestion of ground testicular materials. But what became known as "Steinach's operation" involved resecting the spermatic duct between ligatures instead of introducing external materials. The operation was quite popular during the 1920s and 1930s, being performed on patients such as W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud.^[4]

Carl R. Moore and Dorothy Price at the University of Chicago, working with both types of hormones, did research that contradicted the antagonism theory in the 1930s and rendered the processes in considerably greater complexity, as part of the effort to clarify the processes of sex differentiation. Their work, which posited a complex feedback loop, broke new conceptual and substantive ground in the life sciences.^[5]

Bernhard Zondek of Berlin entered this saga during the early 1930s as well. Seeking easily accessible sources of female hormones, he turned to the horse as research material. Cole and Hart (1930) in California had earlier prepared follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) from pregnant mare serum. Zondek thought horse urine might be a useful source and found that it "contained huge amounts of oestrogen." Pregnant mares then became the usual source of estrogen for pharmaceutical companies. (This confounded farmers, who were shocked both at the requests for horse urine and at being paid for it!) An interview with Zondek provides a retrospective account of the next installment:

F. But you have found that the richest source of oestrogen is stallion urine, haven't you? Z. Yes, I was really astonished when Haussler and I found that stallion's urine contains even more oestrogen than that of pregnant mares. And I was even more astonished to find a high concentration of oestrogen in the testicles of stallions. F. Did you consider it strange to find oestrogen in a male animal? Z. I concluded that oestrgen in stallions had to be a metabolite of the androgenic hormones. Many years later you biochemists substantiated this conclusion by showing through more elaborate methods that testosterone is convertible to oestrogen. But to this day I don't understand how it is that the high concentration of oestrogen in stallion testes and blood does not exert an emasculating effect. F. It is fortunate for the stallion that he has no chance of knowing your trouble. (Finkelstein 1966:11)

Zondek published his work in 1934, and the story seems to have circulated rapidly as a result of the ongoing intercontinental debate about sex hormone antagonism. However, despite citing Zondek's work on estrogen in stallions and that of his Chicago colleagues Moore and Price, Frank Lillie (1939:6, 11) deliberately furthered the reification of sex and gender by not renaming, or at least destabilizing the gendering of, gonadal hormones in his "Biological Introduction" to the major handbook of the reproductive sciences, Sex and Internal Secretions .^[6] He begins by lauding the "the great

advances that have been made and consolidated, especially in the chemistry ... of the male and female hormones ..." which have now "served to complicate rather than to simplify our conceptions of the mechanisms of control of sex characters" which have emphasized work in different species. But, Lillie intoned, "Under these circumstances it seems inadvisable to include in a biological introduction the newer chemical terminology. The old terms male and female sex hormones carry the implication of control of sex characteristics and represent conceptions that would still be valid whatever the outcome of further chemical and physiological analysis. ... As there are two sets of sex characters, so there are two sets of sex hormones, the male hormone controlling the 'dependent' male characters, and the female determining the 'dependent' female characters." Here Lillie eliminates the possibility that science could change its mind over time. And for the most part it did not. Many subsequent discussions of gonadal hormones have been socially gendered in this way (Hall 1974). Major lines of "sex differences" research have been based upon it as well.^[7]

Other reproductive scientists have objected both at the time and subsequently. For example, Oudshoorn (1994:47) reports that at the First International Congress on the Standardization of Sex Hormones held in London in 1932 (discussed later in this chapter), Dutch reproductive endocrinologists were critical of what they called "the unitary school of sex endocrinology." They objected to the definition of the biological actions of the female hormones as categorically only actions in the estrus cycle, specifically because their capacities to stunt growth, produce fatty deposits, decrease kidney weight, and so on, were all ignored by such a narrow definition.

Years later, Amoroso (1963), not referring to sex hormones specifically, complained that "outdated" and "misleading" rhetoric was characteristic of endocrinology quite broadly. For example, he felt the continued phraseology of gonadotropins as parts of one-to-one "feedback" loops when the interactions were already understood to be much more complex misled even scientists. The endocrinologist and historian Medvei (1982:408) has noted that certain supposed "female" and "male" hormones may in fact be identical, a rather "delayed" finding. Whalen (1984) provides a searing critique of scientific language around gonadal hormones, reminding us that "all hormones and their antagonists have multiple effects." That is, what have been called sex hormones are not only sex hormones but have other biological actions as well. Even for scientists, this sustained nomenclature is obscurantist.

Questions that Lillie, Amoroso, and Medvei fail to ask, which feminists do,^[8] include why such social constructions are made, why do they persist, and who benefits? Such problems of misconstruction of concepts of sex and gender in science have negative consequences for the science itself (Keller 1995). The sustained reification of hormones as "male" and "female" in this

century can be viewed as a social phenomenon parallel to one discussed by Farley (1982:110–28), who found a "sexless age of reproductive research" in the nineteenth century when sex was denied both socially and biologically. Farley concludes that these biologists' scientific work was shaped by their social assumptions. He further found that when nineteenth-century biologists did discuss a sexual means of biological reproduction in a particular species, such as humans, they deemed it the basis of a proper and "natural" social division of labor between the sexes, wherein women were assigned to a lifetime of raising children, while men were to be employed outside the home for wages and salaries. Similar social designations have been based on the gendered reification of gonadal hormones (e.g., Harding and O'Barr 1987; Schwartz 1984).

Biologist Fausto-Sterling (1989, 1992:85–88, 1993, 1998) has recently taken up these problems. She argues that there are multiple sexes or, alternatively, that what we call sex is a continuous set of properties and, for most purposes, a classification system of five sexes is fairly accurate, inclusive, and serviceable. This perspective takes the complexities of biology extremely seriously, including the gonadal hormones. We certainly know from the work of Money and his colleagues (e.g., Money and Ehrhardt 1972) on "fixing" humans who apparently do not fit into the binary sex classificatory system, that such phenomena are common enough to have prompted development of routine treatments. The simplified, dimorphic construction of sex has also been challenged by those who study its medical enforcement (e.g., Hirschauer 1991, 1992, 1998; Kessler 1990), and most recently by those who do not fit within the dimorphic classification system. Here we can see today the emergence of a new social movement for change in the medical treatment of hermaphrodites, mounted by hermaphrodites themselves (Chase 1997; ISNA 1995–96).

As this book was going to press, a brand-new second kind of estrogen receptor site was "found." While the already known alpha receptors predominate in the uterus and the mammary gland, the new beta receptor was initially found in rodent prostate tissue, and predominates in the ovaries, testes, and cells that give rise to sperm! The New York Times article concluded that "it is time to put to rest—and cremate—the shibboleth of estrogen as a 'female hormone.' ... Scientists have found evidence of the beta receptor in organs that display little or no evidence of alpha and that nobody had thought of as being under estrogen's dominion, including the lungs, kidneys, intestines, bladder and colon" (Angier 1997). Based on nearly a century of such complications to sex hormone theory, Fausto-Sterling (1998) asks the still radical question "Do sex hormones really exist?" One wonders what the reproductive sciences and biomedicine more generally would have been like had Lillie been as scientific in his nomenclature.

Endocrinology became the core activity of reproductive scientists between 1925 and 1940 not solely because these major hormones were implicated in reproductive phenomena, and therefore pursued and discovered; its rises was also a social phenomenon that deserves a sociological explanation.^[9] Placing endocrinology at the center of the reproductive sciences enterprise reflected a series of choices and commitments made by scientists from many countries. Developments could have been otherwise, or emphases could have been different. As the centerpiece of the reproductive sciences, endocrinology provided with several structural and strategic advantages. These included the following:

a core, widely recognizable research activity for the social worlds of reproductive sciences;

a core research activity that appeared very distant from the social issues of human sexuality and reproduction;

scientific legitimacy and fashionableness by association with general endocrinology, one of the most promising new areas of research in the life sciences;

a biochemical instead of a "merely" physiological thrust, and strong working alliances with sophisticated biochemists;

established conventions and approaches to biochemical research problems;

a common denominator and a common language across biology, medicine, and agriculture; and

the promise of a host of valuable technoscientific interventions into reproductive phenomena.

Endocrinology was a powerful contender for "most outstanding line of work" in the life sciences at this juncture, to some degree because it was part of a more general trend in medicine. In the 1920s, there was a shift of focus in explanations of disease, from exogenous factors such as germs to endogenous factors such as deficiencies, which could result in disease directly or through impaired resistance (Sinding 1990:200). Biochemical approaches, of which endocrinology was one, were also the methodological and paradigmatic "high ground" in the life sciences during this era (e.g., Kohler 1982). Thus reproductive scientists' work along biochemical endocrinological lines brought scientific legitimacy to the enterprise in relation to the scientific audiences, consumers, and sponsors of the reproductive sciences. Scientific audiences existed, of course, in biology, medicine, and agriculture.

During this era, the important pattern was established of biochemists working with reproductive scientists on endocrinological problems. Early

reproductive scientists often lacked the sophisticated chemistry requisite for isolation of pure hormones. Corner (1981:233), in recounting his work toward the discovery and isolation of progesterone, states that once he had a practical test for a potent extract, "The stage was now set for the biochemist ... Willard Allen." Edward A. Doisy, a professor of biochemistry at the Washington University School of Medicine, did key early work on estrogens with Edgar Allan (Allen and Doisy 1923).^[10] A third example of this pattern is provided by Frederick C. Koch, chairman of the Department of Physiological Chemistry and Pharmacology at the University of Chicago, who became an integral part of the reproductive sciences center established by Lillie. Koch worked in tandem with Carl R. Moore, Lillie's successor as chairman of the Department of Zoology, on the testis as an endocrine gland and the androgenic hormones. Koch and his associates developed new methods of separation and distillation of male hormones, discovered multiple male hormones in urine through fractionalization, developed a rapid method of distilling estrogenic hormones from stallion urine, studied normal ranges of variation of hormone content in human urine of both males and females (relating nutrition to hormone production), distinguished and isolated urinary and testis tissue hormones, and began synthesis of androsterone.^[11] Moore and his group simultaneously worked on the biological activity of male hormones (e.g., Moore 1932, 1938, 1947).

Eventually reproductive scientists became more adept biochemists, although biochemical specialists continued to be included in research teams and centers. Some of these centers became involved in serious rivalries. Long (1990) offers a close reading of the debate about the construction of the anterior pituitary gland. It pitted the Hisaw group at Wisconsin against the Engle group at Columbia (see Greep 1967).

The most significant outcome of the endocrinological focus, however, was the drawing together of scientists from biology, medicine, and agriculture around a shared problem structure. A core activity is necessary for the development of an enterprise as a recognizable social world (Strauss 1982). Reproductive endocrinology provided such a core activity. It allowed the reproductive sciences enterprise to cohere quickly as a cross-professional intersectional scientific enterprise. The evidence for this intersectionality is that, quite significantly, major breakthroughs in reproductive endocrinology were made in all three professional situations.^[12]

The distance that the reproductive endocrinological focus provided between reproductive sciences and matters of sexuality and reproduction and birth control as social issues was also central to the development of a legitimate scientific enterprise. Biochemistry is usually "sexy" only to scientists. Thus social legitimacy and cultural authority could also accrue to the enterprise as it eschewed, through focus on reproductive endocrinology, di-

rect involvement in the more controversial aspects of reproduction and sexuality.^[13]

Of course, much of modern reproductive research initially in Britain (Borell 1985; Marshall 1910) and later in the United States (e.g., Asdell 1977; Corner 1981; Loeb 1911, 1958) had implicated hormonal control of the reproductive cycle. More internalist historians thus have reasonable grounds from which to state that scientists were led to endocrinological problems through their research. My argument does not contest this point. Rather, I am elucidating the social structural advantages that also contributed to the institutionalization of reproductive endocrinology as the core activity of the developing enterprise. By institutionalization I mean the centrality of reproductive endocrinology to the reproductive sciences in laboratories, departments, publications, professional associations, and so on. Other problems had been framed and were later de-emphasized or ignored in favor of endocrine problems. It is the shifting balance of the problem structure as a whole, rather than specific problems, that concerns me here.

Intersecting with General Endocrinology: The Anterior Pituitary

A key event in the rise of reproductive endocrinology as model research was the intersection during the 1920s of general endocrinology with reproductive endocrinology. This took place with the discovery that the anterior pituitary gland simultaneously produces both reproductive and nonreproductive hormones, providing a physiological link between reproductive and general endocrinology and between the reproductive system and the rest of the organism. Agate (1975:474) notes that during this era, "probably the greatest obstacle blocking the progress of endocrinology was the confusion and controversy about the function of the hypophysis" (the anterior pituitary gland).

The major investigator associated with clarification of hypophyseal activity was Philip Edward Smith (1884–1970), who began this work at the University of California, continued it briefly at Stanford, and completed it at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons as head of the Department of Anatomy.^[14] After initial work in the frog (Smith 1916), he turned to the rat and developed a surgical approach to removal of the anterior pituitary—hypophysectomy. Unlike previous methods, Smith's did not involve contact with the brain. Smith then showed (1927, 1930) that uncomplicated hypophysectomy in mammals resulted in cessation of growth, loss of weight, and atrophy of the reproductive system, the thyroid gland, and the cortex of the adrenal gland, along with other effects. Smith continued hypophyseal research with the assistance of the anatomist Earl T. Engle and the biochemist Goodwin L. Foster with work on the rhesus monkey at Co-

Figure 2.
"The Study of the Internal Secretions," by Hisaw, Severinghaus, and Cole
(by permission of the Rockefeller Archives Center).

lumbia.^[15] Hypophysectomy became the key technology of the coalescence era, as the Pap smear had been during disciplinary formation. It was not, however, an easy surgery to perform. Roy Greep turned out to have "golden hands" for doing this surgery, which, he said, won him a job at Harvard when he finished his degree at Wisconsin during the Great Depression.^[16]

The hormones produced by the anterior pituitary upon stimulation by the hypothalmus include adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which acts on the adrenal glands; thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH); leutinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), which act on the ovaries or testes; growth hormone (GH), which acts on bones; prolactin (PL), which acts on breasts; and melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) (Wade 1981:13–14). Following Smith, a number of scientists then focused their work on hormones of the anterior pituitary—the point (or gland) of intersection of reproductive and general endocrinology.^[17] That is, the problem structure was revised to focus on the gland producing the hormones rather than on the reproductive or nonreproductive hormones and their effects.

A most interesting representation of this disciplinary intersection was created by Frederick L. Hisaw (a biologist), E. L. Severinghaus (a physician), and L. J. Cole (an agricultural scientist), all based at the University of Wisconsin in 1934. See Figure 2.^[18] The heart of this representation of "The Study of the Internal Secretions" is endocrinology as "the chemical and physiological study of the hormones." Five hormone-producing sites are listed: the uterus, placenta, testis, ovary, and anterior pituitary. The last ranked foremost in the diagram, placed top and center! I would argue that this status was conferred upon the anterior pituitary by reproductive scientists for both physiological and entrepreneurial reasons. Not only do anterior pituitary hormones interact with many other hormone-production processes, but also the pituitary is the organ of intersection of the reproductive with other bodily systems and of the reproductive sciences with general endocrinology.^[19] Research on the anterior pituitary allowed the reproductive sciences to climb aboard the prestigious bandwagon (Fujimura 1988) of general endocrinology research.

One important sociological question concerns the proportion of reproductive as compared with other kinds of endocrinological research undertaken during the coalescence era. Two studies by reproductive scientists of that era directly address this point. Table 4 shows Gregory's (1935:213) bibliographic tabulation from the Index Medicus and Chemical Abstracts. Table 5 shows Evans and Cowles's (1940:908) articles count. Gregory's (1935) assessment, mostly for the years 1927–33, sought to determine the percentage of articles on the corpus luteum (ovarian hormones) among the total publications in endocrinology (note that she did not ask about all reproductive hormones). Papers on gonadotropic hormones of the anterior

pituitary were excluded, as were those on placental, mammary, and testicular hormones. Regardless, she found that fully 18 percent of endocrinological publications dealt with hormones of the corpus luteum. Evans and Cowles (1940) made a direct count from over two hundred journals to analyze interest in the individual hormone-producing glands for the year 1939; they found that 37 percent of articles dealt with the gonads.^[20] Thus, in 1939, reproductive endocrinology constituted a significant proportion—almost two-fifths—of all endocrinological publications. From a sociological perspective, it is significant that these authors undertook such tasks of tabulation to demonstrate the centrality of reproductive endocrinology to general endocrinology.

The modern reproductive sciences emerged during approximately the same historical period as modern endocrinology. For intellectual, political, disciplinary, and entrepreneurial reasons, the reproductive sciences enterprise coalesced around reproductive endocrinology. Although both fields had historical associations with medical quackery (Borell 1985), general endocrinology as a research area possessed greater legitimacy and prestige simply because it did not deal with sex or reproduction. Because of this, reproductive scientists attached their enterprise tightly to that of endocrinology through World War II and beyond.

It was both through direct association with broader endocrinological research and through downplaying its own nonendocrinological and more broadly reproductive problem structure that the reproductive sciences enterprise achieved greater legitimacy and autonomy during the coalescence period. To avoid the confusion of reproductive research with sexology and/or with contraceptive research multiple strategies were developed, even though researchers simultaneously drew upon (some would say plun-

dered) resources committed to these other lines of work (as demonstrated in chapters 4 and 6). And, as I will show later, it was precisely because reproductive scientists wanted to continue their deep identification and association with the more prestigious field of endocrinology that no professional organization focused explicitly on the reproductive sciences was

begun until 1967. It thus seems apt that many years later the reproductive scientist Neena Schwartz (1984) titled her presidential address to the Endocrine Society, "Endocrinology as Paradigm, Endocrinology as Authority."

Sex And Internal Secretions: The American Bible of Reproductive Endocrinology

During the coalescence era, preeminence in the reproductive sciences shifted from European to American research centers. The marker event in this process was the appearance of Sex and Internal Secretions (Allen, ed., 1932). Both its publication and much of the research on which it was based were supported by the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (National Academy of Sciences 1979:v). The committee's "major undertaking for diffusion of knowledge ... was the preparation of [this] book that became exceedingly influential" (Aberle and Corner 1953:25). The first American book focused on the reproductive sciences, it emphasized even in its title the core activity of reproductive endocrinology, further demonstrating coalescence of the enterprise around it. In his introduction as chairman of the NRC/CRPS, Robert Yerkes noted:

As its tenth birthday approached, the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, on suggestion of Dr. E. V. Cowdry, member ex officio as Chairman of the Division of Medical Sciences of the National Research Council, voted to celebrate the event by taking stock of knowledge and opportunity within its field of interest. As a major step toward the realization of this purpose, Dr. Edgar Allen was invited to organize a cooperative survey of recent advances in research on internal secretion in relation to sex, with special attention to phases of the subject upon which committee interest and resources have tended to concentrate. The results of this carefully-planned survey of research achievements, whose timeliness will be recognized, are presented herewith to our colleagues in biology and to others who may find them relevant to their needs. Meantime, the Committee proposes to use the findings of the survey as partial basis for decision concerning its present and prospective serviceableness, and in formulation of a new plan and program of activity should it appear that the organization merits continued support. (Allen, ed., 1932:xvii)

Thus the book was intended both as a research handbook with directions for future work and as a promotional device to garner continued support for the NRC/CRPS from the NRC and the Rockefeller Foundation, which was itself undergoing reorganization at the time.^[21]

The editor, Edgar Allen (1932:xix), also envisioned the book as a device through which to recruit more scientists to reproductive endocrinology and to expand the enterprise: "This whole field has recently undergone such rapid growth that many new questions have arisen to challenge the

investigator's curiosity. An attempt will be made to indicate productive approaches to some of these unsolved or only partially solved problems." All of the contributors to this edited volume were from the United States, signaling the shift to American preeminence in the reproductive sciences. A combination of the negative effects of World War I on European work and the infusion of external fiscal support in the United States through the NRC/CRPS contributed to this shift.^[22] Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation was impressed by the effort, as a 1934 memo reveals: "One gets a vivid picture of the great advance which has been made under the committee. In 1900–1910, there were perhaps six investigators in all making any progress on such problems. There are now well over six investigators at each of a considerable number of institutions. The undoubted leadership of the U.S. in endocrinology can be credited, directly and indirectly, to the committee's activity. In spite of this progress, one is equally impressed by the range, multitude and importance of the specific problems which now present themselves."^[23]

The contents of the book reflect Frank Lillie's agenda for biological reproductive research, which he presented to the NRC/CRPS in 1992 (see appendix 2). While the book includes genetic and embryological aspects of reproduction, it is focused primarily on reproductive endocrinology. Thus it also testifies to the import of biochemistry into research in the reproductive sciences. As Aberle and Corner (1953:27) later asserted, "The growth of research in sex gland biochemistry was greatly promoted by the excellent chapters on that subject by the pioneers Doisy and Koch." Both were among of the first generation of biochemists to work with reproductive scientists on endocrinological problems.

As Marshall had done in his Physiology of Reproduction (1910), Allen (ed., 1932:xix) specified his intended audiences: "This book is intended for the reader with a moderate biological background. ... It is not our intent that it should be a 'popular book on sex.' Instead, it is designed for those interested in the progress of research in problems of sex. ... Physicians who are interested in fundamentals will find much valuable recent material. In supplying a biological foundation for education in matters of sex, it should also attract the interest of serious students of sex functions in man." What distinguishes Allen's remarks from Marshall's is Allen's omission (and Yerkes's as well) of any direct reference to agricultural scientists as a likely audience, despite the fact that several such men had achieved renown for their reproductive endocrinological work in the United States.^[24] Further subtle derogation of the applied side of the reproductive sciences is found in Allen's limits on physician audiences to "physicians who are interested in fundamentals." Like many reproductive scientists of the era, Allen was articulating a strong "basic research" stance regardless of institutional or profes-

sional sponsorship to distinguish the enterprise from both sexology and contraceptive research. Aberle and Corner's (1953:27) assessment of the impact of the book echoes similar themes: "The book had an immense success. It was read and used everywhere, abroad as well as at home, serving notice to the world that America had a corps of investigators who were making great advances in the whole field of sex biology. For graduate students in departments of zoology, and for the more scientifically minded young physicians with embryological, obstetrical, and gynecological interests, it became a reference book."

Sex and Internal Secretions became the second bible of the reproductive sciences, following Marshall's monograph, which had held sway for nearly a quarter of a century. It is also notable that this NRC/CRPS volume was an edited work rather than a single-authored monograph, as Marshall's had been. The impossibility of any single author mastering the field was clear in the reproductive sciences by 1932, as Maienschein (1991a) found to be true for cytology in the same era.

Sex and Internal Secretions went through three editions (Allen, ed., 1932, 1939; Young 1961), with the final edition also marking the official end of the NRC/CRPS. Some of the changes across the three editions are worthy of attention here. The first edition comprised 912 pages with nineteen chapters. The second edition comprised 1,346 pages with twenty-four chapters organized into five major sections as follows:

The last section included chapters on the thymus and pineal glands, the vitamins and sex glands, sex drive, and sex functions in man. The two-volume third edition was larger still, with 24 chapters and over 1500 pages. It was divided into six sections:

The last section on behavior was much expanded from the one chapter allocated to this topic in each of the earlier editions. The psychobiology of sex that Yerkes had advocated in the 1920s and 1930s had come to fruition. The papers here covered topics ranging from birds to humans, and the authors ranged from John Money to Margaret Mead.^[25] The last printing of Sex and Internal Secretions was in 1973.

The next bibles of the reproductive sciences were not published until 1976 and 1977, this time sponsored by the Ford Foundation.^[26] Their titles tell of a repositioning of the reproductive sciences enterprise much closer to contraceptive research. Roy O. Greep, Marjorie A. Koblinsky, and Frederick S. Jaffe produced Reproduction and Human Welfare: A Challenge to Research in 1976, as a primer on the application of the reproductive sciences to contraceptive research, including a valuable short history of the field. Its main focus was framing future directions for worldwide efforts at contraceptive development. The companion volume edited by Greep and Koblinsky, Frontiers in Reproduction and Fertility Control: A Review of the Reproductive Sciences and Contraceptive Development, appeared the following year and more closely paralleled Sex and Internal Secretions . Of forty chapters, about half were on hormones and other "basic" research topics, while the other half centered on clinical topics from abortion and sterilization to artificial insemination, and appendices contained ambitious literature reviews. These two volumes marked the end of the modern era of the reproductive sciences and the beginnings of the postmodern. They contained a much stronger emphasis on male reproductive phenomena and presaged the "new reproductive technologies" that were about to explode onto the scene with the birth of the first "test-tube baby" via in vitro fertilization in England in 1978. With their transnational orientation, these volumes reflected the (re)distribution of reproductive and contraceptive research around the world, of which the Ford Foundation was the major sponsor (Hertz 1984). They also reflected the beginning of the end of American dominance of the field.

Professionalizing the Reproductive Sciences

Table 6 lists the major professional associations and journals addressing reproductive topics in the United States in biology, medicine, and agriculture between 1910 and 1969.^[27] All these journals published research on reproductive topics. There is also information available on the relative publication of articles on reproductive endocrinology in these journals prior to 1934. Mengert (1934) analyzed all of the articles referenced in Sex and Internal Secretions (Allen, ed., 1932) and offered the listing shown in figure 3.^[28] The journals with the highest publication counts within the repro-

ductive physiology of nonhuman primates were the Anatomical Record, Endocrinology, and Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine . Yet similar works were published in such a range of journals that these top three account for only 25 percent of the articles written before 1950 (Studer and Chubin 1976). Long (1987) describes the heterogeneous dis-

ciplinary commitments of reproductive "physiologists," which partially accounts for the wide range of publication venues.

It is, however, intriguing that the Society for the Study of Internal Secretions, founded in 1917 and later known as the Endocrine Society, was not the major professional base for reproductive scientists during the coalescence period. Several factors seem to have contributed to this. First, biological and medical reproductive scientists had professional and disciplinary commitments to other associations and publications, such as those in anatomy and physiology (see, e.g., Corner 1981). Second, most reproduc-

tive scientists were deeply committed to basic research over and against clinical and applied work, while the Endocrine Society was then medical in nature and membership and committed to clinical as well as basic research. As Lisser notes (1967:5–6): "Clinical endocrinology at that time was in disrepute. Conditions were such that any younger clinician, not yet firmly established and despite an unblemished reputation, who dared to embark upon a career in this field was looked upon askance, considered naive and gullible or—perhaps worse—suspected of straying into the realm of quackery, and heading for the 'endocrine gold fields.'" That is, general clinical endocrinology, like reproductive endocrinology, was associated with quackery of an especially lucrative type.^[29] Basic endocrinological research was not viewed so dubiously. For example, the American Medical Association gave a gold medal to Herbert M. Evans in 1923 for his "discovery" of growth hormone and his creation of gigantism in rats through use of these anterior pituitary hormones (Lisser 1967:7). However, it is also possible that the Endocrine Society, not wanting to add sexual insult to clinical injury, was initially less receptive to studies of reproductive endocrinology for presentation or publication because of its own professional vulnerability. The discovery of insulin in 1922 (Bliss 1982) promoted further general endocrinological work and gave the Endocrine Society further legitimacy. After about 1932, the society became essentially a national organization, no longer continuing its efforts at international representation (Lisser 1967:14).^[30] It continues today as a major professional association.

During the coalescence period there were several major international meetings on sex research/reproductive sciences. At the First International Congress on Sex Research, held in Berlin in 1926, which emphasized sexology, few English-speaking basic reproductive scientists were in attendance; two papers published by British workers (one by F.A.E. Crew and the other by Arthur Walton, John Hammond, and S. A. Asdell) on the scrotum and sperm were presented (Marcuse 1928). At the Second International Congress, held in London in 1930, there was considerably greater focus on the physiology of sex, including reproductive endocrinology; basic research was extensive and clearly distinguished from clinical "therapy," contraception, and "sociology of sex" (Greenwood 1931). The United States was represented by Oscar Riddle, C. H. Danforth, F. C. Koch, R. T. Frank, and others. Carl R. Moore, representing the NRC Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, reported:

Registration of 250–300 ... from 30 countries of which United States representation was third in numbers (British, 63; Germany, 48; United States, 32; France, 16, Italy, 9; etc.). ... Biological, chemical, sociological, psychiatric and clinical aspects of sex were represented. From approximately 100 papers presented some 20 per cent dealt with the male gonad. ... 20 per cent dealt with the female gonad. ... 10 per cent dealt with interrelations of the

gonads and their hormones and other organs of internal secretion ... 7 per cent ... secondary sex characters; smaller numbers were devoted to studies of dietary influences upon reproduction, sex reversals, germ cell biology, senility, sociological influences, contraceptives and psychoanalysis.^[31]

Thus, by the 1930s scientists from many disciplines were increasingly focused on international activities, from standardization to technical innovations. Abir-Am (1993) discusses such activities as the construction of transnational objectivity in international space, and such patterns of internationalization were clearly characteristic of the reproductive sciences at this time. Because the broad agendas of the earlier congresses on sex research included sexology, eugenic, and contraceptive concerns, which most American basic reproductive scientists eschewed, there was a move in the early 1930s to have international gatherings only on sex hormones. Two special conferences sponsored by the Health Organization of the League of Nations were then held—one in Hampstead in 1932 focused on estrogenic hormones, and a second in London in 1935 focused on androgenic and luteal hormones. Both sought to establish international standards of biological activity for these sex hormones.^[32]

Subsequently, more general international conferences focused on sex hormones began. The Singer-Polignac Colloque, or the First International Conference on Sex Hormones, was held in Paris in 1937 (Brouha 1938). Attending from the United States were Edgar Allen of Yale, P. E. Smith of Columbia, Carl G. Hartman of the Carnegie Institution, F. L. Hisaw of Wisconsin and Harvard, and Aura E. Severinghaus of Columbia (Brouha 1938; Zuckerman 1978). This conference, restricted to "basic" research on reproductive endocrinology, also included scientists from Canada, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Another standardization conference was held in 1938 in Geneva.^[33]

The outbreak of World War II curtailed international conferences, and for a few years nationally based organizations and gatherings became the conventional meeting grounds for reproductive scientists. One such conference, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, met at a private club in Maryland in 1943. When an African-American scientist was refused entry for several days because of his race, the group determined to find a more hospitable site for future meetings. In 1944, the (now international) Laurentian Hormone Conferences were duly begun in Canada, of which Gregory Pincus served as permanent chairman for many years. In 1945 they began publishing an annual volume of papers, Recent Progress in Hormone Research , which continues to this day. These conferences "set new standards in a field previously dominated by physicians who were strangers to the laboratory by bringing together

from all over the world outstanding medical and nonmedical scientists from universities, institutes, research hospitals, and from industry" (Ingle 1971:234).

Organizational development of the reproductive sciences was parallel in Britain and the United States. General endocrinological and other professional associations and their journals provided vehicles for publication of reproductive research for many years. The (British) Society for the Study of Fertility began in 1944, although its Journal of Reproduction and Fertility was not established until 1960.^[34] In the United States, the American Society for the Study of Sterility, formed in 1944, began publishing its journal, Fertility and Sterility, in 1950. No organization focused on the full panoply of reproductive phenomena until the founding of the Society for the Study of Reproduction in 1967, whose journal, Biology of Reproduction, was inaugurated in 1969. An attempt initiated by the Society for the Study of Reproduction to link up with the (British) Society for the Study of Fertility and jointly produce the Journal of Reproduction and Fertility was rebuffed (Cook 1994).

Those associations formed immediately after World War II, the (British) Society for the Study of Fertility (1949/50) and the American Society for the Study of Sterility, captured in both their names and their foci the post-1940s rhetoric of birth control activists. This new rhetoric carefully down-played earlier themes of sex, birth control, and women's rights in favor of "family planning" and "planned parenthood" (discussed in the next chapter). The clinics of the birth control movement also began to offer sterility and infertility services along with contraception (American Foundation 1955). The growth of the reproductive sciences after World War II (see, e.g., Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976; Greep and Koblinsky 1977), which created a flood of publishable papers, also contributed to the viability of new professional organizations and journals.

The Enterprise As Cultural Intersection

An intersection in the sciences, where two or more worlds or communities of practice come together, can have much to offer both, but it also can pose risks to each participating community. I have argued elsewhere (Clarke 1985, 1990b) that separate and relatively secure institutional and professional situations can allow very heterogeneous scientific (or, for that matter, other intellectual) participation. Fundamental resources are not at risk here. This social phenomenon has become increasingly interesting to scholars in science studies. Star and Griesemer (1989) discuss "boundary objects," which are robust enough to travel across multiple worlds but simultaneously plastic enough to carry local or community-specific meanings.

Such objects help scientists address their needs for cooperation despite their own diverse means and goals. Galison argues that distinct scientific subcultures may interact through development of "trading zones," viewed as "social and intellectual mortar binding together" disunified traditions.^[35] Lowy (1992) takes off from these concepts and discusses "pidgin zones" where pidgin is a marginal language native to neither side. She argues that pidgin boundary concepts can be very important and the strength of loose concepts can be similar to the (sometimes surprising or counterintuitive) strength of loose organizational ties (Granovetter 1973). That is, a loose concept could allow the development of stable "zones of interaction," even federative experimental strategies, without obliging the participants to give up the advantages of their respective identities (Baszanger 1995).

The American reproductive sciences are exemplary of these patterns of border cultures. The enterprise quickly became a triangulated effort among scientists in biology, medicine, and agriculture. This intersection arose through a problem structure focused on the reproductive cycle and coalesced through one focused on reproductive endocrinology. The enterprise may be construed as an intersection with biochemists as well, but the problem structure remained centered on reproduction. The structure of the intersection is presented as Figure 4. The primary lines of interaction are between reproductive scientists in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Secondary (dotted) lines of interaction are shown as well. Biochemistry is attached to each professional field independently, by and large reflecting the actual organization of the work. All three fields had a tradition of research focused on reproductive phenomena. Each had adequate resources of its own to further the shared enterprise. All had been and continued to be audiences and consumers of each others' research in the larger enterprise of the reproductive sciences.

Such an intersection was neither new nor uniquely American, although emphases were different elsewhere.^[36] Corner (1961:ix) carefully notes the contributions of German and Austrian gynecologists to understanding both the human menstrual cycle and the estrus cycles of other mammals, and the contributions of animal breeders and naturalists as well: "Thus at the beginning of the twentieth century and during the next decades investigation in this field became more intense. Naturalists, animal breeders, histologists, embryologists and gynecologists gradually came to understand each others' problems, and began a period of rapid advance not yet ended or even slowed down." Britain had a long tradition of biomedical and agricultural science cooperation. The British Agricultural Research Council and the Medical Research Council were even jointly funded to pursue reproductive research (American Foundation 1955 2:140). Corner (1961:ix) also noted the significance of the impetus provided by psychology, anthro-

pology, and the women's rights movement to the development of the reproductive sciences.

The reproductive sciences intersection was a division of research labor both by the type of research materials typically used and by the "in principle" intent or mission of the work. Reproductive scientists in biology sought to pursue "pure" reproductive science as part of a general effort to grasp biological processes through work largely with laboratory animals. Reproductive scientists in medicine sought to understand normal and pathological reproductive function and to develop diagnostics and therapeutics to ameliorate reproductive pathology through work with humans and with animals as close to humans as possible (especially nonhuman primates). Reproductive scientists in agriculture sought to improve animal production in terms of quantity, quality, and controllability of reproduction, with some development of diagnostics and treatments of pathology, largely through work with domestic animals used for food or other human consumption.

The division of labor by use of very different materials was important to the development of a robust intersection specifically and the reproductive sciences generally, although workers in each field used other fields' special materials on occasion. The intersection thus not only allowed but facilitated communication about reproductive phenomena across very different species. This was of considerable heuristic value, making it easier for scientists to make comparisons and to transpose findings from one species to others. These comparisons and transpositions, which encouraged the linkages among biological, medical, and agricultural research, became the foundation of the reproductive sciences enterprise.^[37] And the linkages themselves legitimated the very study of reproductive phenomena that was so problematically illegitimate. Corner (1961:ix) noted that researchers from different lines of work came to "understand each others' problems." Such understandings contributed to their solution in many ways.

The mechanisms and processes of this intersection were multifold. Developments and methods in each area were picked up and used by the others. Research materials were shared (Clarke 1987, 1995b). Joint projects were initiated. The major integrative mechanism was the shared reproductive problem structure. The first shared focus was on the estrus and menstrual cycles, with biologists concentrating on laboratory animals, medical scientists concentrating on nonhuman and human primates, and agricultural scientists concentrating on farm animals. Endocrinology deepened the intersection by providing: (1) a unifying approach; (2) shared methods and techniques; (3) sharing of materials conventions (what to use, how to use it, and how to maintain it); (4) a mutually recognized mode and unit of production; and (5) a common terminology. Not only could researchers

use and benefit directly from each others' work, but all benefited through participation in a shared biochemical endeavor increasingly recognized not only by scientific worlds but also by funding sources. Each profession had joined the bandwagon early, and all gained authority and authenticity through the breadth of the endeavor.

Networks developed both within the three professional areas and across them. For example, in 1915–17, a strong line of communication on the problem of sexual differentiation in the freemartin was developed between Frank R. Lillie of the Department of Zoology at Chicago and Leon J. Cole in animal genetics at the University of Wisconsin. They shared research materials, ideas, and strategies.^[38] The vaginal smear quickly became a unifying technique for reproductive cycle studies in biology, medicine, and agriculture. In one classic example, Herbert M. Evans, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, worked on the estrus cycle of the dog with Harold H. Cole, publishing their paper (Evans and Cole 1931) shortly after Cole joined the animal husbandry faculty at the University of California School of Agriculture at Davis. Cole (1930, 1977) had done research on the estrus cycle in the cow and later became an agricultural pioneer in reproductive endocrinology. Another major intersectional working group at Wisconsin, discussed earlier, centered around zoologist Frederick L. Hisaw, medical scientist Aura Severinghaus, and animal geneticist Leon J. Cole. A number of other workers, such as chemist Harry L. Fevold (Fulton and Wilson 1966:403–6) and "second-generation" endocrinologist Roy Greep (1967, 1973), were also at this center early in their careers. This intersection in the 1930s was strongly focused on reproductive endocrinology.^[39] Figure 4 demonstrates their cooperative work in a grant application diagram.

Research materials were common foci of cross-professional networks. Although nonhuman primates (mostly Macaca rhesus ) were largely the research materials of choice of medical reproductive scientists, some biologically trained workers such as Hartman also developed such colonies.^[40] This intersectional group cooperated so extensively that it was known as "the monkey fraternity" at the Rockefeller Foundation.^[41] Another materials intersection centered on pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG). Harold H. Cole and George H. Hart (1930) of the Department of Animal Husbandry of the University of California School of Agriculture at Davis discovered that the blood of pregnant mares (readily available to agricultural scientists) contained a substance similar to an anterior pituitary hormone known as follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH). Aschheim and Zondek (1927) in Germany had found another anterior pituitary hormone, leutinizing hormone (LH), in the urine of pregnant women. Asdell (1977:xi) notes: "Both discoveries were useful as they provided abundant sources for

these hormones. It was no longer necessary to rely on the limited supply of pituitaries for hormones with gonadotropic activity. They were also useful in providing a test for pregnancy in these two species." Pregnancy tests were early and important technoscientific products of the reproductive sciences in both medicine and agriculture (Hartman 1962). Cole and Hart's research grently benefited from patent royalties for processing PMSG.^[42] Andrew Nalbandov has described the difficult and unpleasant aspects of urine collection and distillation. Urine sources were prolific, but distillation processes were arduous and highly scented for many years. Blood sources, such as PMSG, were preferred, and blood could be drawn routinely without harm to the mares. Thus agricultural scientists provided key materials for biologists and medical scientists.^[43]

A key sociological question here is what made such an intimate intersection possible. Several factors contributed. Each field was sufficiently established and had its own special audiences, sponsors, and consumer markets bound to it by tradition and interest. They could intersect to create a broader, stronger, and more legitimate endeavor while retaining their institutional and professional independence, autonomy, and resources, For each group, the social structure of the intersection made the other groups helpmates rather than threatening competitors. In the language of social worlds, the intersection formed a wider social world of the reproductive sciences with distinctive subworlds in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Sociologically, the intersectional nature of the reproductive sciences articulated reproductive research with three distinctive professional contexts. In each, and across them all, there was a coalescence of professional interests in and potential markets for reproductive research, which simultaneously created and reinforced the intersection and the broader enterprise. Market demands upon workers in each field varied tremendously. Clinical and commercial applications were constantly sought by practical medical and agricultural interests, and biologists were certainly not immune to such demands. But each subworld had full rights and responsibilities for managing its own distinctive markets and resources.

At the most fundamental level, participants in the reproductive research enterprise were allies in forging a new line of scientific work—both individually and across professions. Initially a frontier ethos prevailed in reproductive research—because so little had been done, there was room for all. Gradually workers in each line of work focused more intently on their own audiences, sponsors, markets, and consumers, while maintaining strong cross-professional ties, linked but autonomous endeavors around reproductive problems. Essentially, these were relations among equals (Lowy 1992), rather than those in a network with a single major actor such as Pasteur (Latour 1983, 1988).

Figure 4.
Structure of the reproductive sciences intersection with key applied

Major American centers of reproductive science in biology, medicine and agriculture, 1910–1945.

Biological centers:

Medical Centers:

Agricultural Centers:

Hybrid Centers:

Several centers at the above institutions were distinctively hybrid, crossing professional divides for a sustained period, including:

This figure provides an overview of professional organization. Some individuals, both faculty and students, may have been involved in more than one center. Data based largely on Aberle and Corner's (1953: Appendices 7–8) listing of centers funded by NRC/CRPS. Most scientists published 10+ papers listed by Aberle and Corner. Agricultural centers were usually funded through the state or the USDA.

Tensions In The Field

All was not always smooth in the reproductive sciences, however. One site of contention was the continued significance of morphology and anatomy to (many in) the reproductive sciences when nationally, at least, physicochemical and molecular approaches were in ascendance. In Marshall's introduction to his Physiology of Reproduction (1910:2), he makes an important point about the development of the reproductive sciences: "It may be objected that, for a book on physiology, too much space is devoted to the morphological side of the subject. This has been done purposely, since it seemed impossible to deal adequately with the physiological significance of the various sexual processes without describing the anatomical changes which these processes involve." Marshall obviously thought it was necessary to defend himself in advance, arguing that there was no way to represent physiological processes without examining their concrete manifestations in anatomy/morphology. A key example of the intimate linkages to which Marshall referred in 1910 was Papanicolaou's development, in 1917, of the vaginal smear as a morphological indicator of reproductive physiological processes. That is, within the reproductive system, many physiological changes (natural or experimental) can be traced through histological and cytological examination of tissue and cells affected by those changes. Soon other tissues and organs such as the ovaries and uterus were seen to have the capacity to serve as indicators of changes in reproductive processes.^[44] Reproductive research itself, in terms of both physiological and endocrinological problems, then proceeded via complicated zigzag paths from physiological or endocrinological "triggers" (natural or experimental) to observation and examination of histological and cytological specimens, and back again.^[45]

Philip E. Smith's (1927, 1930) development of the technique of hypophysectomy (discussed earlier) considerably accelerated this zigzag development in anterior pituitary endocrinology. The hypophysectomized rat was "one of the most widely used tools of investigation in endocrinology and reproductive physiology today."^[46] In short, the rat as technology revolutionized the field. The indicators of hypophysis were both histological and cytological. It is not surprising, then, that Smith was to edit the key text in the field, Bailey's Textbook of Histology , from 1932 to 1958 (Christy 1972:1415).

Marc Klein (1963:293) described the logic of endocrine research as follows: "Once morphological exploration is complete, we have to turn to experimental investigation to clear up a problem. The simplest way is to remove an organ and observe the effects on the body as a whole. Then come attempts to replace the missing gland, first by grafting the whole organ or parts of it, followed by extracting active products, first in crude and later

in purified form. At that stage the exploration has already passed into the hands of chemists and physicists, who in the end specify the chemical formula and succeed in synthesizing the active principle."^[47] Deletion or ablation of its pituitary turned the rat into the equivalent of a blank canvas, an excellent technology through which to study the gonadotropic hormones.

Figure 5 represents another of the classic tools of the reproductive sciences: the caponized cock. As with the rat, the cock was used for experiments of ablation followed by implantation. Here Moore and Price first castrated the cock (shown before and after); they then added hormonal substances or organs, in the mode described by Klein, and studied their effects. These cockscomb experiments and other work with fowl whose feather patterns were affected by hormones were key technologies of early reproductive endocrinology.^[48] Thus morphology through histological and cytological work promoted both reproductive physiology and endocrinology. Historian of biology Frederick Churchill (1981:185–86) has suggested that "a closer examination of the interplay between organic form and life's functions deserves the attention of modern as well as nineteenth century historians." In this section I have demonstrated the centrality of that relation in reproductive physiology.

In the reproductive sciences, however, tensions developed during the 1910–40 period between a broadly conceived reproductive physiology and a more narrowly construed reproductive endocrinology. Fissures emerged between those who consistently valued the contributions of morphology (through histology and cytology) to the reproductive sciences and those committed to a purer biochemical endocrinological agenda.^[49] The initial evidence concerning the value of morphology is Marshall's (1910) comment quoted earlier that morphology has a distinctive role in the reproductive sciences. Echoing Marshall, in 1925, F. A. E. Crew and his British agricultural science associates came down on the side of a broader physiological program in their introduction to Hammond's Reproduction in the Rabbit (1925:v–vi): "The present generation is witnessing 'a return to the practice of older days when animal physiology was not yet divorced from morphology.' Conspicuous progress is now being seen in the field of general physiology, of experimental biology, and in the application of biological principles to economic problems." In 1953, agricultural researcher H. H. Cole (1953:138) of the University of California, who himself pioneered reproductive endocrinology in domestic animals, stated in a review of the field: "It is my impression that there is still much to be learned by a more detailed study of the morphology of the reproductive organs and of the glands controlling them in normal and abnormal animals."

More recently, a number of scientists have commented on the increased value placed on comparative efforts, formerly a minority position. For example, in 1963, E. C. Amoroso, a British veterinary surgeon and endocrinolo-

Figure 5.
Key indicator of biological activity: the cockscomb (Domm, Juhn, and Gustavson 1932: 606–7; Borell 1989: 41).

gist, was pleased to look at the future prospects of endocrinology and see that "comparative endocrinology is once more coming to the forefront of biological interest, and its future becomes of immediate concern not only to biology, but to medicine and agriculture as well" (Klein 1963:297). R. V. Short (1977:34) concludes his insider history by noting: "This brief account of the history of our knowledge of the ovaries outlines the value of a broad comparative approach to the subject. By our increasing tendency to specialize we have lost the breadth of interest which our predecessors had. Many of their observations were close to what we now believe to be the truth, but they could not be developed in the prevailing scientific climate." Andrew Nalbandov, professor emeritus of the Department of Animal Science at the University of Illinois, for many years emphasized the diversity of reproductive physiologies across species, especially heterogeneous compared with other physiological systems such as digestion, respiration, and circulation.^[50] Nalbandov (1976:2) goes so far as to state, "Some scientists resist accepting diversity, insisting instead on finding a unified scheme that would fit all mammals." He further noted that, during the 1930s and 1940s, some papers demonstrating diversity were refused for publication and presentation on the grounds that the findings must be "wrong."^[51] In short, diversity among nonhumans was greeted with about as much glee as multiculturalism has been by conservatives. Further, such "multibodyism," or the diversity of reproductive physiologies, was actively resisted within the sciences because it ran against the grain of the modernist goal of constructing universal scientific laws.

In a number of ways, comparative perspectives have been linked with broader biological viewpoints rather than with narrower endocrinological ones, in the past as well as more recently. For example, at the turn of the century, Frank Lillie pioneered a distinctively broad biological perspective in his comparative embryological and reproductive researches specifically in opposition to the biochemical reductionist perspective held by Jacques Loeb.^[52] Emil Witschi provides an example of an agricultural scientist with a comparative eye. Initially trained as a morphologist, Witschi spent most of his academic life at Iowa studying reproductive endocrinology and the problem of sex differentiation. In 1960 he established the Division of Comparative Endocrinology of the American Society of Zoologists during his presidency (Gorbman 1979:1264).

Another example from the first generation of American reproductive scientists is Carl Hartman (1879–1967), who initially taught biology in Texas and spent most of his career at the medically oriented Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology. Hartman insisted on being called a reproductive physiologist to reflect his commitment to a broader biological view of reproductive phenomena throughout his career (Biggers 1970; Vollman 1965). A final example is provided by third-genera-

tion reproductive scientist T. J. Robinson (1978:189–90, emphasis added), who stated in a review of Cohen's Reproduction: "This is a refreshingly different book because it deals with reproduction from a classical, biological point of view and is a healthy reminder that reproductive biology is not all endocrinology . It is a textbook ... on comparative animal reproduction. ... To the reviewer who, like all aging reproductive biologists, has grown up with this relatively new science and so is largely self-taught, this book has opened up areas of comparative reproductive biology which were either unknown or but vaguely remembered."^[53]

Many but far from all of the "biology versus endocrinology" tensions in the reproductive sciences seem to be clustered around what I would term "the rat debate"—whether or not scientists view rats as adequate research materials for investigating the full range of reproductive phenomena. In arguing for comparative work to fully grasp reproductive phenomena, Nalbandov complained (1958:i): "Some [graduate students] ... profess interest only in the aspects of the field that apply to the human animal; others want to concern themselves only with the reproduction of the rat; and still others are content to learn all there is to know about the cow. This attitude is frequently carried over into their professional careers: at scientific meetings, gynecologists walk out when papers on the reproduction of sheep are read, 'sheep men' retaliate by walking out when 'rat men' are reading, and 'rat men' are content to listen only to one another."

Thus we can hear the reverberations of chronic tensions in the field over fifty years focused on the value of morphology, the value of comparative work, and the centrality of endocrinology versus a broader biological perspective. Some of these tensions may well have been and continue to be oblique manifestations of status differences among biological, medical, and agricultural scientists, but this explanation seems necessary yet not sufficient. These biological versus reductionist tensions have pervaded much of twentieth-century biology (Benson 1989), and in this, at least, the reproductive sciences are no different from other specialty areas in the life sciences.

In her study of the disciplinary formation of pain medicine, Baszanger (1995, 1998a,b) also addresses tensions in the field. She too argues that a dual vision is necessary for us to see simultaneously the robustness of the new discipline when viewed from without and the differences perceptible when viewed from within. She further argues that such differences occur at the heart of the work of internal legitimation—the efforts of scientists themselves to make sense of their shared work. Moreover, such strained situations may last for a long time and are a normal modus vivendi. In short, difference is usually present if one seeks it out.

Finally, these tensions may reflect a particular genre of debates in the life sciences, and perhaps beyond, which Keller (1995:35–36) frames as

"a preference for interactionist, contextual, or global models over linear, causal, or 'master molecule' theories." Both models have been linked to gender, and both have implications for how we attempt to bridge the gulf between representing and intervening and how research trajectories are defined and organized. Those of us concerned with gender in science are concerned about how the gendered ordering of the world may be re represented in science with negative consequences for science and for women. This may be one such site.

What The Reproductive Sciences Did For Biology, Medicine, And Agriculture

The benefits the reproductive sciences conferred upon investigators and their professions varied considerably, and the discipline proved quite flexible during the period of coalescence. As a new line of work within American academic biology, the reproductive sciences provided several clear benefits to this growing academic profession and discipline. The reproductive sciences emerged as biologists were seeking to expand the boundaries of their discipline (Pauly 1984). By about 1910, biologists had secured their academic niches but still needed to incorporate popular new lines of work within the field. The reproductive sciences filled the bill. First and foremost, the reproductive sciences offered both experimental and biochemical avenues of research—the nascent paradigms or approaches in biological work. It thus could link biology with important and highly fundable research directions in medicine yet remain under biological auspices. Both biology and medicine could autonomously pursue the reproductive sciences yet benefit from the exchanges across professions. For biology this meant that biochemical approaches—including reproductive endocrinology—could be established as biological work (e.g., Kohler 1982). Moreover, because of socially motivated funding and the activities of biologists within funding forums, the reproductive sciences became a fundable line of work in biology between the two world wars, when nonmedical research was not often externally sponsored (Dupree 1957).

The benefits of the reproductive sciences to medical scientists and to medicine lay in two distinctive areas. First, they offered to medicine a highly scientific line of work as scientific medicine struggled to become the reigning medical paradigm. Second, it offered an extensive array of information and therapeutics for obstetricians, gynecologists, and urologists (who addressed male reproductive phenomena) regarding the diagnosis and treatment of functional (physiological) reproductive problems. These were among the first real therapeutic alternatives to surgery in these specialties. As in biology, the reproductive sciences offered an experimental and biochemical line of work to reformist medical scientists who sought to estab-

lish scientific medicine both within the profession and as the profession. It offered strong links with the nascent field of general endocrinology, which, despite accusations of quackery, provided highly successful functional therapeutic interventions in diseases that had plagued medicine for centuries, such as diabetes and myxedema.

The reproductive sciences in medicine were also fundable, sharing sponsorship with biology, for example, in the NRC Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, and developing their own funding sources, such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Particularly attractive for medical reproductive scientists were the direct linkages of their work to extant specialties of obstetrics and gynecology. The reproductive sciences in medicine could be both basic and clinical, doubly furthering the mission of scientific medicine.

Leonardo (1944:374–76) offered a list of twenty-one advances that reproductive endocrinology provided, including an early pregnancy test, a test for hydatid moles (a serious complication of pregnancy), a hormone treatment for gonorrheal vulvovaginitis in children, a method of determining whether ovulation has occurred (endometrial biopsy), an understanding of anovular menstruation, potential hormonal treatments for lactation, prevention of miscarriage, absence of menstruation and postpartum hemorrhage, treatments for dysmenorrhea, and an understanding of mittelschmertz (intermenstrual pain) as due to ovulation.^[54] Corner (1981) also established that miscarriages are commonly the result of problems of the fetus rather than maternal pathology, which had typically been blamed. Papanicolaou did extensive work toward the use of the vaginal smear in the diagnosis of cervical and uterine malignancy.^[55] Evans clarified the role of vitamins in reproductive processes, including pregnancy (Amoroso and Corner 1975). Hartman (1933, 1936, 1937) determined the timing of ovulation and fertility in women, publishing his findings as "Catholic Advice on the Safe Period." Fertility and sterility diagnostics and therapeutics became important medical offerings (e.g., Reynolds and Macomber 1924; McLaughlin 1982).

This list of marketable products and services is most impressive. It also answers the question of what the reproductive sciences did for women and men, because neither clinicians nor medical researchers consulted in any organized fashion with patients of either sex about their wants and needs. Not all of these treatments proved efficacious or even safe in the long run; some were clearly carcinogenic, such as DES (administered to women and beef cattle), which was also teratogenic for male and female offspring (e.g., Bell 1995; Marcus 1995). Male hormones such as Hombreol did not last long on the mass market (Oudshoorn 1994). Even today, extensive efforts are made to protect men against unnecessary exposure to hormones (Rosenblatt 1997). No such preemptive concerns are focused

on women's exposure, and the safety of estrogen therapy in menopause and the risks of contraceptive hormones are still actively contested (see chapter 8).

In agriculture as in medicine, reformers sought to make agricultural research and practice more scientific. In animal agriculture in particular, reproductive scientists spearheaded that reform movement. Here again the benefits of the reproductive sciences had two basic thrusts: to make animal agricultural research more scientific, and to provide means of improving animal production. In animal agriculture, however, scientific approaches had yielded fewer prior benefits, with the exception of some control over diseases.^[56] By and large, practitioners of animal agriculture had been practical husbandmen focused on particular animals and were not themselves scientifically trained. Nor did their audiences or markets for new knowledge—ranchers, herders, and breeders—see animal science as particularly promising. Thus the new animal agricultural scientists had to simultaneously build a foundation for their science within the agricultural academies and develop audiences, sponsors, and consumers for their work in the wider food animal industry (cf. Rosenberg 1976). Reproductive animal science helped them to do both.^[57]

The benefits of reproductive science in herd animal agricultural practice included diagnostics, therapeutics, and, most significant, new technologies that drastically improved animal production. Diagnostics included pregnancy tests, sperm potency tests, and means of assessing time of ovulation and fertility. Because fine animals do not necessarily produce fine sperm, sperm evaluation is extremely important for both natural and artificial insemination (Greep and Koblinsky 1977; Herman 1981). Therapeutics included improved understandings of nutritional and vitamin needs for reproduction in domestic species (e.g., Cole and Cupps 1959) and a National Research Council program of research on infectious abortion in cattle (Bowman 1935).

Two key interventions led to improved animal production. First, chicken ranching was transformed from a cottage industry to a factory-based industry, "turning each hen into a mechanical oviduct" by electric light and heating in hen houses that extended circadian rhythms and "kept 'the girls' working well into the night and through their seasonal 'winter pause.'" Hens were also stripped of their maternal functions through the use of kerosene and electric brooders to keep chicks warm. The artificial incubator also allowed flock manipulations so that both chickens and eggs could be standardized (Bugos 1992:133–34). In terms of productivity, these were very successful external manipulations of reproductive processes.

Second, technoscience innovations, notably artificial insemination, also improved production of herd animals and animal science itself (Phillips 1947; Reingold 1982; Brackett, Seidel, and Seidel 1981).^[58] Successful appli-

cation of the technique required means of obtaining, evaluating, preserving, and delivering sperm in a timely fashion, along with assessing fertility in the female (Herman 1981). A bull can "cover," or fertilize, thirty to fifty cows per year under average "natural" conditions. By 1947, using artificial insemination, one bull could impregnate five hundred to a thousand cows per year (Phillips 1947:113). By 1979, the potential number of calves per bull per year was fifty thousand (Reingold 1982:153). While artificial insemination was begun before World War II, large-scale practice did not occur until afterward (Herman 1981; Phillips 1947). It benefited especially from the wartime cryogenics research of Parkes and others in Britain, which dramatically facilitated the transportation of semen (Parkes 1985; Polge 1994).

Improvements in genetics, especially principles for selecting "good" sperm donors and receptors, were fundamentally connected with artificial insemination after about 1925. Sewell Wright's early 1920s statistical work on guinea pig genetics was central to these developments, and it was applied to animal agriculture most notably by Jay Lush.^[59] Applied genetics elaborated on the variation of continuously distributed traits in a population, carrying over what was known about rapidly reproducing laboratory species such as fruit flies, guinea pigs, and rats to the much slower reproduction of large food and farm animals. New statistical techniques made it possible to predict breeding values or merit and analyze breeding programs. These have now, of course, been extensively computerized, and genetic fantasies include a "Bovine Nirvana" of optimal genotypes for different environments.^[60] Agricultural scientists' work on reproduction prior to World War II also included preliminary investigations of hormonal treatments for superovulation (for twinning or multiple embryo production) and for synchronizing estrus in herds for efficient artificial insemination, embryo transfer, sex determination of sperm and embryos, and multiple embryo implantation.

Figure 6 shows the interrelation of these technologies based on the reproductive sciences in animal agriculture, vividly demonstrating rationalization of the means of (re)production.^[61] Intense controversy emerged in agriculture in the 1970s regarding the use of reproductive hormone DES as a food additive for beef cattle. Despite being declared carcinogenic and recalled by the FDA, the hormone continued to be used, leading to a major national scandal (Marcus 1995). The consequences for humans of ingesting hormone-laced meats, such as increased rates of breast cancer and precocious development of breasts in very young prepubescent girls, remain highly contested.

The benefits of the reproductive sciences in agriculture, especially artificial insemination and the "new" reproductive technologies, paralleled the

Figure 6.
Reproductive technologies in animal agriculture (Reingold 1982: 152).
Photograph by permission of the Rockefeller Archives Center.

development of safe and effective surgery in medicine—the first significant improvements over folk practices. The reproductive sciences so improved the capacity for animal production that they simultaneously established animal science qua science in agriculture and organized audiences, sponsors, markets, and consumers of scientific research. Practical husbandmen in agricultural academies gave way to scientists who had practical offerings for their audiences. One stockman assessing animal agriculture concluded,

"Paramount to remaining in a competitive position will be research and more research. ... The land-grant [agricultural university] system becomes more important than ever before" (Pope 1980:70).

Conclusions

During the period 1925–40, the reproductive sciences enterprise coalesced around reproductive endocrinology. This was manifest throughout the discipline in biology, medicine, and agriculture as reproductive endocrinology became the "model work" and core activity of the enterprise. Researchers in the United States achieved supremacy, largely through reproductive endocrinological investigations collected in what became the bible of reproductive endocrinology during the mid-twentieth century, Sex and Internal Secretions (Allen, ed., 1932, 1939; Young 1961).

The intersection of investigators from biology, medicine, and provided many advantages to participants because each was sufficiently established with their own audiences, sponsors, markets, and consumers bound to them by tradition and interest. These were relations of relative equals, bound together through their boundary crossings. The reproductive sciences provided biologists with a new line of research as they sought to expand their discipline. They provided medicine with a wide array of nonsurgical diagnostics and therapeutics for functional reproductive problems, especially pharmaceutical hormonal products. They provided agriculture with revolutionary reproductive technologies that dramatically rationalized and industrialized animal production.

Such enhanced control over human and nonhuman life through rationalizing and industrializing processes is the mark of modernity. For reproductive scientists, the salience of the human/nonhuman distinction ebbs as the technoscientific products and services they have created are applied to both. However, feedback loops are not limited to hormones. Some of these technoscientific products pioneered during the coalescence period have, in effect, boomeranged. For example, DES, which reached the marketplace in 1940, caused serious problems in women, their male and female offspring, and beef cattle through its carcinogenicity and teratogenicity. These and related controversies have shaped the development of the reproductive sciences ever since and are discussed at length in chapter 8. The desire for enhanced rational control and improvement of social life through the reproductive sciences was also central to the negotiations between reproductive scientists and birth control advocates, as is discussed next.

Chapter Six
Negotiating the Contraceptive Quid pro Quo
Birth Control Advocates and Reproductive Scientists, 1910–63

In the arena of reproduction in the United States throughout the twentieth century, the social worlds that have mattered most to the development of the reproductive sciences have been those of birth control advocates. These included divergent groups such as feminists, physicians, eugenicists, and demographers. From 1910 to 1963, relations between reproductive scientists and various birth control advocates were exceptionally complex and changing, while at the same time extraordinary reconfigurations were also occurring within each grouping. In what became an intimate dance of realignment, these once distinctive and often oppositional social worlds were reconstituted, transformed, and ultimately integrated, if not fused, through a quid pro quo that met each group's revised needs and goals. The story of these changes is complicated and rife with contradictions and conflicts. None of these multiple worlds was monolithic, nor were they ever fully segregated since their boundaries were permeable. This chapter offers a classic story of the development of "scientific solutions" to the major "problem of sex" in modernity: unwanted pregnancy.

In 1915, in a "frenzy of renown" provoked by feminist activists, the birth control cause hit the major American newspapers and magazines with a force not again equaled for twenty years. Later in the decade, advocates began speaking out, organizing, setting up clinics, distributing illegal birth control information and devices, and seeking improved means of contraception.^[1] Then, between roughly 1920 and 1945, the very nature of modern contraception was negotiated between reproductive scientists and several varieties of birth control advocates. The reproductive scientists ultimately captured definitional authority over what would constitute modern contraception. After endless petitioning by birth control advocates to produce and test improved, simple contraceptives, reproductive scientists finally

agreed to play the contraceptive research game, but only on their own "basic" research terms. That is, to recruit reproductive scientists into the birth control arena, the means of contraception had to be made scientific. Here the process of professional transformation of lay problems to meet professional requirements is fundamental. As Latour (1987) notes, scientists "should be" seen as the driving force even when they are enlisted by others. Who was enlisting whom in this instance is, contra Latour, problematic. Regardless, the power of the culture of science is vivid here. Ultimately it pervaded the worlds of birth control, eugenics, and population control.

It is crucial to remember how very radical birth control was early in this century in the United States. Women were not full citizens with voting rights until five years after Margaret Sanger's first arrest in 1915 for distribution of contraceptives. Distribution to unmarried people was not legal in all of the states until 1972, the year before the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. For most of the twentieth century, birth control has been at least as charged and controversial an issue as abortion is now. In many ways the moral propriety of contraception remains the underlying and contested issue: Does using contraception mark women and girls as immoral? What is "natural" for the heterosexual couple? Certainly it is here we see the struggles concerning what Foucault (1978:103–5) described as the "socialization of procreative behavior" and the construction of "the Malthusian couple" as a target and anchor point "for the ventures of knowledge."

From 1920 to 1945, reproductive scientists used several strategies to assert their legitimacy, autonomy, and authority to their often insistent market audience of birth control advocates. First, they carefully distinguished reproductive research from contraceptive research and refused to participate in studies of "simple" contraceptives (such as spermicides, douches, and diaphragms), marginalizing any reproductive scientists who did so.^[2] Second, they argued for basic research as the ultimate source of modern contraception and made token offerings from their "basic" research work (such as accurate information on the timing of ovulation). Third, they redirected contraceptive research toward "scientific" methods that would utilize basic reproductive science (hormonal contraception, spermatoxins, IUDs, and sterilization by radiation).

In short, reproductive scientists were successful in insisting upon the culture of science, which operated as what Bijker (1987) has recently called a "technological frame." Such a "frame of meaning" can come to be associated with technologies (such as contraception) positioned among multiple social groups/social worlds. A technological frame—in this instance the primacy of the culture of science within the contraceptive research world—then further guides and shapes the development of those technologies.

Through deployment of the culture of science, reproductive scientists

sought to protect and promote the legitimacy, autonomy, and "basic" nature of their work and to simultaneously gain considerable funding and support. By about 1945, a quid pro quo between the reproductive sciences and birth control worlds was established. Through the relations and negotiations among and about birth control advocates, reproductive scientists, hormones, foundations, laboratories, the National Research Council, primates, and others between about 1925 and 1945, a congruence of interests was arrived at that adequately "fit" the changed and changing needs of the major actors in the arena. In the 1950s and 1960s, the quid pro quo began to consolidate as reproductive scientists (largely outside the academy) produced the major modern scientific means of contraception—birth control pills, IUDs, injectable hormones, and improved means of sterilization. The working out of this quid pro quo, prior to and fundamental for the actual development of modern scientific contraception, is the focus of this chapter.

In addition to social worlds and arenas analysis through which it was generated, this chapter also illustrates other recent developments in the social construction of technology.^[3] Several emphases are especially important: (1) examining the earliest moments in the making of the technology; (2) analyzing the interests and commitments built into the actual design of the technology by analyzing all the engaged social worlds, their perspectives and commitments, including their interpretations of the technology itself (interpretive flexibility); (3) taking the technology itself to include the eventual institutional distribution, regulatory, and other related systems or networks; and (4) attending to processes of closure when interpretive flexibility supposedly vanishes. Both Woolgar's (1991) key point that we can examine how technologies configure their users and Latour's (1991) notion that technology is society made durable have long histories in feminist technoscience studies (e.g., Cockburn 1985; Wajcman 1995). They resound here as well. Configuring women as the primary users of contraceptive technologies was, in fact, a core goal of population control groups. Callon's (1991) darker point that these are often techno-economic networks and often close to irreversible also pertains. Contraceptives are, after all, what Foucault termed "disciplinary technologies" (Rabinow 1984:17). The reproductive arena was full of conflict from the beginning. Over the decades, further conflicts have been generated as the implicated actors—women users of scientific contraception—have organized resistance and set new agendas.^[4] The arena remains conflictful today (Clarke 1997), and closure is not necessarily permanent where controversy lurks (e.g., Hard 1993).

I begin with a brief historical orientation to various technologies of contraception, followed by an overview of the key birth control movements: lay, medical, and social/academic groups, including changes in the kinds

of contraceptives these groups advocated from 1925 to 1945. Third is an extended analysis of the responses of reproductive scientists to the ongoing demands of these birth control advocates that scientists do contraceptive research. Here I focus on the specific strategies reproductive scientists used to manage these recalcitrant markets. Finally I examine the quid pro quo that fused the reproductive sciences and birth control and population control advocates into a shared arena where most still dwell today.

Contraceptive Technologies: A Historical Overview

The following list documents the major means of contraception, with the year of first development; the dates refer to the introduction of these means, not their general availability.

In premodern and early modern times (and in places where similar conditions still obtain today), there was often fairly extensive knowledge of contraceptives and abortifacients, mostly of plant origins. This knowledge was communicated through both oral traditions and printed texts (e.g., herbals).^[5] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the distribution of information about these means of reproductive control was curtailed; the topics were deleted from physicians' texts and given less coverage in herbalist works. The early nineteenth century saw even further limitations on access to such knowledge (Riddle 1992:160). But in the United States by the 1830s and 1840s, linked in part to the popular health movement of the Jacksonian era, this knowledge began traveling again. It often did so through newspaper advertisements and printed brochures that hawked both older approaches and newer devices such as douches, "womb veils," and "female protectors" (probably vaginal sponges). Abortionists and abortifacients were also advertised and increasingly utilized. The late nineteenth century also saw a minor transformation of contraception due to both the vulcanization of rubber (used in condoms and diaphragms) and the development of surgical sterilization (thanks to anesthesia and asepsis).^[6] The social "fact" that most powerfully demonstrates the effectiveness of these and other methods such as coitus interruptus is that the average birth rate among white native-born married women dropped by almost half over the

nineteenth century, from 7.04 in 1800 to 3.56 in 1900 (Brodie 1994:2). In the past as well as the present, most means of contraception listed above were intended for female users.

However, the last decades of the nineteenth century also saw the rise of a number of "social purity" movements aimed at criminalizing reproductive control and disempowering women, whether or not by direct intent. Many of the means of reproductive control had been commercialized, and opponents could point to increased rates of vice, prostitution, and other "social ills," claiming that these were promoted by women's recent access to means of contraception. Campaigns against both abortion and contraception were led largely by white, middle-class, professional men, many of them physicians. Federal and state legislation and judicial decisions criminalized both abortion (which had been legal before "quickening" for over two centuries) and marked contraception as "obscene" (Brodie 1994; Mohr 1978).

Despite the dates on the chart, in the United States birth control was essentially illegal from about 1873 until 1936, and much later in some states. A federal law, the Comstock Act of 1873, made it illegal to put through the mails any contraceptive advice, device, or information, and the subject was then omitted from new editions of books in which it had appeared. The Comstock Act, aimed largely at controlling vice and prostitution, explicitly defined "the prevention of conception" as obscene, and the law prohibited the mailing of obscene matter. The mails had been (and may well have continued to be) the primary means of distribution of birth control (including abortifacients) for some decades. A variety of state and local statutes also prohibited distribution of contraceptive devices and information.

Twentieth-century birth control advocates mounted many challenges to such laws. Margaret Sanger was especially active, drawing on her leftist roots and allies to mount direct actions against Comstockery. Her arrest with her sister, their related trials and those of other activists, their imprisonment, their forced feeding, but especially their powerful arguments for birth control became part of the "daily news" in 1915 and remained visible for years. The most important early decision on the legality of contraception was made in New York in 1919 when a state court permitted physicians to provide contraceptive advice, but only "to cure or prevent disease" (McCann 1994). The roots of Roe v. Wade , the Supreme Court decision of 1973 that made the choice of abortion a matter between a woman and her physician, go back to this earlier decision. The next major legal change did not occur until 1936, when Judge Augustus Hand of a federal appeals court gave doctors the right to advise and prescribe contraception under federal law. This case dealt with seized imported diaphragms destined for a birth control clinic. Judge Hand ruled that while the language of the Comstock Act was uncompromising with regard to contraceptive devices and infor-

mation, if in 1873 Congress had had available the clinical data on the dangers of pregnancy and the safety of contraceptive practice that were available in 1936, birth control would not have been classified as an obscenity. But state and local statutes remained, impairing physicians' prescription of diaphragms and other means of contraception well into the 1960s. The final two Supreme Court cases focused on legalizing the distribution of contraceptives were Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which stated that the private use of contraception by married Americans is an inherent constitutional right, and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which extended the right of contraceptive practice to the unmarried (Dienes 1972; Chesler 1992:376). Not until 1977 did the Supreme Court rule that advertisement and display of contraceptives could not be prohibited. Only since the advent of AIDS, however, have such ads, especially for condoms, appeared in popular magazines. Television networks still refuse to broadcast them (Gamson 1990:271–75).

Despite the increase of birth control activism in the early years of the century, the next round of development and improvement of contraceptives did not begin until the 1920s and 1930s, when better diaphragms, spermicides, douches, cervical caps, and IUDs became available. Importantly, these were the results of birth control advocates' efforts and were not technoscientific products of the modern reproductive sciences that only became available decades later during what became known as the "contraceptive revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s. Then the Pill, new plastic IUDs, and injectable hormonal contraception became available. Continued efforts at technical improvement in the 1980s and 1990s produced implantable hormonal contraceptives such as Norplant, a new over-the-counter spermicidal sponge, the abortion pill RU486 (variants of which are also used as "morning after" hormonal interventions to prevent implantation), and a variety of immunological "vaccines" now in development (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990).

My focus in this chapter is especially on the years 1925–63, which saw the shift from what I call "simple" to "scientific" means of contraception (see Table 7). While this classification is not perfect, it is reasonably easy to divide all the available means of contraception into these two main groups. Simple means include spermicides (jellies, creams, foams), barrier methods (condoms, diaphragms, cervical caps, vaginal pessaries, vaginal sponges), douches, the rhythm or "safe period" methods, testicular "heat" methods, and herbal treatments (Langley 1973). These are low-technology means of contraception, though many did require some science to formulate, test, and produce.^[7] Simple means are indeed relatively simple to use. Control lies in the hands of the user; use can be discontinued at any time; they can usually be used or not at the time of a given intercourse; the effects are localized to the reproductive system; and most are considered safe enough

to be distributed over the counter.^[8] Although virtually all of these simple methods existed by 1915–20, their availability was quite limited until after World War II, and even later in some regions (Gordon 1976). Scientists typically view them as nonscientific, derived instead from clinical practice and "applied" research. And scientists' perspectives are of special concern in the negotiations.

Modern scientific means of contraception include birth control pills, plastic IUDs, surgical sterilization, immunological means (vaccines), and injectable and implantable hormonal contraceptives (e.g., Depo-Provera and Norplant). These are high-technology methods. Hormonal methods (pills, injectables, and implantables) are systemic; sterilization was then and must still be considered permanent and involves major surgery (under general anesthesia) for the female; IUDs must be inserted by specially trained personnel. All require medical intervention for initiation, monitoring for safety, or removal. All derive from extensive "basic" research. According to the FDA, none can be distributed safely over the counter.^[9] Of these high-technology "scientific" methods, only sterilization, spermatoxins, and IUDs were available prior to 1960, and then only on a very limited basis (Langley 1973). This chapter is concerned with the cumulative shift from advocacy and production of simple means of contraception to complex, scientific

means and the divergent ways the heterogeneous social worlds concerned with contraception were involved in this shift.

Birth Control Movements

This section offers a substantial discussion of the three major birth control advocacy groups or social worlds in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century: lay, medical, and social/academic (eugenicist and neo-Malthusian) groups. I emphasize each group's specific patterns of contraceptive advocacy (Berkman 1980), referring to its preferred means of contraception and the rationales offered for those choices. I examine both contraceptive advocacy of extant methods and contraceptive research advocacy of new and/or improved methods. Different constituencies within birth control and reproductive research worlds preferred different means of contraception, at different times, for different categories of users, and for a wide variety of reasons.

Lay Birth Control Movements

The lay birth control movements of the first half of this century became organized phenomena composed of many divergent groups ca. 1915.^[10] Initially, decentralized groups appeared on the grassroots level in many areas of the country, mostly deriving from progressive labor and socialist groups, and including such personages as Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman. Sanger, herself a nurse, had come to advocate what she ultimately named "birth control" through treating women who were sick and dying after undergoing abortions to prevent unwanted children. Many women turned to her as a nurse for birth control information when they did not dare ask their physicians (Sanger 1938/1971). Through the work of her birth control clinic, her arrests, and her speaking tours between 1915 and 1917, Sanger became the leader of the lay (nonphysician and nonscientist) movement and remained a key actor for many decades (Chesler 1992). World War I gave birth control a boost through massive distribution of contraceptive information and condoms to stem the tide of venereal disease among soldiers. In a Baltimore study, prewar sales of condoms were estimated at 2 to 3 million per year; postwar (mid-1920s) annual sales were about 6.5 million (Gordon 1976:206).

During the 1920s, just after women obtained the vote, birth control could have become the next central feminist issue. However, the decade following World War I was largely one of conservatism and antifeminism. The major women's groups were (re)focusing on two streams of feminist work. One group sought to sustain women's citizenship and seek equal

rights via the League of Women Voters and the National Women's Party. A second focused on women's work and maternal and infant health via the Children's and Women's Bureaus of the Department of Labor and the federal Sheppard-Towner Act, which provided, between 1922 and 1929, what we now would call "well baby clinic care" at little or no cost. Women active in these latter efforts have become known in recent scholarship as "welfare feminists." They were mostly white, middle-class women who sought state sponsorship and protection for all women, especially (but not only) in their capacities as mothers (e.g., Fildes, Marks, and Marland 1992). The lay birth control movement became the third stream of feminist work, but the birth control cause was still considered so radical in the 1920s that neither the civil rights nor the welfare feminist groups would publicly support it (McCann 1994).

In 1921 Margaret Sanger and colleagues founded the American Birth Control League (hereafter the ABC League). By 1926 it claimed thirty-seven thousand members, mostly women (Cott 1987:91). Their main strategy was to open local birth control clinics and provide, under medical guidance, contraception to all women who sought it. Sanger's ultimately successful strategy enrolled both physicians and academic scientists, who were among the first eugenicists to support contraception. Sanger explicitly deployed the academic biological scientists (including Raymond Pearl, Edward M. East, and Clarence C. Little) to limit the authority of physicians in the merging and expanding birth control movements. Her rhetoric for contraceptive advocacy simultaneously shifted from enhancing women's bodily autonomy to producing better babies (McCann 1994:120–21). Through such alliances, the birth control movement became a more liberal and centralized cause, increasingly shorn of its feminist roots (Gordon 1976:238).

The other major, and competing, lay birth control movement organization and strategy was the National Birth Control League, founded in 1917. Led by Mary Ware Dennett, this group focused on legal reform, seeking both federal and state-by-state repeal of the prohibitions on contraception as obscene. They explicitly rejected Sanger's direct-action strategy of providing birth control and opening clinics. Yet despite their more general conservatism, they opposed physician authority over diaphragm and other contraceptive use, arguing instead for women's autonomy in a more fully feminist fashion. However, it was the Sangerists' clinic-founding strategy that ultimately won the day for birth control. This strategy has endured under multiple names up to the present, but with considerable medical rather than feminist authority.^[11]

An ideology that families should have only as many children as they could afford started to emerge by the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Great Depression seems to have consolidated this "economic ethic of fertility" into the ultimate cultural arbiter of parenting decisions (McCann 1994). Ironically, the depression also challenged traditional economic (and eugenic) theory, since even many individuals of "good stock" found themselves thrust into poverty. Lay birth control theory then shifted emphasis from reducing the population of the inferior to helping the poor (including the "new" poor) to plan their families, using birth control, so that they could "afford" their children. This shift fit well with medical, clerical, and social work ideologies. The ABC League began to argue that birth control provided a flexible tool offering greater choice for all. Most women agreed: a survey conducted by Gallup in 1938 for the Ladies' Home Journal found that 79 percent of women favored birth control and 76 percent thought that family income was the most important consideration in decisions about having children (Ray and Gosling 1984–85:401).

In the 1930s, birth control clinics began offering infertility therapy as well as contraception, although efforts to include birth control clinics as part of the New Deal failed. Clinic rhetoric changed to "child spacing" or "family planning" rather than "birth control," seeking to include men in the project. Reflecting these changes, advocates who had founded the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939 as the new central organization for the movement changed its name in 1942 to Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Eugenicists in the birth control movement were strong advocates of this new name (Gordon 1976:344). Sanger hated it and resented the euphemism. She also specifically rejected encouraging the middle and upper classes to have more children (positive eugenics). However, by 1942 Sanger was sixty-three years old and tiring. Her influence was beginning to wane in her own organization, and she had also failed to cultivate a successor who shared her vision, much less a core bloc within the organization (Reed 1983:122; Chesler 1992:391–92). The radical-to-liberal tack of the birth control movement after the 1920s was reflected in the shrinking importance advocates placed on female reproductive autonomy (Gordon 1976). The lay female and often feminist birth control advocates who had been so active and outspoken in the 1910s and 1920s had gradually been replaced by professional men, including physicians, who were much more organizationally minded and quickly grasped the reins of leadership of the family planning/population–oriented infrastructure composed of over 350 clinics and advocacy groups in the United States and abroad (McCann 1994:175). World War II made birth control important to even more people than before.

By about 1945, the ideology and rhetoric of birth control, emphasizing women's rights and freedom for all to enjoy sexuality without fear of pregnancy, had changed to one promoting family planning that directly

addressed family economics, including men in its appeal. This new rhetoric of "planned parenthood" offered the possibility of bringing Taylorist approaches of "scientific planning" and "scientific management," drawn from the factory and marketplace, into the "private" sphere of the family (Banta 1993). If in business Taylorist rationalizations and efficiency allowed greater control over production processes, in the family they allowed greater control over reproductive processes—not only conception but also child spacing and family size. Sexuality, like the uncertainties of the marketplace, could be tamed and controlled to some degree. This kind of social engineering with the help of biology had actually been the ideal of Jacques Loeb, whose tradition and experiments Gregory Pincus (soon to be father of the Pill) chose to emulate (Pauly 1987).

The expansion of "family planning" services to include problems of infertility and sterility was also strategic. These services were designed to provide something for everyone—even the infertile and Roman Catholics—within the broader planned-parenthood frame (e.g., McLaughlin 1982). Consumer demand among the infertile was starting to develop (Pfeffer 1993). For the movement to progress, it also had somehow to address the tremendous Catholic opposition to contraception at the time. Obviously, such expansion widened social legitimacy. This aura of social beneficence clung to the "family planning" movement through its next shift to a "population control" rhetoric from 1945 to 1965 and beyond. The focus and rhetoric of controlling fertility and treating infertility thus served as a segue between two radically different movements.

Lay birth control proponents initially sought woman-controlled rather than male methods explicitly to enhance women's bodily autonomy. They cited "sex experts" who had condemned coitus interruptus and periodic abstinence as unhealthy and sexually repressive (Gordon 1976:xiv). Lay women's contraceptive advocacy initially focused on the doctor-fitted diaphragm with spermicides as the most effective means of contraception. The Sanger-led birth control movement introduced this method through hundreds of local clinics spread across the United States. But the safety and efficacy of these methods had not been studied in the United States. In 1923, Sanger therefore founded the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau as a department of the ABC League to serve as the research arm of the lay birth control movement. Several prominent scientists, most with eugenic goals, served on the advisory board.^[12]

Women physicians working in movement-sponsored clinics then did pioneering (and illegal) American research on diaphragms and other contraceptives (Kopp 1933; Reed 1983:106, 114–15, 124–26). The bureau began publishing its own Journal of Contraception in 1936. Since the diaphragm was more effective when used with spermicides, research and testing of

spermicides were then sought from reproductive scientists. Since there then was no consumer guarantee of product contents, efficacy, or safety, birth control advocates also sought government regulation of spermicidal products (Borell 1987a). Ironically, the contraceptive advocacy strategy of Margaret Sanger's ABC League gave the power to prescribe birth control to physicians, not to women. Another feminist organization, the Voluntary Parenthood League led by Mary Ware Dennett within the lay birth control movement, objected strongly, if unsuccessfully, to both the diaphragm-only and the prescription-only/"doctors-only" contraceptive advocacy of Sanger and her associates (Gordon 1976:292). However, Sanger had calculated that the price of acceptance of contraception by the medical world would be a medical monopoly on the new service. She also thought nothing could bring greater prestige to contraception than to have it associated with the magic of medical science (Reed 1983:101). On this point remember that Sanger was a credentialed public health nurse.

Through the 1930s, lay birth control advocates began to seek contraception that was cheaper and easier to use for the masses of women who had no access to a physician or clinic for diaphragm fitting and prescription. Considerable debate ensued about the best means of contraception for the "uneducated," "poor," "indigent," or "lower social types." Sanger's ABC League ferociously held out for the diaphragm. There were two other alternatives: new and improved "simple" methods (such as better spermicides that might also prevent sexually transmitted diseases) or new "scientific" methods (hormonal or immunological). Sanger's industrialist husband, Noah Slee, ended up producing spermicides to assure quality and availability for the ABC League clinics. A Canadian industrialist, Alvin Kaufman, also began working to produce improved simple contraceptives, as did American industrialist Clarence Gamble (Reed 1983:114, 221).

Birth control advocates ultimately looked to reproductive scientists for scientific solutions (Borell 1987a), seeking a "magic bullet" (Vaughn 1970) or a "technological fix" (Reed 1983). By 1940, lay birth control advocates were actively seeking more sophisticated and scientific means of contraception specifically for "the masses" both nationally and abroad: "The future of Birth Control necessitates the discovery of a method which is simple and effective and which does not require the cooperation of the individual" (Baskin 1934:94). A major strategy used by lay birth control advocates to recruit biomedical scientists and others to their cause was organizing both national and international conferences on birth control, neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, and population issues and inviting leading scientists to present their work. For example, Sanger chaired the World Population Conference of 1927 held in Geneva, one of the earliest moments when population control discourse began to supplant that of birth control (Horn

1994:50). Birth control advocates and sexologists also attended the International Congress for Sex Research in 1930, focused primarily on reproductive biological research.^[13] These were lively sites of intersection for all.

Medical Birth Control Movements

Physicians also had their "own" birth control movement and organizations, primarily the National Committee on Maternal Health (NCMH), which included clinicians as well as both medical and biological reproductive scientists. The goal of this organization was professional medical control over contraceptive practice as preventive medical work.^[14] But the NCMH represented only some physicians' positions. Prior to 1940, many if not most physicians opposed birth control. In 1924, Robert Latou Dickinson, founder of the NCMH, published "Contraception: A Medical Review of the Situation," which marked the beginning of informed, open discussion of birth control as clinical technique in the leading medical journals. This article was read to the American Gynecological Society and mailed to three thousand physicians in defiance of the Comstock Act. Dickinson sought to establish the subject as "susceptible of handling as clean science, with dignity, decency and directness" (Reed 1983:183–4).

Dickinson's other major strategy was to "wrest birth control from the hands of agitators"—essentially to take over the Sanger-led ABC League and its clinics and place them under "proper medical guidance." The physicians who worked in the many ABC League clinics around the country, mostly women, were somehow not "proper" enough or not "guiding" enough. However, Dickinson's and others' efforts in this direction were confronted directly by Clarence C. Little, geneticist, eugenicist, president of the University of Michigan, and member of the ABC League advisory board. Little stated: "The medical profession has not lived up to its obligations or opportunities in this particular matter ... [and] has not earned the right to take over the work in a field which others have tilled for them" (McCann 1994:83–84). Sanger drew deeply on the support of such "progressive eugenicists" as Little, East, and Pearl in her confrontations with organized medicine. She sought to maintain both as allies, playing them off against each other while she retained the key leadership role.^[15]

During the 1920s, the contraceptive advocacy of the NCMH was mixed. The committee sponsored two lines of research: basic studies of reproductive problems that might lead to improved contraception, and studies of simple chemical contraception—spermicides. Hoping to sponsor joint research, the NCMH approached the main sponsoring agency of the reproductive scientists, the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (NRC/CRPS). Its queries were summarily rejected. Because of the Comstock laws and refusals by reproductive scientists to un-

dertake such projects, the NCMH could not place its sponsored spermicide research in American universities. It therefore contracted with F. A. E. Crew's Department of Research in Animal Breeding at the University of Edinburgh (Borell 1987a; Reed 1983:242). The Bureau of Social Hygiene, supported by Rockefeller monies, funded the research.

By the 1930s, both the legitimacy and the legality of birth control expanded. Professional medicine responded. With pressure from Dickinson and the NCMH, the American Medical Association created a Committee on Contraception in 1935, in part as a response to the dangers of the totally unregulated contraceptive products industry. This was about a $250-million per year business, specializing in condoms and other means carefully billed as "disease prevention" devices.^[16] In 1937, thanks to considerable effort by the NCMH, this committee recommended an AMA-sponsored study of techniques and standards, promotion of birth control instruction in medical schools, and physican advice on contraception based "largely on the judgment and wishes of individual patients" (Reed 1983:122–24).

By this time, in the middle of the Great Depression, medical contraceptive advocacy was also changing. Many physicians formerly opposed to birth control, such as Kosmak of the AMA, now asserted that birth control did not reach those who needed it most—the indigent. Echoing eugenicists, physicians now asserted that the poor lacked clinic access and in any case were deemed incapable of learning "the birth control habit" required for effective diaphragm use. Other methods were therefore needed, and medical debate centered on what kinds of contraception these should be: "simple" or "scientific." Many physician advocates of birth control, like Dickinson, believed that "major progress would have to wait for breakthroughs in basic science that would provide methods requiring less motivation or skill from the user" (Reed 1983:190, 212–14).

At the core of these objections lay the culture of scientific medicine revealed in physicians' dislike of available simple methods of contraception. A medical journal editor spoke for a good part of the general public as well as his profession when he declared in 1943: "Caustic self-analysis leads to only one honest conclusion: candid physicians are ashamed of these messy makeshifts. ... [T]here is a sense of relative inadequacy ... nourished by the contemplation of these disreputable paraphernalia. The messy little gadgets, the pastes and creams and jellies [were simply] an embarrassment to the scientific mind" (Reed 1979:132). Yet other NCMH physicians, notably Robert Latou Dickinson and Clarence Gamble, argued for expanded research and application of such "simpler" methods. Reproductive scientist F. A. E. Crew agreed, noting that for a country like China, contraceptives should be based on materials available in coolies' pantries.^[17] Gamble, a physician and philanthropist, sought doctor-free contraception.

In 1934, Gamble's offer to fund a "Standards Program" for testing contraceptive product effectiveness through the NCMH was accepted. This became the NCMH's second spermicide research project, including the establishment of state and federal product regulations. Gamble established the R. L. Dickinson Research Fellowship in Chemistry at New York University in 1935, which was held by Leo Shedlovsky, Ph.D. Research focused on measuring the physical and chemical properties of the more than forty contraceptives then on the market (mostly spermicides). This was the first laboratory study of contraceptives in the United States, notable here because it was done in a chemistry department rather than a biology or medicine department. Reprints of Shedlovsky's work were sent to fifteen hundred teaching physicians throughout the United States as part of the NCMH effort to get the AMA Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry to issue reports on contraceptives as it already did on other drugs; the effort succeeded, and a major report was published in 1943 (Reed 1983:245–46).

As birth control became more legitimate and "scientific," both suited to medical science and increasingly under its professional control, hostility within the medical profession ebbed. Moreover, medical efforts to take over the birth control movement could certainly be said to have succeeded by 1950.

Social/Academic Movements: Eugenics and Neo-Malthusianism

Other social worlds concerned with birth control were eugenics and neo-Malthusian movements. Within and beyond the academy, across multiple disciplines and professions but probably most deeply based within biology, these two social movements were confronting birth control issues. Eugenics was a social and intellectual movement, begun in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, that sought to apply hereditarian principles of improved agricultural breeding to humans. Eugenicists hoped to breed "better" people through positive eugenic activities (increasing the reproduction of persons deemed "fit," or aristogenic) and negative eugenic activities (decreasing the reproduction of persons deemed "unfit," or cacogenic). Eugenic conceptions of fitness were deeply class- and race-based, focusing on increased reproduction among the Anglo-Saxon upper classes and decreased reproduction among the lower classes, both white (especially in England) and of color (especially in the United States and in British colonial regimes).^[18]

Most eugenicists initially opposed birth control for popular use during the early decades of this century, fearing that upper-class women would use it more effectively than would people of other classes, thereby reducing the numbers of the "fit" while the "unfit" multiplied unchecked. They viewed birth control solely as a technique for negative eugenics.^[19] Eugenicists' con-

traceptive advocacy had focused on negative eugenics since the turn of the century. Eugenicists advocated involuntary surgical sterilization of the "unfit" with institutionalized criminal, insane, and "feebleminded" people as targets of special legislation. But by the mid-1930s, such laws met with considerable opposition, especially after the Nazis copied and used them. Many eugenicists had also regarded such sterilizations as an ineffective strategy.^[20]

Demonstrating the diversities within these movements, several eugenicist strategists were also early birth control advocates. E. M. East, a Harvard biologist and member of the Advisory Board of Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau, was one. In 1925, he persuaded Sanger not to publish an attack on eugenicists in the Birth Control Review for failing to support contraception, arguing that she needed their support and that they, in time, would need her. East warned: "No matter what you say, birth control is only part of a eugenical program. It is a secondary aspect of a larger whole, but it is the key. The mere fact that so many eugenicists have not been able to think straight does not make the abstract subject itself any less valued" (Reed 1983:135). During the 1920s, other eugenicists sought evaluation of the eugenic value of contraception, including Simon Flexner, C. C. Little, and Adolph Meyer of the Committee on Eugenic Birth Control.^[21]

During the Great Depression era 1930s, more eugenicists and other social conservatives began to find contraception attractive, especially as birth control advocates exploited the issue of skyrocketing welfare costs. They talked much less of women controlling their bodies and much more of the need to "democratize" contraceptive practice—to spread it "down" from the upper and middle classes to the lower classes.^[22] Since the middle classes clearly would not stop practicing contraception, eugenicists concerned about differential fertility between classes believed that their best hope for altering "dysgenic" population trends was promoting birth control for the poor. How much this was also racialized varied among individuals and regionally (e.g., McCann 1994; Larson 1995).

Some eugenicists were swayed by Raymond Pearl's studies at Johns Hopkins of populations and reproduction by economic sector or class. In studies supported by the Milbank Fund and drawing on sophisticated Pearsonian statistics, Pearl demonstrated that the differences in fertility by class and race correlated with differences in access to and use of contraceptive information and technologies. Pearl's conclusions ran counter to current biological explanations and other social/cultural explanations (including Pearl's own beliefs) of the incapacity of the lower classes to practice contraception. The studies were therefore significant in convincing eugenicists of the need for broad-based access to contraceptives (Allen 1991; Notestein 1982). In Pearl's words, "Hitherto, everybody excepting the scientist had a chance at directing the course of human evolution. In the eugenics move-

ment an earnest attempt is being made to show that science is the only safe guide in respect to the most fundamental social problems." Pearl then sought changes in policy among the "agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations" toward providing contraceptive information (Allen 1991:235; Cooke 1997).

Under the influence of Fredrick Osborn, men who placed less stress on heredity and more on environment replaced the old leadership of the American Eugenics Society in the 1930s. Osborn said in 1937: "The question I want light on is how the spread of contraception can be carried on in such a way that it will give opportunities for contraceptive practice to those families who shouldn't have children without indoctrinating too much those families who should have more children?" Ideally, eugenicists would decide who should and who should not practice contraception. Osborn was anxious to cooperate with birth control advocates in spreading contraception among the poor, but he insisted that greater emphasis be placed on "positive" eugenics: "birth control" should be replaced by "family planning" and encouragement of large families for those who could afford them (Reed 1983:213, 136). Policing yet another boundary, Osborn also convinced Margaret Sanger to withdraw as a candidate for vice president of the Population Association of America, arguing that it should be a "scientific" organization (Notestein 1982:660).

In accepting voluntary birth control as a eugenic strategy, eugenicists themselves then ceded ground on both negative and positive eugenics. At that time sterilization was the only method by which to address directly the inheritance of dysgenic qualities. Moreover, eugenicists had to acknowledge the failure of "positive" eugenics. In short, eugenicists accepted birth control and population control because they had no other activist choices.^[23] Voluntarism rather than state compulsion seemed more likely to succeed in reducing the numbers of the "unfit." There was even talk of combining the ABC League and the American Eugenics Society (McCann 1994:181).

Neo-Malthusianism was the name used early in the twentieth century for the social and academic movement of those concerned with overpopulation, both numerically and proportionally by social class, who also supported birth control. As noted earlier, the term Malthusian was also used synonymously with what we now call birth control (as in Foucault's Malthusian couple). By 1940, neo-Malthusians had moved successfully into the scientific study of population phenomena as a means of promoting social policy, developing an elaborate institutional infrastructure for their new discipline of demography. The list on page 57 contains some of the key organizations and events in the movement's development. Its rhetoric shifted from neo-Malthusianism to population research to population control and demography.^[24]

At the organizing meeting for the Population Association for the United

States in 1930, 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. ... [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."^[25] However, neo-Malthusian population scientists were not in accord on contraceptive advocacy. They debated effectiveness, costs, and accessibility. Many population scientists asserted a direct correlation between socioeconomic status and the ability to nurture children in ways that remain too familiar. Many advocates of population control through contraception were also deeply racist, targeting lower-class and poor people and racial/ethnic groups of color both in the United States and abroad.^[26]

The period from 1920 to 1940 constituted the "emergence" era of the population enterprise, which coalesced between about 1940 and 1965.^[27] The British movement, which was larger and stronger than the American during the 1920s, focused primarily on colonial populations. British-ruled India had the first government-sponsored birth control clinic in the world, opened in 1930 (Hartmann 1987/1995). In the United States, organizing efforts focused on the academy and the philanthropic foundations. United States possessions were also the focus of birth control/population control programs; in the 1930s, a major program was established in Puerto Rico focusing on diaphragms, spermicides, and surgical sterilization (Ramirez de Arellano and Seipp 1983). This network was later enrolled to serve as the home base for testing the birth control pill prior to its approval for U.S. distribution (Oudshoorn 1994:122–37).

A number of reproductive and related scientists actively participated in the population establishment. For example, participants in the World Population Conference of 1927 included Leon Cole, C. C. Little, Adolph Meyer, Raymond Pearl, and J. Whitridge Williams (Hopkins gynecologist). Fellows and members of the Population Association of America included Little, Pearl, Dickinson (NCMH), L. B. Dunham (BSH), E. B. Wilson, Clark Wissler, and Robert Yerkes.^[28] Population concerns were raised in various media by these and a host of related organizations and demographers, generating wide cultural interest in population, and hence in reproductive issues more broadly.^[29] One of the key organizations in the present story is the Population Council, through which modern scientific IUDs (along with implantable hormonal contraceptives) were developed (Segal 1987), discussed next as a Rockefeller organization.

Rockefeller Philanthropy and Contraception

In addition to social movement groups committed to birth control and enhanced control over family size and composition, one of the major phil-

anthropic families of the twentieth century also manifested sustained commitments and a wide range of efforts in such directions. In some ways, Rockefeller involvement has been so powerful that it can easily be seen as on a par with social movement organizations as an actor in the arena. The Rockefeller-sponsored Bureau of Social Hygiene initiated such Rockefeller involvement in the birth control and population causes. In the 1920s, its commitment to birth control and population studies was thus not a wholly new direction. Like many other eugenics groups, Rockefeller interests shifted from contraception to population control (Allen 1981:253). The Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fund was supporting population research at the Scripps Institute in the 1920s (Notestein 1982:654). And as early as 1924, Raymond B. Fosdick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, had written to J. D. Rockefeller Jr.: "I believe that the problem of population constitutes one of the great perils of the future. ... Scientists are pointing hopefully to such methods as Mrs. Sanger and her associates are advocating" (Borell 1987a:66). Fosdick himself had served briefly as the general counsel of Sanger's ABC League (Harr and Johnson 1988:191). Such philanthropists' commitments were significant for reproductive scientists because these same funding sources were often simultaneously sponsoring their basic research. Some sponsors attempted to recruit reproductive scientists for research on specific contraceptive projects, while other sponsors provided liaisons between birth control advocates and reproductive scientists. Reproductive scientists were obliged by their reliance on such sponsors to respond, often awkwardly.

The Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH), funder of both the NRC/CRPS and the NCMH, was active in both liaison efforts and direct funding of contraceptive research. During her tenure as director of the BSH, Katherine Davis made numerous attempts to further such research.^[30] When she retired and L. B. Dunham took over as director in 1928, he was unsure about continued Rockefeller commitment to the birth control cause: "It seems to me that the project on spermatocides ... would lead to an extremely controversial field and one that is surcharged with theological politics. It seems to me that, necessary as that work is, it ought to be carried out as part and parcel of a larger research project by some medical center. Another course, it seems to me, might expose the Bureau to a lot of publicity of a nature that would lessen its general effectiveness."^[31] Dunham was quickly put in his new and "proper" place as a Rockefeller-funded birth control advocate by Raymond Fosdick of the Rockefeller Foundation, who vividly reasserted the Rockefeller commitment to contraception: "I do not share your feeling of [not] getting the Bureau into the controversial field of birth control. I think the Bureau ought to get into this field, and as a matter of fact it is in, and so is Mr. Rockefeller. Surveys of the type proposed by Dr. Dickinson

[on spermatocides] are enormously important and the Bureau exists for just that purpose ."^[32] Dunham then became a promoter of contraceptive research among reproductive scientists. For example, he set up a Conference on Birth Control in 1931. Guests included reproductive scientists Walter Cannon (Harvard Medical School and member of the NRC/CRPS) and Charles Stockard (Cornell Medical School researcher supported by the NRC/CRPS), as well as Henry Pratt Fairchild (demographer and president of the American Eugenics Society).^[33]

The BSH also sought to expand its funding of contraceptive research to include fresh efforts by reproductive scientists. Ruth Topping of the BSH talked about this goal at length on several occasions with Carl Hartman, who made numerous arguments for basic reproductive research as leading ultimately to contraceptive research (discussed in detail later in the chapter). Topping wrote to Dunham in 1931: "Might it not be possible to stimulate ... observation and experimentation [leading to contraception] among workers who are studying the reproductive cycle under grants from the [NRC/CRPS]? If some of these scientists became especially interested in the search for a contraceptive, the Bureau might later make supplemental grants."^[34] As we shall see, the NRC/CRPS refused such overtures. But the importance of such efforts by the BSH and the Rockefeller Foundation is that they added the voices of a major philanthropy and a major reproductive sciences funding source to the chorus of advocates attempting to engage American reproductive scientists in contraceptive research during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

In the 1950s, Rockefeller changed the form of its support for birth control. A key Rockefeller organization is the Population Council, through which modern scientific IUDs were developed. This organization was founded in 1952, and was funded through the direct commitments of John D. Rockefeller III, who despite being a board member, could not convince the Rockefeller Foundation of the importance of population control. At the time, the foundation was deeply involved in international agricultural reform and improvement, which, it was hoped, might eliminate the problem of "overpopulation" through production of adequate food. Moreover, the foundation per se had avoided directly supporting contraception and population projects for many years by funneling them through the BSH. After the BSH was terminated in 1933, the foundation had carefully avoided such responsibilities and had explicitly eschewed them during the McCarthy era, when it was under considerable scrutiny as a "liberal" organization. Instead, Rockefeller Foundation executives were pleased that other groups were shouldering this burden.^[35] The Population Council became, in fact, one of the sites of the implemented merger among birth control, eugenic, and population control groups.

A Synthesized Movement: Family Planning and Population Control

Family planning/population control became the banner or umbrella framework for an amalgam of birth control, eugenics, neo-Malthusian, and population/demographic movements and interests by about 1940, and by about 1950 it formed a fully articulated ideology (Gordon 1976:391). This banner provided excellent symbolic rhetoric for all of these groups. First, like the reproductive sciences, population control had developed a considerable scholarly scientific reputation, along with a well-organized institutional infrastructure (Allen 1991). Second, the terms family planning and population control omitted the words sex and birth control , sounded objective and scientific, and allowed racism to be expressed apparently neutrally concerning whole populations.^[36]

Population control organizers had considered the merger since the early 1930s. As Henry Pratt Fairchild said at the founding of the Population Association: "When this idea [for a Population Association] first came into my mind I was thinking about a possible merger of the Eugenics and Birth Control interests in the country, but now it is seen as a much bigger thing. ... It is feared by some that anything approaching consolidation may lose us support. There are some people who believe in eugenics, but not in birth control, and vice versa. We might lose some support on both sides, but would get it back from the united front we would present."^[37] And they did.

By 1934, greater coordination of effort among the constituent segments was already apparent: "There is clear evidence [of] greater coordination in the work of the [ABC] League, a sharper definition of program, and greater cooperation with such organizations as the National Committee on Maternal Health, the eugenics-focused Human Betterment Foundation in California, the National Committee on Federal Legislation [for Birth Control], the Population Association of America, and the American Eugenics Society."^[38] Further evidence of coordination and integration lies in the interlocking memberships and directorates of the multiple population, birth control, neo-Malthusian, and eugenics organizations, and in the new mission statements issued by these organizations. For example, the first Board of Directors of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America included former presidents of both the American Eugenics Society and the Race Betterment Conference.^[39] By 1953, American foundations had contributed over $3 million to the field of population study (Osborn 1967:368), and this was before the era of extensive government and foundation involvement and sponsorship (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976). The scale of private funding for population control was immeasurably greater in the 1930s, and especially after World War II, than it had been for orthodox eugenics (Allen 1991:254).

Fairchild made another statement about the merger to the annual meeting of the Birth Control Federation (successor to the ABC League) in 1940: "One of the outstanding features of the present conference is the practically universal acceptance of the fact that these two great movements have now come to such a thorough understanding and have drawn so close together as to be almost indistinguishable" (Gordon 1975:273). Within the birth control movement, those segments most supportive of eugenics and population control then became active around the International Planned Parenthood Federation, housed in the Eugenics Society building in London. Those in the middle of the road were active in the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, focused on the incorporation of reproductive control into state programs as a form of social planning and ultimately population control (Gordon 1976:342–47). Feminists and other progressives seem to have left the birth control/population control movement entirely at this time, or to have worked very locally in clinics providing direct access to birth control for women.

By the late 1930s, the birth control, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian movements had synthesized into a new "family planning and population control" movement. Sanger herself (1937:3–4) best captured the contraceptive advocacy of the newly synthesized movement in the quote that began this book. Sanger further argued: "We should place the scientists not only at the helm but on the bridge [of the movement] as captains to guide humanity." As we shall see, scientists were, by the end of World War II, almost ready to comply. Putting scientists at the helm transformed the nature of modern contraception.

Reproductive Scientists and Contraceptive Technologies

Responding to the loud and determined chorus of voices urging reproductive scientists into contraceptive research between 1925 and 1945, the scientists used three key strategies. They distinguished reproductive from contraceptive research; they argued with birth control advocates for basic research on reproduction from which applications such as contraception would flow; and they redirected contraceptive research from simple to scientific methods. It was eugenic arguments that first captured reproductive scientists' interest in birth control as a scientific problem (Borell 1987a), as many of them had both intellectual and organizational commitments to that movement. However, all of the initial voices seeking research on simple contraceptives were from the lay and medical birth control movements. The initial strategic response of reproductive scientists to these demanding yet illegitimate audiences was to turn a deaf ear.

First Strategy: Distinguishing Reproductive from Contraceptive Research

Reproductive scientists initially focused on distancing their enterprise from that of birth control advocates and establishing a clear set of distinctions between them. This strategy reflected both the general illegitimacy of the birth control movement (with its tattered but still present feminist garb in the 1920s) and reproductive scientists' own designation of contraceptive research as unattractive applied work. In 1920, reproductive scientists had strong hopes that their research area would become as prestigious as any other area of basic biology, a hope gradually abandoned over the next decades, especially after World War II.

Reproductive scientists worked hard to demarcate the boundaries of their work to exclude explicitly contraceptive research. Robert Latou Dickinson of the NCMH approached the NRC/CRPS on several occasions with a request to undertake contraceptive research. In 1924, he recounted one response he received:

A year ago we [the NCMH] tried to get some of our borderline sex problems, like sterility and information bearing on sex life in our histories, taken up by [the NRC/CRPS] and received a written answer that their Committee was only interested in animal research. Several months later when sex life of human beings was included in their studies we again tried to delimit our respective fields and suggested the whole subject be a matter of [joint] conference and allotment. Their meeting considered the matter and decided they need not coordinate the work as the Committee on Maternal Health had only to do with birth control.^[40]

At this point reproductive scientists in the NRC/CRPS rebuffed birth control research and any other research that the NCMH might have sought. While there was, in fact, considerable overlap in investigations sponsored by the two organizations, association with a birth control organization, even a medical one, was clearly not on their agenda.

Both the NRC/CRPS and the NCMH received support from Rockefeller philanthropies. A dozen years later, in 1936, the NCMH sought Rockefeller funding for sterilization and other research, including projects on both simple and scientific means of contraception, which the NRC/CRPS had refused to address.^[41] Warren Weaver, recently of the Rockefeller Foundation, then wrote to Robert Yerkes, chairman of NRC/CRPS since its inception in 1921. Weaver felt these projects "would appear to fall within the scope of the NRC/CRPS ... [yet] ... It is not clear to me whether such topics would be [so] viewed by your committee." Weaver even implied that if the NRC/CRPS would address the topics, its budget might be expanded accordingly.^[42] Here Yerkes's response to Weaver was the third rebuff of the

NCMH and such "human side" problems. Yerkes strongly reasserted the NRC/CRPS's clearly bounded research policy to Weaver:

Reference to [the NRC/CRPS] ... is not clearly indicated. The committee in question [the NCMH] is, like my own, composed of reputable specialists whose judgments are trustworthy. In my opinion, neither committee should be asked to advise concerning or endorse the program of the other. Inasmuch as the Committee on Maternal Health is concerned primarily with applied aspects of research on sex and reproduction, whereas the N.R.C. Committee has dealt almost exclusively with so-called fundamental problems in the biology of these subjects, I doubt that the N.R.C. Committee would favor support of such studies as are listed in your letter.^[43]

Finally, in 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation gave the NCMH funds for research that the NRC/CRPS refused to undertake, including studies of sperm morphology, spermatoxins, reproductive endocrinology, and sex cells (Reed 1983:269; see chapter 7).

The second element of the strategy of distinguishing reproductive from contraceptive research was refusing to participate in research on simple means of contraception such as spermicides and condemning any reproductive scientists who did so. The first two major studies of spermicides were undertaken in Great Britain because of the refusal of American scientists to undertake the work, combined with the restrictions of the Comstock Act. British scientists were also generally unenthusiastic about applied research on simple contraceptives (Soloway 1995). The outcomes of both studies demonstrate my point.

Cecil Voge conducted one study under the direction of F. A. E. Crew of the Animal Breeding Research Department of the University of Edinburgh. Voge's work focused on tests of extant spermicides to determine if there was a safe, highly effective one that would also work as a prophylactic against venereal diseases (a search that continues to this day; see Clarke 1997). Voge's project was sponsored by the NCMH and funded by the Rockefeller-supported BSH. Crew's department at Edinburgh was transformed between 1927 and 1930 into the Institute of Animal Genetics by a matching grant from the Rockefeller International Education Board that provided an endowed chair, buildings, and equipment (Hogben 1974:139). Apparently, Crew's approval of Voge's contraceptive research project was grudging, and his approval may well have been "induced" by his other Rockefeller grant. The NCMH's contraceptive advocacy here was for an "easily available chemical in a form that should keep in good condition over a long period of time and in all climates, and be so easy to use that the most ignorant woman in the Orient, the tropics, the rural outposts or the city slums might be protected."^[44] The Voge study, published in 1933, did

not produce such a "magic bullet" or miracle contraceptive, but sponsors considered it a great success in terms of establishing standards of safety and effectiveness.^[45]

Crew, however, had a very different reaction, calling Voge "a traitor to science."^[46] Despite having a doctorate in immunology, Voge (1933:11) had somehow crossed the invisible and shifting border into "applied" research. Crew then recommended that the NCMH cease to support Voge's work because his future as a research chemist was being jeopardized. Voge ultimately "fulfilled the worst fears of his colleagues" when he went into business as a consulting industrial chemist (Reed 1983:243). There was also some controversy about Voge's use of Baker's early research (Soloway 1995), discussed next.

The second spermicides study in Britain was sponsored by the Birth Control Investigation Committee, part of the British activist clinic movement, along with the British Eugenics Society and the American BSH and NCMH. Initially, reproductive scientist F. H. A. Marshall, then president of the Cambridge birth control clinic, tried to place the project in a lab at Cambridge University, but he was unsuccessful (Soloway 1995). Instead, in the late 1920s, John R. Baker, an ardent eugenicist of the Department of Zoology at Oxford, began examining the spermicidal value of pure chemicals, as well as testing extant means and vehicles used to deliver them vaginally (Baker 1930a,b, 1931a,b). According to one source, Baker assembled at Oxford a "team" of scientists in zoology, chemistry, physiology, and bacteriology and related both clinical and laboratory findings.^[47] Baker specified that the ideal contraceptive should be inexpensive and small; require no special appliance for insertion into the vagina; be unaffected by the ordinary range of climates; leave no trace on skin nor stain fabrics; contain no volatile or odorous substance; be nonirritating to the vagina, cervix, and penis; be without pharmaceutical effect if absorbed into the bloodstream; contain a substance reducing surface tension to ensure that the smallest crevices of the folds of the vagina are reached; be able to kill sperm at five-eights or lower concentration in the alkaline and acid test to avoid harm to mucous membranes; and be able to diffuse rapidly into the semen (Robertson 1989:84–85). These remain the key requirements for this common and simple contraceptive.

During the late 1930s, this work led to the development of a popular and highly effective spermicide called Volpar for vol untary par enthood (Borell 1987a). Baker, however, was forced to leave the Department of Zoology at Oxford when the director discovered the purpose of his experiments. (He was allowed to relocate to the Department of Pathology.) In Baker's own assessment, his contraceptive research was "rather prejudicial to his career" (Porter and Hall 1995:176). It was "permanently symbolized in his recollection of assembling his apparatus and reagents on a handcart

and trundling this from department to department," although he did remain in academic chemistry. Clarence Gamble then funded a research fellowship in chemistry at New York University to "complete the work done by Voge and Baker," focusing on spermicides available in the United States (Reed 1983:243–45).

In the United States, the NCMH made at least one attempt to "piggyback" applied spermicide research to ride on the back of "basic" sperm survival research. In 1938, the NCMH offered a grant to the Carnegie Department of Embryology to study the transport and viability of spermatozoa in the genital tracts of female dogs and monkeys.^[48] The department agreed, "provided work is designed specifically for study of the reproductive cycle and not for collateral problems of a social type."^[49] But in a personal letter to Carl Hartman of the Department of Embryology, Raymond Squier, then executive secretary of the NCMH, tried to remind Hartman that another reproductive scientist member of the NCMH (Earl Engle of Columbia) had discussed this matter privately with Hartman. The NCMH thought they had come to an understanding that spermicidal testing would be incorporated into the research. Squier said he was sure that Hartman understood that the NCMH could not afford to spend "$3000 simply on further study of the estrous cycle of dogs or other work on monkeys having no relation at all to possible practical applications for the control of human reproduction."^[50]

Despite his own long-term commitments to the birth control movement, Hartman's response fell fully within the strategy of reproductive scientists regarding their birth control audiences: he refused to incorporate the contraceptive research. He wrote to the head of the Carnegie Department of Embryology: "I assured Squier that we could work on any phase of pure science that we wished, leaving propaganda and 'applications or social implications' for organizations like his. As to effect of chemical or physical agents on sperms—we don't propose to touch that subject unless we get a new 'lead' that justifies [it]. ... What we shall do is study sperm survival under normal conditions—there will be little time for anything else."^[51] Even Hartman, a former chairman for research of the NCMH (from 1934 to 1937), would not bend the rules or cross the boundaries of the Carnegie Department of Embryology specifically or of the basic reproductive research enterprise generally.^[52]

Reproductive scientists' overall strategy of distinguishing reproductive research from contraceptive research was successful for them, especially in highlighting distinctions between applied and basic research and in clarifying their basic research identity. The career trajectories of reproductive scientists who did undertake research on simple contraceptives vividly demonstrated that there was an applied/basic boundary that could not be crossed without negative consequences. Not only was birth control research

socially illegitimate; it was also scientifically marginal or illegitimate—especially when it focused on simple methods.

Second Strategy: Arguing for Basic Reproductive Research

A corollary second strategy reproductive scientists used in response to birth control advocates was arguing for basic research as both the prerequisite for and the ultimate source of improved means of contraception. Here reproductive scientists turned the tables and attempted to recruit birth control advocates into providing financial and other support for basic reproductive research. Again, they were successful in the long run.

Carl Hartman at Hopkins, a major reproductive scientist active in birth control worlds, articulated this strategy very clearly when queried by Ruth Topping, a staff member of the Bureau of Social Hygiene:

When I asked Dr. Hartman in what directions research for a better contraceptive might most profitably be conducted, he recommended an indirect rather than a direct approach to the problem. After pointing out the vast amount of research being done in this country in the physiology of reproduction, particularly in relation to glandular activity, he expressed the opinion that if some of the outstanding workers in this field could be persuaded to keep contraceptive possibilities in mind in connection with their observation of the reproductive process, some of them might discover ways and means of interrupting the process at given points or under given conditions. These observations might narrow the lines along which specific research might then be carried on.

Here Hartman was speculating on the possibility of hormonal contraception emerging from reproductive endocrinological investigations. He further suggested that such work might well be carried on at or in connection with agricultural experiment stations, attempting to place it in supposedly intrinsically "applied" settings rather than "basic" reproductive biology labs.^[53]

Similar arguments were made by Lillie of Chicago and Crew of Edinburgh.^[54] In case Topping and other birth control advocates did not understand the distinction between basic and applied research, Crew clarified it: "It is impossible, in Dr. Crew's opinion, to make definite programs in scientific research. 'The real scientist is not an employee,' he said. 'He starts out to find something but may discover something on the way that changes the whole course of his investigations. He can't have someone pulling strings and keeping him to a course.'"^[55] This is a classic argument for both basic research and the autonomy of the scientific enterprise.^[56] Medical reproductive scientists made similar arguments for basic research, including Earl Engle, who bluntly exclaimed, "We don't give a damn about contracep-

tion. We want a study of basic factors in human reproduction," and Howard Taylor, who complained that "birth control was a banal topic for the first-class clinician." Even a physician birth control advocate such as Dickinson believed that "major progress would have to wait for breakthroughs in basic science" (Reed 1983:243, 129, 214).

An integral part of reproductive scientists' strategy here was to provide birth control advocates with token offerings from basic research. Many reproductive scientists in the United States undertook basic research that had clear potential for contraceptive development, while eschewing the simple-method spermicide studies of their British brethren. The classic basic investigations focused on the timing of fertility in women, which allowed more precise determination of "the safe period" during which unprotected intercourse would not result in pregnancy, generally known as the rhythm method. This research involved a wide range of basic problems intriguing to reproductive scientists, including the timing and occurrence of ovulation in relation to menstruation, egg transport through the fallopian tube, fertilization, implantation, and sperm vitality and motility.

In 1922, participants in the International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference lamented the lack of clarity about the timing of fertility (Pierpoint 1922:270), and the next decade saw numerous efforts in this direction. The leading researcher on this problem in the United States was Carl Hartman,^[57] who conducted numerous nonhuman primate studies (e.g., 1939) and also worked with Raymond Pearl (1932) on human studies. The major difficulties encountered by scientists pursuing this topic was the range of variation in women's cycles, both among women as a group and within individual women over time (Hartman 1962:vii). As Hartman put it, "There are almost no regularly menstruating women, any more than there are regularly menstruating monkeys" (Sanger 1934:53). Hartman published "Catholic Advice on the 'Safe Period'" (1933) in a birth control journal. His summary work was Time of Ovulation in Women: A Study on the Fertile Period in the Menstrual Cycle (1936), part of the Medical Aspects of Fertility Series sponsored by the NCMH.^[58]

George Papanicolaou of the Cornell Medical Center was also engaged in work sponsored by the NCMH on the "safe period," attempting to discover a means of determining the day of ovulation in women through vaginal smears (Papanicolaou 1933), excellent indicators in laboratory animals (Stockard and Papanicolaou 1917). Edgar Allen and his colleagues (Allen et al. 1928) also engaged in studies focused on the timing of ovulation and surgically recovered live human ova from the fallopian tubes, charting their place in the cycle. These researches offered some immediate contraceptive payoffs but were far from direct responses to birth control advocates' explicit requests for investigations of simple contraceptive technologies.

Third Strategy: Redirecting Contraceptive Research

The third strategy of reproductive scientists regarding birth control advocates was to continue with their own basic research agendas and claim that new means of contraception would eventually flow from this work. Here reproductive scientists essentially redirected contraceptive research along new basic "scientific" research lines and away from the "simple" means initially sought by birth control advocates. They did so by promoting four major research directions for modern "scientific" contraception: endocrinological, immunological, intrauterine, and radiation—most only in women. Each of these was attractive to a different subset of reproductive scientists, as we shall see.

Promoting Endocrinological Intervention.   Promoting endocrinological intervention in the female cycle can be analyzed as precursor research to the Pill, which operates through this mechanism. Such possibilities were attractive to both funding sources and some scientists by the 1920s. The basic principle was suggested by Haberlandt in 1921 (National Science Foundation 1973:10–12), though it seems to have been ignored. By the mid-1930s, however, Max Mason of the Rockefeller Foundation thought that "the ultimate solution of the problem [of birth control] may well lie in the studies of endocrinology, particularly antihormones" (which would counter routine cycling).^[59] The overall strategy was to use hormones to intervene in the monthly cycle of women to prevent conception, or, as Hartman put it, "to interrupt the process at given points or under given conditions" (Borell 1987a:fn76). Crew suggested experimental work with hormone injections for the object of developing a chemical combination that would prevent the ovum from entering the uterus.^[60]

Wary discussion of the possibilities of hormonal contraception began in the birth control literature in about 1928.^[61] The fundamental requirements for such methods were a clear understanding of the reproductive endocrinological cycle (e.g., Aberle 1934; Allen 1932) and chemical isolation and production of pure hormones (Djerassi 1981). These were precisely the tasks that many reproductive scientists had set for themselves during the "heroic age of reproductive endocrinology" between 1925 and 1940 (Parkes 1966a). Moreover, American reproductive scientists had sustained fiscal support in these endeavors through the NRC/CRPS, and by about 1940 hormones were widely used for medical treatment (Bell 1986, 1994b), though not for contraception.

In 1937, a summary of these endocrinological strategies was published by Ralph Kurzrok, a Columbia University endocrinologist, as "The Prospects for Hormonal Sterilization." He discussed six alternative interventions in the female hormonal cycle that would likely prevent conception,

including estrogen injections to inhibit ovulation (the subsequent basis of the Pill). He concluded, "The potentialities of hormonal sterilization are tremendous. The problem is important enough to warrant extensive work on the human." All of Kurzrok's fourteen citations were to basic reproductive scientists, most of whom were working with rats and rabbits at the time. But reproductive scientists did not answer his call to work on humans for many years, nor did he pursue such efforts himself. Serious work on the Pill itself did not begin until about 1951.

Movement toward scientific contraception was not always smooth, and there were debates about particular lines of research. In 1938, for example, Nicholas Eastman, a gynecologist at Johns Hopkins, was studying spermatoxins with NCMH sponsorship. He wanted to change "the direction of his work ... to hormonal means for avoiding pregnancy." However, Earl Engle, research director for the NCMH, decided that "the hormonal field is not very promising" and refused to sanction the change because the drug company that provided Eastman's funds through the NCMH was interested in spermatoxins and might withdraw its support. By 1945, Fuller Albright of Harvard was arguing in support of Kurzrok's hormonal method for women (Reed 1983:270, 315).

But talk about developing hormonal means of contraception was cheap. Reproductive scientists did not have to engage in applied research to make claims of future contraceptive payoffs from their work. As one historian has noted (Johnson 1977:77fn 10), Sanger knew what she wanted from the scientists, knew what their scientific research on contraception would likely produce, and was still unable to induce any scientist who could make a contribution to engage in such work until the 1950s. In fact, scientists did not undertake this work in explicit basic research settings until as late as the 1960s.

Ultimately, development of the Pill was initiated and fiscally supported by Sanger, her ally Katherine McCormick, and the lay birth control movement. It was developed through the efforts of several scientists, all of whom, at the time, were operating from institutional sites on the fringes of academia or in industry. Specifically, Gregory Pincus and M. C. Chang were at the private Worcester Institute of Experimental Biology, which in 1950 was fiscally dependent on contract pharmaceutical industry research. Pincus had a strong background in the agricultural end of the reproductive sciences from his personal experiences, his undergraduate studies in biology from Cornell, and a year spent at Cambridge University in one of the major British centers of agricultural reproductive science with John Hammond, F. H. A. Marshall's primary student then working on artificial insemination (Pauly 1987:187). Like Walter Heape and Jacques Loeb, Pincus had worked on artificial parthenogenesis and other reproductive problems in the 1930s and 1940s (Biggers 1991). When he began explicit work on the Pill, Pincus

was already "a refugee from academic biology" (Reed 1983:316), after being denied tenure at Harvard during the era when "proper" biology departments were getting out of the reproductive science business and expressing anti-Semitism.^[62]

Pincus had received $14,500 from the PPFA in 1948 and 1949 for work on the mammalian egg. In 1951, he conferred with Sanger regarding hormonal contraception and then reapplied to the PPFA for support of this line of research, receiving $3,100 in 1951 and $3,400 in 1952. Pincus then sent in a most promising report of this work, which was ignored by William Vogt (then directing Planned Parenthood), who wanted organizational expansion to be focused on his administrative functions rather than animal testing of the Pill. Sanger, in one of the preemptory moves for which she was famous, simply bypassed him. In 1953, she convinced Katherine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune and longtime suffragist and birth control advocate, to accompany her on the now-famous visit to Pincus at the WFEB. At the end of their conversation, McCormick promised Pincus $10,000 per year on the spot; this increased to $150,000 per year and more during her life (totaling about $2 million), and she left the Worcester Foundation $1 million in her will (Reed 1983:340; Chesler 1992:432).

The strategy of endocrinological contraception was also appealing to biochemists, and developments in steroid chemistry were key to the Pill. Russell Marker's and Carl Djerassi's chemical efforts were based at different times in Syntex, the industrial pharmaceutical company Marker had helped to form in Mexico. When Marker analyzed plant steroids for the first time he realized that hormones could be produced synthetically using a Mexican yam. Frustrated by his inability to locate support, he left academia and went to Mexico to pursue this line of research. Djerassi joined Syntex after Marker's departure, and with colleagues produced an orally active estrogen, which he then sent to Pincus and others for testing. Both Searle (with whom Pincus was already working) and Syntex eventually produced birth control pills.^[63]

Not all reproductive scientists were thrilled with the Pill, and the clinical trials proved problematic.^[64] Carl Hartman, then chairman of the medical committee of Planned Parenthood, expressed reservations about the Pill's systemic properties and predicted a fifteen- to twenty-year period before its safety could be assessed (about the same amount of time women's health activists also estimated as necessary). But Sanger and McCormick were "so confident ... of the Pill's revolutionary consequences that they seemed positively immune to any objections to it whatsoever, and interpreted reasonable concerns about the liabilities of experimenting with so potent a drug as just one more round in the arsenal of opposition that birth control advocates had confronted for years" (Chesler 1992:434, 445). This pas-

sage also reminds us that women and feminists have held multiple positions about the Pill.

Pincus, Chang, Marker, and Djerassi all left academia under different conditions to pursue their work on their own terms in industrial or semi-industrial venues. They may have laughed at scholars' rejection all the way to the bank, but academic reproductive scientists were still refusing to do explicitly contraceptive research. These four in fact, had gone beyond the scholarly pale of their era—more or less commercial.^[65] It was not until well into the 1960s that "population" funding from foundations and the federal government filtered into academia on a scale massive enough to involve basic reproductive scientists in research related, both directly and indirectly, to endocrinological contraception (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976). By then, such research was undertaken almost exclusively in medical settings. By 1970, there were 9 million American women using the Pill. Currently about 60 million women around the world do so.^[66] Women Pill users are configured as active participants in contraception because the Pill must be taken daily.

Promoting Intrauterine Intervention.   Intrauterine devices (IUDs) are made of various substances (silk coils, rubber, metal, and after about 1958, plastic) and are placed into the uterus through the cervix. It is surmised that they prevent conception by creating a hostile uterine environment (one too irritated to allow implantation). Traditionally, the devices have been inserted by physicians (Langley 1973:336–37). IUDs are obviously directed at women actors—women as implicated users.

By the nineteenth century, IUDs had been patented and were in use for contraceptive purposes; Robert Latou Dickinson began promoting such devices in the United States in 1916 (Southam 1965:3). IUDs were also discussed at the Fifth International Conference on Birth Control in 1922 (Pierpoint 1922:275–77). The first modern developer was Ernest Grafenberg, a German gynecologist, who began experimenting with various types of devices in 1909 and began publishing on IUDs in 1928 (Langley 1973:336).^[67] Grafenberg reported great success with the method in 1930 at the Seventh International Birth Control Congress, and considerable experimentation followed with what were then called "Grafenberg rings" (Reed 1983:275). But IUDs also generated considerable debate within the medical community in the 1930s and later, with many physicians vehemently opposed to their use, largely on grounds of risk of infection.^[68] Physician opposition to it was strongest in the United States, where it was difficult even to publish on this method.^[69] "No physician who himself had used IUCDs published a report in any medical journal of the Western countries between 1934 and 1959" (Tietze 1965b:1148).

The increased availability of antibiotics after World War II helped to over-

come both the fears and the infections (Bullough 1994:186). Drawing on work done in Israel and Japan (Tietze 1965b), Lazar Margulies of the Department of Obstetrics of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and Jack Lippes of the University of Buffalo resurrected IUDs in the United States. Between 1958 and 1960, they pioneered a plastic product as a new, modern means of "scientific" contraception. The Population Council provided grants covering about 95 percent of development costs (Notestein 1982:678). Christopher Tietze of the Population Council candidly stated: "It was a very exciting period. ... [W]e were working with something that had been absolutely rejected by the profession. ... There was such a feeling of urgency among professional people, not among the masses, but something had to be done. And this was something that you could do to the people rather than something people could do for themselves. So it made it very attractive to the doers" (Reed 1983:307). It is this controlling approach—seeking something "you could do to the people"—that has guided much subsequent research within the population control framework.

As predicted by physicians in the 1930s, problems did appear with all IUDs, especially infection and "traveling." But one device in particular, the Dalkon Shield, was a transnational disaster, associated with an estimated seventeen deaths and extensive morbidity, including permanent infertility.^[70] Such disasters have certainly sustained the controversial status of the reproductive sciences. Currently only a few IUDs are marketed in the United States because of steep product liability costs following the Dalkon Shield case (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990).

The configured users of the IUD are women who do not want to or cannot practice a method of contraception that requires active involvement, such as taking the Pill daily or using condoms. Those who developed techniques of contraception such as the IUD (and later injectables and implantables) to be "done to the people," in Tietze's terms, have taken an array of approaches that draw on different professional skills and knowledges within different and often competitive organizations.^[71] But not all such efforts were as successful as the Pill and the IUD, as we shall see next.

Technological Intervention: Radiation for Sterilization. Voluntary (instead of involuntary, state-ordered) sterilization began to be seen as a viable means of contraception by birth control advocates in the 1920s (e.g., Dickinson and Gamble 1950; Sanger 1934:71). Although the usual means of sterilization were surgical (Langley 1973:272–336), a "simpler" and less invasive method of achieving permanent sterility was seen as desirable, and research was undertaken on sterilization by irradiation of the ovaries and testes. Radiation technology was the current "magic bullet" for new approaches to old problems. Whether the sterilizing potential of

x-rays was discovered inadvertently is not clear. An early text on fertility and sterility notes, "A few years ago before the nature of the Roentgen rays [was] understood, practically all x-ray workers were sterile" (Reynolds and Macomber 1924:128). This method was therefore directed at both women and men as implicated actors/users. Both would be configured as passive users once radiation had been done.

In 1922, Donald Hooker of Hopkins reported on his preliminary investigations of sterilization by x-rays in the rat (Pierpoint 1922:236–39).^[72] Hooker's research then generated further funding from the NRC/CRPS for the years 1922 to 1925; the committee also briefly funded clinical research on the effects of x-rays on sterility and fertility from 1924 to 1927 (Aberle and Corner 1953:93, 120). In 1925, Robert Latou Dickinson wrote to Katherine Davis of the BSH that in order to get away from mechanical appliances and "to suspend temporarily or to arrest ovulation permanently, irradiation of the ovaries must be studied in animals, especially in monkeys."^[73] The BSH then offered Dickinson and the NCMH a matching grant for such research.^[74] After consulting with Hooker at Hopkins, Corner at Rochester, and Stockard at Cornell Medical School, the NCMH granted aid to Halsey J. Bagg and Harold Bailey for a project using monkeys, to be cosponsored by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.^[75] Dickinson's project was challenged by C. C. Little, president of the University of Michigan, and member of the board of Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau, who wrote to Sanger in 1925 that physicians were reckless in attempting x-ray-induced infertility (McCann 1994:85). Again, multiple positions were held within the scientific community.

By about 1930, investigations of radiation as a means of contraceptive sterilization began to disappear from the literature. One German physician opposed x-ray sterilization because she regarded the maintenance of the endocrine organs (ovaries) as essential for prevention of premature menopause (Sanger and Stone 1931:118).^[76] In Germany, one physician attempting to avoid the use of genocide as "the final solution" of "the Jewish problem" proposed covertly radiating all Jews and thereby sterilizing them (Proctor 1995). When the AMA's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry began reporting on contraceptives in the late 1930s, it found that the use of x-rays for contraception was "of no value" (Reed 1983:245)—and highly carcinogenic and unreliable to boot.

Radiation sterilization initially offered a promising line of investigation to predominantly medical reproductive scientists, suitable both on scientific research grounds and as fundable work. Medical scientists thus found scientific contraception appropriate, regardless of the ultimate demise of this method. Investigating the consequences of radiation was also not viewed as, or at least was not transparent as, contraceptive research.

Promoting Immunologic Intervention: Spermatoxins.   In the search for scientific biological contraception, as opposed to simple and local chemical or mechanical means, reproductive scientists viewed immunology as a logical and exciting research path and sought means of immunizing women against pregnancy. The means of effecting immunity at that time was subcutaneous injection of the female with a serum or spermatoxin derived from fresh sperm of the same or different species. Mention was made of the possibilities of contraceptive autoimmunity in the male, but as in the lay and medical birth control movements, the focus was on female means of contraception (Sanger and Stone 1931:112–13). Biologists also found sperm research problems of classic physiological and morphological interest. Animal agricultural scientists were also interested in sperm studies, especially in relation to artificial insemination (Brackett, Seidel, and Seidel 1981). Both basic and clinical medical scientists found spermatoxin research problems attractive especially in relation to "classic" problems in immunology.

Initial work done in Germany at the turn of the century was continued in Germany (e.g., Ardelt 1931), and in the United States new work was begun by W. F. Guyer of the Department of Zoology at Wisconsin, who worked with rabbits and guinea pigs (Cooper 1928:115). The NCMH funded Guyer's endeavor,^[77] and he was soon joined by others such as J. L. McCartney (Cooper 1928:268) and M. J. Baskin (1934), who performed clinical trials calling the method "temporary sterilization." Biologist investigators were quickly followed into this line of work by medical scientists.^[78]

Because animal sperm were more available and hence more desirable for serum preparation, international debate focused on whether same-species sperm were requisite.^[79] Guyer, for example, worked with whale testes and sperm, plentiful if properly preserved. In 1929, Stewart Mudd, a microbiologist of the Phipps Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and an active birth control advocate, in research with Emily Mudd, a sociologist on the medical school faculty, found both species and tissue specificity in mammals. There was also debate about how and where in the reproductive system spermatoxins operated and concern about possible "side-effects."^[80]

As with some other methods of contraception, Soviet scientists were pioneers because of the legitimacy of birth control and hence of contraceptive research there: "To them it is a problem of scientific interest, worthy of the same amount of study as any other problem of scientific research, such as control of tuberculosis or cancer" (Daniels in Sanger and Stone 1931:109). By the mid-1920s, research on humans had begun: "The Russians feel that the use of spermatoxins has come out of the stage of pure theoretical research and has entered into the field of practical experimentation" (Stone in Sanger 1934:105–8). The Russians were certainly faster in moving from pure to applied contraceptive research, and American birth control advo-

cates were most interested. Marie Kopp, an American clinical and epidemiological birth control researcher, went to the Soviet Union in 1932 to gather information on birth control methods and report back to American colleagues (Kopp 1933).^[81]

Two aspects of spermatoxin contraception became especially attractive during the Great Depression: its simplicity and its low cost. "Think of how wonderful it would be if one could immunize a patient by simple hypodermic injection once every six months, just as we today immunize children against diphtheria. It will indeed be a new and wonderful era in the practice of preventive gynecology" (Daniels in Sanger and Stone 1931:111, emphasis added). The appeal of injectable hormonal means is clear here as well. Dr. McCartney commented: "Devices are all very nice for those who can afford them. The poor people with whom we are really concerned in this [Depression] recovery program cannot afford them. ... [I]t is quite necessary to be concerned with something that can be applied very much more cheaply. Spermatoxins ... are one of the methods" (Sanger 1934:111). Whether they actually would have been cheaper is debatable; they certainly would have been more easily controlled by physicians. Women here were configured as semiactive users because they would need to receive injections at regular intervals.

In the late 1930s, the NCMH again supported spermatoxin research through grants from Squibb and Sons. The scientists' conclusions were the (temporary) death knell of spermatoxin research: "When one compares ... the fertility of the injected animals with the controls, it appears that paraenteral injection of live sperm reduces slightly the fertility of the recipients, but the reduction is neither of significant degree nor of practical importance" (Eastman, Guttmacher, and Stewart 1939:151). While contraceptive application seemed futile, spermatoxin research had instigated considerable sperm research in humans. One product at the time was a much greater understanding of male infertility and sterility, issues of concern to the NCMH and other birth control organizations as they shifted from woman-controlled birth control to "family planning" approaches and included infertility research and treatment in their array of services (e.g., Reynolds and Macomber 1924; Weisman 1941).

Further, spermatoxin research had proved to be of considerable interest to biomedical scientists regardless of its association with birth control. Again, the appeal of research on scientific means of contraception to reproductive scientists was clearly demonstrated to birth control advocates during the 1930s. Since about 1967, there has been a renaissance of interest in what is now called "immunoreproduction," with considerable focus on finding a male means of spermatoxic contraception. This research initiative was led by Bulgarian scientists, echoing the Russian initiatives of half a century earlier.^[82] But it has also been sustained in the United States and else-

where (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990:33). However, national and transnational women's health groups have raised serious questions about the safety and efficacy of immunocontraception (e.g., Richter 1993). Their concerns center on the consequences of contraceptive-caused immunosuppression or immune system compromise, both because of the AIDS epidemic and for many women who are already malnourished. Other lines of current immunological contraceptive research continue to seek what, during the 1930s, Max Mason of the Rockefeller Foundation called "anti-hormones": vaccines to block hormones needed for very early pregnancy and a vaccine to block the hormone needed for the surface of the egg to function properly (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990:33; Alexander 1995).

Each of the four methods of contraception examined here involved different key actors and reproductive sciences worlds. Each addressed birth control advocates' goals in some way. Most were directed exclusively at women users, who were not included in the design stage but instead were positioned as implicated actors. None of these methods met the original desires of the early feminist lay birth control movement for safe and effective, simple means of contraception that would enhance women's autonomy. All met the goals of reproductive scientists to make contraception scientific.

The Quid Pro Quo

Through ongoing negotiations, heterogeneous birth control advocates and reproductive scientists arrived, between 1925 and 1945, at a congruence of interests that adequately met the changed needs of the major participants in the birth control arena. The quid pro quo achieved was based on changes, compromises, and trade-offs both within and among participating social worlds. Reproductive scientists had demonstrated that they would do "basic" research on problems related to "scientific" means of contraception and publishable in their "basic science" journals. In some such instances, they would even accept fiscal support from the birth control/population control movements, as some already did from pharmaceutical companies. In turn, birth control advocates had learned to cease demanding reproductive scientists' involvement in research on simple chemical and mechanical means of contraception (such as spermicides and diaphragms) and found other avenues through which such research could be pursued (such as academic chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry). This quid pro quo has been the fundamental basis for all subsequent relations over half a century.

But this accommodation and quid pro quo could only have been

achieved given the shifts within the lay, medical, and academic birth control movements between 1925 and 1945. The most pronounced shifts were from commitments to birth control as a means of enhancing reproductive and sexual autonomy for women to contraception within an economic ethic of childbearing—economic planning, eugenics, and population control, often with racialized agendas (e.g., McCann 1994). These shifts led many birth control advocates to seek modern "scientific" means of contraception that are "done to the people," relying for effectiveness more on biological and medical research and expert control than on the users' own motivation.

Reproductive scientists also underwent transformatory experiences during this period. In the development of this quid pro quo, reproductive scientists' struggles for professional legitimacy, autonomy, and cultural authority for their enterprise were central. That is, the driving force behind the development of "scientific" means of contraception was and remains reproductive scientists' desires for professional autonomy as "basic" scientists. As Borell put it, reproductive scientists continued to do their "pure" or "basic" research, but they also provided a social product—the technology of scientific biomedical contraception—that gave them greater social authority.^[83] In so doing, they both drew upon and further contributed to the cultural authority of science. Final development of means of contraception using that technology was to be left to the pharmaceutical industry and clinical practitioners (e.g., Segal 1987; Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990).

The contraceptive Pill, based on decades of reproductive endocrinological and physiological research, and developed in marginal academic and commercial institutions, is the strongest demonstration of this process. Academic reproductive scientists did the bulk of the "basic" work, leaving it to lapsed scholars in quasi-industrial settings to push and polish it into a final product, with support from only two pharmaceutical companies from the established industry and a couple of new companies founded by other renegade scholars. The fiscal support provided by the birth control and population control movements from the 1930s to the 1950s was still too low to stimulate deeper involvement of reproductive scientists (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976). Moreover, contraceptive research still bore the stigma of illegitimacy. The clinical trials of the Pill, done almost exclusively on women of color in the Third World/Southern Hemisphere countries, were also problematic.^[84]

The problem of the illegitimacy of birth control was alleviated by the coalescence of the various birth control movements into a legitimate, middle-class, professional, international family planning and population control establishment between about 1940 and 1965. This establishment

was deeply linked with the reproductive sciences, sharing quite porous boundaries. As late as 1959, the Ladies' Home Journal would not address modern birth control in its regular medical column (Meldrum 1996). But by the 1960s, the publicity achieved by the population establishment claiming a "population explosion" in the Third World was sufficient to trigger the federal government's involvement in both contraceptive development and distribution. As Reed (1983:373) observed, "Social order everywhere suddenly seemed threatened by human fertility."^[85] The National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science and Public Policy selected population problems as its focus in 1961 (National Academy of Sciences 1979:v). Most reproductive scientists agreed with these arguments (e.g., Pincus 1965; Djerassi 1981), including proposals for more integrated approaches such as Shelesnyak's (1963a,b) call for "biodynamics" as a new interdisciplinary frame for the study of reproductive phenomena and fertility control in all their complexity. During these years and after, reproductive scientists were drawn ever more deeply into public- and foundation-funded research that addressed "population problems"—basic research yielding clear and high contraceptive payoffs. But their involvement was very much on the terms of the quid pro quo negotiated with birth control advocates before World War II.^[86] The arguments for basic research made by reproductive scientists enhanced the legitimacy, autonomy, and social and scientific authority of the enterprise. The culture of science predominated, and women were by far the most commonly configured users.

Both federal policy and public opinion on contraception also changed dramatically between 1945 and 1970. In 1942, after over a quarter century of agitation by the lay birth control movements and their establishment of 803 birth control clinics throughout the country as their major form of activism, the U.S. Public Health Service ruled that federal funds allocated for local health services could be used for family planning in the states (Ray and Gosling 1984–85:404). By 1963, however, only fifteen state health departments offered such services (Reed 1983:268). In 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower responded to a question about foreign aid for contraception by stating: "I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility. ... This government will not, as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with the problem of birth control. That's not our business." Four years later, during the administration of the first Catholic president, Democrat John F. Kennedy, Republican Eisenhower dramatically changed his mind. He then wrote in the Saturday Evening Post that population growth posed a threat to world peace and that birth control was a legitimate concern of government (Reed 1984–85:383).

After Kennedy's assassination, the Johnson administration provided an

array of family planning services nationally and transnationally through many legislative acts. The Fulbright amendment to the foreign aid bill, signed in December 1963, authorized programs in population research and technical assistance. Special recognition of American family planning needs began in 1967, and in 1969 the National Center for Family Planning Services was established in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The Family Planning Act of 1970, under President Nixon, expanded services and federal funding, which totaled over $68 million in 1971 and $336 million in 1987 (Davis 1991:386–87, 398). Extensive research, transnational distribution, and technical support for family planning services has been provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other organizations. In short, the United States became the dominant transnational distributor of the means of control over reproduction. By the late 1960s, thirteen pharmaceutical companies were involved in contraceptive research and development (Djerassi 1992:119). The "Contraceptive Revolution" (Westoff and Ryder 1977) took place in the 1960s and 1970s as the direct result of the negotiation of the quid pro quo between birth control advocates and reproductive scientists. Its impacts have been and continue to be global.

Feminist voices, so strong at the beginning of the century in the formation of lay birth control movements, were co-opted and silenced in the shift from birth control to family planning and population control by the end of the Great Depression (McCann 1994:chapters 5–6). Ironically, they reappeared in new forms in the 1970s at the height of population control efforts. National and transnational women's health movements have formulated multiple, divergent critiques of the contraceptive revolution, and such groups are now participating in many of the venues where family planning and population concerns are translated into health care policy and foreign policy.^[87] Further, over eighty years since Margaret Sanger's first appeal, demands for more and better simple means of contraception are still heard, along with detailed explication of concerns with safety, such as the following, derived from the 1994 Cairo Conference Organizing Committee (Organizing Committee 1994:6):

Item 13. In the area of contraceptive technology, resources should be redirected from provider-controlled and potentially high-risk methods, like the vaccine, to barrier methods. A significant proportion of the participants also felt strongly that Norplant or other long-term hormonal contraceptives should be explicitly mentioned as high-risk methods from which resources should be redirected. Female controlled methods that provide both contraception and protection from sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, as well as male methods, should receive highest priority in contraceptive research and development. Women's organizations are entitled to indepen-

dently monitor contraceptive trials and ensure women's free, informed consent to enter the trial. Trial results must be available for women's organizations at the different stages of such trials, including the very early stages.

Equally significant, in the United States and abroad, women have voted with their feet, resisting and rejecting means of contraception that do not meet their needs. Many feminists tacitly or explicitly draw on the "three contraceptive axioms" specified by Dr. Mary Calderone (1964:153) when she was medical director of Planned Parenthood—World Population:

Partly because of such feminist interventions, there has been a shift away from the modernist, standardized "one-size-fits-all" approach so deeply embedded in the search for scientific contraception described in this chapter. The shift is to a more postmodern, economic, and individualized nicheoriented "cafeteria approach" offering an array of means of contraception, ideally suited to the highly varied health care and living situations of prospective users—men as well as women—and accommodating changing reproductive needs and goals across the life course. However, the modernist "one-size-fits-all" pattern remains dominant in many Southern Hemisphere countries, while the postmodern "cafeteria" is available primarily in the Northern Hemisphere (Oudshoorn 1995, 1996a).

Conclusions

The arenas concerned with human reproduction changed between 1925 and 1945 in ways that ultimately allowed the quid pro quo to develop. One shift was from progressive reform to conservative control—from birth control as a means of individual self-determination, especially for women, to family planning and population control. There was also a shift from an individual choice to a social control agenda, and shifts of focus from concerns about qualities of individuals to quantities of populations, and from user control of simple means of contraception to professional control over scientific means of contraception, from means "people do for themselves" to means "done to the people." The rationalized family could be achieved via modernist control over reproduction, biologically based social engineering that allowed scientific management and planning to be applied in the supposedly private domain of reproduction—the bedroom.^[88]

This chapter illustrates the utility of a social worlds and arenas approach

in technoscience studies. Scientific enterprises such as the reproductive sciences are especially in need of individual case studies and comparative analyses that examine their embeddedness in specific market and resource networks. Multiple nonmonolithic social worlds were engaged in the birth control arena at the turn of the century, and others were reluctantly enrolled. That is, reproductive scientists who by and large did not want to do contraceptive research could not avoid participating directly or indirectly in the birth control arena. We can see them as reluctant actors, coerced or seduced by funding and their own dreams for the larger enterprise.

I examined the earliest moments in the making of two successful technologies of modern scientific contraception—the Pill and the IUD—analyzing the interests and commitments built into the actual design of these technologies by examining the engaged social worlds, their perspectives and commitments. Failed approaches, specifically immunotoxins and sterilization by radiation, were also discussed. Women were the targeted/implicated users (Clarke and Montini 1993) but were excluded from direct participation, then as now. Most users were configured (Woolgar 1991) as women, and they were reconfigured from Sanger's goal of women as autonomous sexual beings to people something should "be done to." Both the Pill and the IUD were intended as what Oudshoorn (1995, 1996a) has called universal, "one-size-fits-all" technologies. Latour's (1987, 1991) notions that technology is society made durable and that scientists should be seen as in the driver's seat are clearly upheld in the case of the reproductive sciences and contraceptive technologies.

Contraceptives are what Foucault termed "disciplinary technologies" (Rabinow 1984:17), part of the "socialization of reproductive behavior" that can discipline such behavior in multiple ways. But, simultaneously, contraceptives can be means of liberation, offering strategies of resistance against related disciplines of gender as well as race, class, and global position. Many contradictions are carried on the n-way webs of relations along which both simple and scientific means of contraception travel. As feminist women's health advocates have learned, especially but not only through the transnationalization of their movements, the heterogeneity of women's situations must be of paramount concern. This heterogeneity requires that women and men have access to a diversity of means of control over reproduction. Current feminist goals call for active user participation in design and in all subsequent stages. Further, the calculus of risks and benefits for each method must take diversities of women's health care, cultural, and economic situations into account. This would, of course, change the reproductive arena considerably.

Hard (1993) has argued for a more explicitly and vividly conflictful social constructionism as not only possible but also likely to be found in empirical research, along with issues of power, stratification, and hierarchy.

Drawing upon social worlds analysis, the story of the emergence of modern scientific contraception told here meets these criteria. The reproductive arena was conflictful when it emerged, it remains conflictful today, and closure is not in sight. It is a modernist technoscience story of hierarchies, gender, and power that has now segued into the postmodern era and is still unfolding. But the quid pro quo constructed between reproductive scientists and birth control advocates of multiple kinds remains the foundational moment that still must be addressed.

Chapter Seven
Funding the Reproductive Sciences

Money matters, in science as elsewhere. The modern adage that "he who pays the piper calls the tune" also echoes strongly in social studies of science and technology. This is especially the case in studies of disciplinary formation because new knowledge production is usually expensive (e.g., Jasanoff et al. 1995; Shapin 1992). The deeply controversial nature of the reproductive sciences qua sciences makes the analysis of their funding even more salient than for more conventionally accepted research areas. I have therefore devoted a full chapter to an overview of the funding sources of the reproductive sciences since about 1910. Both the stature and the extent of the funding of reproductive research during its formation and coalescence periods were unique and significant in enabling this controversial line of research work to establish itself as a "going concern," a recognized, viable scientific enterprise.

The history of funding for research in science and technology, between 1910 and 1963, is fascinating. This was the era of the key shift from funding by private individuals (usually scientists or personal benefactors) to university departmental research budgets to corporate foundation support and, finally, to governmental support. This shift ultimately transformed the world.

Sociologically, funding is a key basis for linking heterogeneous social worlds and for building new infrastructure across socioeconomic sectors (such as the academy, philanthropy, and corporations). Funding is usually pivotal to legitimacy as well—sometimes more important than the science itself. The modernist era of "Big Science" and external research support began in the decades after World War I (Price 1963; Kohler 1991; Kleinman 1994). "Big Science" funding hit the reproductive sciences immediately via the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex,

which is examined in detail in chapter 4. Here I emphasize other sources, including industrial support.

There has been only minimal documentation of reproductive sciences funding.^[1] The only such analysis for the period prior to World War II is that of Roy Greep and his associates, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. They argue that, due to the general illegitimacy of sex and reproduction as both social issues and scientific research foci, "to initiate and sustain serious research in the reproductive sciences has required for more than half a century concerted effort by interested individuals and private organizations, mainly from outside the mainstream of the biomedical research community" (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:367–71). My analysis both sustains and challenges their views. I attempt to portray the breadth of funding sources, the extent of funding, and types of research funded where possible, along with a historical orientation to each of the major funding sources.^[2]

More specifically, Greep and his associates (1976:370) argued that funding for the reproductive sciences before World War II was both slight and far from the mainstream of the biomedical research community. They also asserted that reproductive research, especially as related to the development of contraception, was relatively underfunded as compared with other biomedical research fields during this period. In contrast, I conclude that considerable funding was provided through prestigious organizations by the major biomedical research—oriented foundations to the "basic" reproductive sciences. However, as Greep and his colleagues asserted, there was little funding of explicitly contraceptive research until the 1950s and 1960s.^[3] The key difference in our analyses is that I have carefully distinguished between loosely "basic" research in the reproductive sciences (in biology, medicine, and agriculture) and explicitly contraceptive research. I make this distinction because American reproductive scientists largely eschewed explicitly contraceptive research and punished those who pursued it at least until the 1950s or 1960s. It was the quid pro quo constructed among reproductive scientists and birth control advocates in the 1940s and 1950s that fused the previously distinctive reproductive and contraceptive research traditions. That quid pro quo also fused the funding patterns and identities of the reproductive sciences more generally. Old boundaries were dissolved, and the applications of the reproductive sciences were more fully acknowledged. For a host of likely reasons, Greep and his colleagues, writing in the 1970s, seem to have blurred reproductive and contraceptive research and funding in their analyses, reflecting the more contemporary intimate relations of these two endeavors following World War II.

This chapter documents the successes of reproductive scientists in gaining prestigious, sustained, and significant support for their work prior to World War II. I examine the major funding sources beginning with the Na-

tional Research Council (sponsor of reproductive research through several subagencies), the National Committee on Maternal Health, direct foundation support, and industrial support. Last, I offer a brief synopsis of funding since 1940 to demonstrate changes in the fiscal "career" of the reproductive sciences enterprise.

Overview Of Reproductive Sciences Funding, 1910–40

Between about 1910 and 1940, most reproductive research was undertaken in university departments. Funding was both internal (from routine departmental research budgets) and external (from sources outside the local institution). While external funding sources (analyzed later in this chapter) were diverse and fairly extensive, I believe a precise fiscal analysis of reproductive research would reveal that routine departmental research budgets were the major source of reproductive sciences funding before World War II. At some institutions, such budgets were supplemented with revenue from patents secured by faculty reproductive scientists for reproductive hormonal extraction, isolation, and production procedures.^[4] Because research costs were comparatively low, reliance on local funding sources was likely typical in many other areas of scientific research as well.

Until after World War I, the primary external research funding sources, although not strong, were major foundations and industry. I suspect that industry played a particularly significant role for the reproductive sciences both initially and more recently because of both the illegitimacy of those sciences and the simultaneous demand for their technoscientific products for clinical and agricultural work. This certainly was the case in Europe (Oudshoorn 1994). After World War I, direct funding of American reproductive research was often provided by private nonprofit agencies committed to science or social change of some kind, but the actual funds such agencies dispersed derived primarily from foundations. Individual benefactors also funded the reproductive sciences. Table 8 presents Greep and his associates' (1976:371) summary of private agency reproductive research expenditures from 1922 to 1940.

Included here are expenditures of the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex and Committee on Research in Endocrinology, and the private National Committee on Maternal Health. Startlingly, this total constitutes over 10 percent of foundation contributions to the entire NRC during this era.^[5] This is a very significant proportion and, moreover, was not the only funding the reproductive sciences received.

The United States government did not provide extensive fiscal support to any kind of biomedical research until after World War II. The Hygienic Laboratory, which had been founded in 1897, was enlarged as the National

Institute of Health (NIH) in 1930. But in 1935 the science budget of the Public Health Service, including the NIH research budget and representing almost the total federal health research investment, was only $508,000 for all research (Strickland and Strickland 1976:5). Support was focused on research on acute infectious diseases (Rosen 1965; Swain 1962). The major exception was government funding of agricultural research, which began during the late nineteenth century (Rosenberg 1976). Some proportion of these funds was certainly used to support reproductive research under agricultural auspices by scientists trained in a wide variety of settings.^[6] Amounts are unclear, but the physiology of reproduction in farm/meat animals was not a focus until after 1925 and the area was still relatively minor until after World War II, when it intensified considerably (Byerly 1986).

National Research Council Sponsorship

The National Research Council (NRC) is a suborganization of the National Academy of Science (NAS). The NRC itself was founded in 1916 as an agency to inventory research toward enhanced military preparedness; it focused primarily on the natural and physical sciences. After World War I, it was quickly transformed into a science sponsorship forum with a variety of committees and subcommittees funded (along with the Academy) by a grant of $5 million from the Carnegie Corporation (Tobey 1971:35, 53). The Rockefeller Foundation was also an early and extensive supporter of the NRC.^[7] Nearly $12 million of foundation support was provided to the NRC from 1916 to 1940; 98 percent of these funds came from Rockefeller and Carnegie boards (Kohler 1991:104).

The NRC was a prestigious organization from its inception, thanks to its early association with the NAS, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Kohler (1991:109) has argued that the NRC essentially served as an intermediary between the foundations and scientists in the

interwar years: "Biology, which was a congeries of competing and contentious subspecialties or subcultures, with varied relations with medicine, agriculture, psychology, natural resource management, all of which offered attractive but competing opportunities for discipline," posed particular problems for funders. The proto—peer review mechanisms offered through the NRC provided useful insulation for the foundations as they moved into what Kohler has called "partnerships" with the sciences qua research institutions. Even if one takes a more critical perspective and views the foundations as shaping or engineering the future by shaping the directions of sciences toward their own interests, the peer review mechanisms were useful in improving foundation understanding and access to information.

Committees of the NRC could be initiated from within or without the agency, but they required agency approval. Before World War II, two such committees sponsored reproductive research: the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex and the Committee on Endocrinology. The reproductive sciences were also funded through the NRC Grants-in-Aid Program. Two other post—World War II NRC committees, the Committee on Human Reproduction and the Committee on Contraceptive Technology, also became involved later.

The NRC Committee for Research in Problems of Sex

My commentary on the NRC Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (NRC/CRPS) here is brief; its founding and the redirection of its mission from sexology to basic research in reproductive biology is analyzed in considerable depth in chapter 4. The NRC/CRPS, which existed from 1921 to 1962 (National Academy of Sciences 1979:v) in the Medical Sciences Division of the NRC, was the major external funding source for reproductive research prior to World War II. One historian has asserted: "The committee virtually paid for the development in American universities of [reproductive] endocrinology" (Reed 1983:283). From 1921 to 1940, the NRC/CRPS sponsored reproductive research by means of grants totaling $1,087,322; from 1940 to 1947, an additional $368,934 was expended (Aberle and Corner 1953:113).

The NRC/CRPS itself was funded almost exclusively by Rockefeller monies, initially through the Bureau of Social Hygiene and, after 1931, through the Rockefeller Foundation (Aberle and Corner 1953). In later years it also received funding from the Ford Foundation (National Academy of Sciences 1979:v). Rather than provide grants to individuals at many institutions, the NRC/CRPS primarily funded established and emerging centers of reproductive sciences staffed by multiple investigators under the leadership of a prominent scientist. From 1921 to 1947, "104 cooperating investigators received approximately 470 grants, under which 585 individu-

als took part in the researches" (Aberle and Corner 1953:70). Directing investigators thus received an average of 4.5 grants. This innovative means of organizing scientific research sponsorship promoted what would today be termed "project-oriented" research, drawing together investigators from several salient disciplines to address a related set of problems.^[8]

As Table 10 demonstrates, research sponsored through the NRC/CRPS was largely, though far from exclusively, endocrinological in nature. During the years before World War II, most sponsored research utilized animal rather than human materials. The status and prestige of the NRC affiliation lent stature to the CRPS specifically and to the reproductive sciences enterprise generally. It seems unlikely that well over $1 million would have been provided to the committee by Rockefeller philanthropies had it not found an institutional "home" with the NRC.

The NRC Committee on Endocrinology

The NRC Committee on Endocrinology was founded in 1936 and remained active until 1950 (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:370). I have argued in chapter 5 that the reproductive sciences coalesced around the core activity of reproductive endocrinology as a means of gaining legitimacy for the enterprise by riding on the coattails of general endocrinology. It is thus both ironic and anomalous, as I will attempt to explain, that the major NRC committee addressing the reproductive sciences (the NRC/CRPS) existed for fifteen years prior to the establishment of the NRC Committee on Endocrinology.

By 1933, there was extensive discussion of the need for an NRC committee on endocrinology both within the Rockefeller Foundation and with NRC representatives. As one report noted, "The other [non-sex] hormones are not of lesser importance."^[9] Meanwhile, the Markle Foundation (founded in 1927), which was undergoing a major program review in 1934 and 1935, decided to focus its sponsorship afresh on medical research, as many other foundations were doing at the time (Strickland and Strickland 1976:6). Officers of the Markle Foundation then approached Robert Yerkes (Chairman of the NRC/CRPS and a former NRC officer) for advice. Yerkes arranged a conference with Frank Lillie, who suggested that research in endocrinology needed assistance. A report assessing the field was supplied by Roy Hoskins, editor of Endocrinology (Cannon 1942:844). The NRC/CRPS could not support nonreproductive endocrinological research, as it was increasingly being asked to do. The Markle Foundation offered funds for such a committee.^[10]

During its fourteen years of existence, the NRC Committee on Endocrinology expended $561,000 on grants in aid of research. According to Greep and his associates (1976:370), $71,000 of this amount was devoted

directly or indirectly to reproductive endocrinological research. Walter Cannon, a professor of physiology at Harvard, was the first chairman of the committee.^[11] There was concern from the outset regarding the boundaries between these two NRC committees, as Yerkes wrote to Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation: "The rumor is abroad that support of endocrinological studies is being lessened [by the NRC/CRPS]. Actually there is every reason to suppose the [NRC/CRPS] will continue to support such studies. ... Obviously it is essential that the overlap of interest between [the two committees] ... be carefully scrutinized, and the two committees so conducted with reference to promotion of endocrinological studies of sex that maximal assistance shall be rendered without undesirable duplication ... or oversight."^[12]

L. H. Weed, chairman of the Medical Sciences Division of the NRC, sought to facilitate the cooperation of the two committees structurally, arranging for their chairs to sit ex officio on the other committee with planned successive meetings. Weed reported to the Rockefeller Foundation that the NRC/CRPS was "allowing most of the proposals in the endocrine field to be taken by the Endocrine Committee."^[13] This freed NRC/CRPS funds for other purposes, largely human sexuality studies after 1940. By the late 1940s, the glamour of nonreproductive endocrinology had apparently worn thin as well. As Maienschein (1994) puts it, "Cutting edges cut both ways." The Markle Foundation, with a new president, refocused its giving on the Markle Scholars program to enable medical schools to retain promising graduates and prepare them for careers in academic medicine and research, a program it then supported for over twenty years (Strickland and Strickland 1976:18).

The anomaly of the NRC/CRPS preceding the NRC Committee on Endocrinology by fifteen years, despite the greater legitimacy of general endoctrinology and its consequently greater apparent "fundability," cannot be overlooked. The main explanation is that the original mission of the NRC/CRPS was not, in fact, support of reproductive biological or endocrinological research but support for research on sexual problems in humans to prevent and alleviate social problems. The Bureau of Social Hygiene was its original institutional sponsor. However, this mission was redirected by the members of the NRC/CRPS toward reproductive biological research, especially reproductive endocrinology, from its earliest days, a contingency that could not have been anticipated by its founders.

Second, despite its redirected mission, the research sponsored by the NRC/CRPS included endocrinological problems that were not solely reproductive. Both physiologically and in funding practice, the boundaries between reproductive and general endocrinology were blurred, as were the boundaries among enzymes, vitamins, and hormones.^[14] This blurring was well recognized in a 1933 Rockefeller Foundation report, which proposed

"three separate committees dealing with the fields of enzymes, vitamins and hormones. ... The three committee point of view is suggested for, ... in general, there are three rather distinct groups of workers. ... A Committee on endocrinology ... seems almost certain ... to shed much light on the chemical aspect of life and the control of certain diseases; with also some probability of leading into the fields of psychobiology and personality problems."^[15]

The NRC Committee on Infectious Abortion

The NRC Committee on Infectious Abortion was jointly sponsored by the Division of Medical Sciences and the Division of Biology and Agriculture of the NRC. Infectious abortion in animals, especially beef cattle and dairy cows, was of considerable concern to agricultural breeders and scientists. It is caused by the genus Brucella , which also causes undulant fever in humans. The Committee on Infectious Abortion established a research station at Lansing, Michigan (supported by the Commonwealth Fund of New York), and sponsored a variety of researches, including studies of reproductive problems, in aid of furthering understanding of the physiological processes of infectious abortion. These researches were jointly funded by the American Medical Association, the Certified Milk Producers' Association, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry, and the Michigan State College of Agriculture through the NRC.^[16] This group, then, was another minor sponsor of mammalian reproductive research.

The NRC Grants-in-Aid Program

In addition to its standing committees, during the 1930s the NRC also administered an individual Grants-in-Aid Program, which served as another, if relatively minor, funding source for reproductive scientists. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, from 1929 to 1935 it made 267 grants in the medical and biological sciences for a total of $132,511; the average grant in all fields was $532 (Bowman 1935:339). Kohler (1991:105–13) provides a vivid account of the entrepreneurship and stewardship of Frank Lillie in developing these grants. Lillie drew strongly on his successes in the early 1920s with the NRC/CRPS. A review of archival materials demonstrates that a number of reproductive scientists, including Doisy, Backman, Bissonette, Lillie, Turner, Allee, Long, Guthrie, Geiling, and Rasmussen, received funds from the Grants-in-Aid Program for work on a wide variety of reproductive research problems Their studies addressed the histology of lactation, the effects of x-rays on ovarian and uterine tissue, ovarian hormones, vertebrate oocytes, reproductive endocrinology in the whale, and comparative histology of the human hypophysis in pregnant and non-

pregnant women.^[17] These data confirm my contention that funding was not at all minor, and certainly came from reputable, mainstream sources.

The NRC Committee on Human Reproduction

The NRC Committee on Human Reproduction was established in 1947 and existed only until 1951 (National Academy of Sciences 1979:v). Originated through efforts of activists in the lay and medical birth control movements, an agreement was constructed whereby the NRC would sponsor this committee while the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the National Committee on Maternal Health (another reproductive and contraceptive research funding source discussed later in this chapter) would raise the funds to support it. However, only $40,000 was raised by these groups for this committee, despite the direct involvement of John D. Rocke-feller III, who was instead committing himself to the Population Council (discussed later).^[18]

Howard Taylor Jr., a physician on the faculty of the Columbia University medical school and a longtime activist in the National Committee on Maternal Health, served as chairman of the Committee on Human Reproduction (Reed 1983:271). Plans were laid for funding a wide range of reproductive researches within a budget of about $220,000 per year. A fourteen-member committee was recruited that strongly represented both reproductive biology and medicine, with other members from public health, psychology, and sociology (Taylor 1948:3). During its four-year existence, this committee funded only nine projects and held four conferences, expending a total of $112,000 (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:374). Of this amount, $7,500 went to Gregory Pincus of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology for studies of the fertilization and development of the mammalian egg; $5,400 went to John Rock of the Free Hospital for Women in Boston for infertility research. Both studies were concerned with the hormonal control of ovulation and later contributed to the development of the birth control pill. Margaret Sanger had also attempted to gain the ear and support of Katherine McCormick to fund the NRC Committee on Human Reproduction, but McCormick's funds were tied up at the time and the committee died for lack of support. McCormick later put nearly $2 million into Pincus's work on the birth control pill at the Worcester Foundation.^[19]

The NRC Committee on Contraceptive Technology

Almost a quarter century elapsed between the failure of the first NRC Committee on Human Reproduction, which was interested in both reproductive and contraceptive research, and the establishment of a second such effort. The Assembly of the Life Sciences of the NRC established the Com-

mittee on Contraceptive Technology in 1977 within the Division of Medical Sciences (National Academy of Sciences 1979:vii). Such a committee was sought on the basis of population issues raised by the Committee on Science and Public Policy since 1963. The goal of the group, which continues today, is to serve as an intersectional organization among the reproductive sciences, population/demography research and fertility control research worlds, to assess current research status and needs, and to plan coordinated efforts. The full integration of the reproductive sciences enterprise with those of population and contraceptive research worlds in the years after World War II is reflected in the existence, structure, and mission of this NRC committee.

In 1990, the renamed Committee on Contraceptive Development published the results of the latest major assessment of the international reproductive biology and contraceptive research situation (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990), the first since that of Greep and his colleagues (1976, 1977) sponsored by the Ford Foundation. It focuses on the present status and future of contraceptive research in the United States and internationally, arguing that funding for such endeavors has been deemed inadequate; specific problems are examined in detail. This book project as a whole was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The committee is now jointly staffed and administered by the NRC Committee on Population and the Institute of Medicine's Division of International Health.

The National Committee On Maternal Health

The private National Committee on Maternal Health (NCMH) was founded in 1925 as a birth control advocacy and research organization and lasted until 1967. It was intended by and for practicing physicians, but eventually it included both medical and biological reproductive scientists.^[20] The NCMH developed out of gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson's work with the Bureau of Social Hygiene and was supported by the Bureau and major foundations.^[21] The NCMH had several major programs during its forty-four-year history, and it was the site of a number of internal struggles regarding the direction and sponsorship of different activities.

The initial focus of the NCMH, from about 1923 to 1928, was on both "clinical" contraceptive and some "basic" reproductive research. The basic scientists who received support undertook the following projects:

The last study, Moench's work on the cytology of sperm, was considered the most successful. It resulted in a monograph in German and a wide variety of English publications.^[23] Robert T. Frank, Robert Latou Dickinson, and Herbert McLean Evans reviewed the manuscript. "Dr. Frank, our Chairman of Research, considers Moench's study the best in its field, and we see constant references to it in medical articles."^[24]

The major NCMH goals during this early period were establishing and raising standards for clinical contraceptive research.^[25] By 1928, however, it became clear to Dickinson and others involved that the basic scientists they had supported in hopes of generating new and/or improved means of contraception were not responding as desired. Several of the reproductive scientists would not even send reports of their progress.^[26] Reed's (1983:181–84) analysis here is that "the committee lacked both the personnel to supervise such projects and the money required to back research from which no immediate results could be demonstrated to donors." I would argue further that reproductive scientists were likely asserting their autonomy over their work in response to unwanted demands from birth control advocates. Even if they happily took money from this agency, basic reproductive scientists were unlikely to pursue contraceptive research at this historical moment, although "raiding the larder" of the NCMH seems to have been acceptable. Further, there was an increasing array of potential sponsors for noncontraceptive research. Regardless, the NCMH temporarily left the field of basic research sponsorship to the NRC/CRPS and other groups around 1928.

Dickinson next guided the NCMH into a new role as medical birth control publicist (ca. 1928–35). Some of the rationales for this organizational strategy emerged through both legal decisions and birth control movement strategies promoting medical control over the practice of many kinds of contraception through medicine's exclusive authority to prescribe drugs and certain devices (Chesler 1992; McCann 1994). To both expand

and consolidate medical authority in the birth control arena, during the NCMH's medical publicist era, several NCMH-sponsored monographs were produced to serve as contraceptive handbooks for doctors. These works provided information used to justify shifts in their clinical and personal opinions on contraception for which many medical men were ready—as long as the information came from physicians. Dr. Dickinson's strategy for the publications noted that "contraception alone will carry less difficulty if bracketed with sterility when it comes to enlisting professional interest." The NCMH-sponsored monographs included Dickinson and Louise Bryant's book Control of Conception (1931), his Human Sex Anatomy (1933), Norman Himes's Medical History of Contraception (1936), Cecil Voge's Chemistry and Physics of Contraception (1933), Carl Hartman's The Time of Ovulation in Women (1936), several studies of human sexuality, and works on abortion and sterility. Dickinson and the NCMH were much more successful as professors to the medical guild than as organizers of basic research (Reed 1983:182–85, 409).

Internal organizational struggles occurred in the NCMH in the years after 1929 between Dickinson and Clarence Gamble, a member of the NCMH, a philanthropist, and a physician who advocated simple means of contraception with nonmedical delivery. Gamble wanted the NCMH to invest in simple contraceptive research and delivery, including clinics. With some concessions to Gamble, Dickinson prevailed and further pushed the NCMH to broaden its audience to include nonmedical scientific and professional societies, both to raise money and to provide information to lay groups. Apparently, there was also some debate about whether the NCMH should focus on birth control or population control (Reed 1983:185).

Yet another shift in direction of the NCMH occurred ca. 1935 with a new generation of leadership. Carl Hartman at Johns Hopkins had been the long-distance research director. Now Earl Engle of Columbia University's medical school, handily in New York City, took that position.^[27] Engle also had considered becoming executive director of the NCMH but instead remained in teaching and reproductive research.^[28] The NCMH now became less interested in legal aspects of sex and contraception and eugenics,^[29] and its program again became increasingly biological and "fundamental" over the years 1935-42.^[30] This shift may well have been an attempt by basic scientists active within the NCMH to "redirect" the mission of the NCMH as other scientists had succeeded in doing within the NRC/CRPS. The goals of the NCMH were explicitly framed afresh in 1939 along such lines: "The function of the Committee is to select, plan, and supervise research projects conducted by qualified experts in hospitals and university departments where their status makes the prosecution of research effective. The Committee furthermore solicits funds for such research projects and acts as a coordinating, educative and critical agency in the planning of re-

search work and human sex phenomena."^[31] Probably because of these new goals, in 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation gave the NCMH $12,000 for research in aspects of human fertility that were not being covered by the NRC/CRPS. The NCMH then sponsored research in sperm morphology, spermatoxins, and other studies of sex cells at Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Rochester, and the University of Pennsylvania (Reed 1983:269). Also in 1939, there was a "Conference of Investigators Working on Various Problems Relating to Sperm Biology Under the Auspices of the NCMH." And, in 1940, the NCMH considered changing its name to the Research Council on Human Reproduction.^[32]

This infusion of Rockefeller Foundation funds strengthened the hand of those in the NCMH who wanted to leave actual contraceptive testing—the major early activity of the NCMH—to other organizations. In 1940, Kenneth Rose of the Birth Control Federation (the predecessor of Planned Parenthood) worked out an arrangement with the NCMH by which the federation would be responsible for all laboratory and field trials of contraceptives except where special technical problems were involved. In turn, the federation was to raise $25,000 per year to support the NCMH in its role as sponsor of basic reproductive research. In early 1941, Dickinson's dream of hiring a medical scientist to head the NCMH came true. Clair E. Folsome, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, became executive secretary of the NCMH. However, research funds dried up during World War II, and Folsome left the NCMH to become research director for Ortho Pharmaceuticals (Reed 1983:270).

In 1948, there was an attempt to revitalize the NCMH as a fund-raising organization for the newly established NRC Committee on Human Reproduction, but the effort failed (Reed 1983:271). Instead of Gamble being forced out of a revitalized basic reproductive research organization, the NCMH became a paper corporation, leaving Gamble free to use it as a sponsor for his mostly "applied" contraceptive research projects from 1949 to 1957. His projects consisted primarily of contraceptive standards research and delivery work, with the assistance for some years of Christopher Tietze, a medical statistician and evaluator of family planning programs (Reed 1983:272). In 1957, Gamble and his family established the Pathfinder Fund, a population control research organization, and he turned the NCMH over to Tietze. At this point, Teitze's work under NCMH auspices became wholly sponsored by the Population Council as its "favorite child," in Tietze's words. Ten years later, the NCMH was wholly absorbed into the Population Council's Bio-Medical Division.^[33] Thus the NCMH ended up in an appropriately modern home within the reproductive/contraceptive/population research establishment of the late twentieth century. Its early history, reflecting these heterogeneous commitments, made the NCMH an exemplary funding organization of the American reproductive sciences.

Direct Foundation Support Of Reproductive Sciences

In addition to large grants to scientific and social action agencies for distribution as reproductive sciences research grants, several major American foundations also directly funded reproductive scientists and centers during the years before World War II. Full documentation of such funding remains to be undertaken. My intent here is merely to sketch the range and extent of such direct funding.^[34]

The longest-lived example of direct foundation funding of a center of reproductive research is the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology, established at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1913 (Sabin 1934:303). Before 1940, this department had varied reproductive research foci, but after about 1923 it was an institution at the heart of reproductive physiological and endocrinological research. It also published a major journal in the field, Carnegie Contributions to Embryology , which was not limited in content by its title. The following description is found in a report by James Ebert (1975-76:7): "The Department was for five decades the world's leading center for the study of the human embryo. It pioneered in the development of primates for research, having the earliest successful American monkey breeding colony. Using these animals, large strides were made toward understanding menstruation and cyclic changes in the ovaries and uterus, laying much of the groundwork for recent advances in family planning." Many of the medically oriented reproductive scientists working in the decades up to 1955 spent some parts of their careers there or worked closely with the department's faculty (e.g., Corner 1981). In 1955, the department's focus shifted away from reproductive to molecular topics.

In 1932, the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation began to make a series of grants in reproductive science (Osborn 1967:367), including, for example, a grant to Gregory Pincus at Harvard for studies of ovulation (published as The Eggs of Mammals in 1936) and a grant to George E. Coghill of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia for investigations in embryonic development and behavior correlations (Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation 1950:26). In 1936, the Macy Foundation funded Dr. Ephraim Schorr's research at Cornell Medical School for studies on the correlation of the menstrual cycle with changes in the vaginal epithelium. Schorr was also working with George Papanicolaou at the time. Additional grants were made to C. C. Little at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory for investigations of the relations between the adrenal cortex and the gonads (Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation 1955: 118–22).

The Markle Foundation, in addition to supporting the NRC Committee on Endocrinology, also provided some direct grants to reproductive scientists, among others (Strickland and Strickland 1976). In 1938, for example, it granted $9,000 over three years to Dr. George W. Corner of the Department of Anatomy of the University of Rochester.^[35] (Although Corner was

a major reproductive scientist of the interwar years, he was not a recipient of NRC/CRPS support.)

The Milbank Memorial Fund, which was then broadly focused on population research, provided partial support of Raymond Pearl's (e.g., 1932) studies of actual contraceptive practices in Baltimore, studies that were especially significant for their statistical innovations. Pearl was a biologist, initially based in agriculture and later moving to public health, who pursued an array of reproductive investigations that demonstrated the shift from eugenics to population control as eugenics in its own name waned during the 1930s (Allen 1991). Pearl's previous population research studies had been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of the Biological Institute at Johns Hopkins ca. 1925–1930 (Allen 1991:252). After this project, Pearl shifted from a biological interpretation of class differences in fertility to a contraceptive usage interpretation, an important shift in the development of population research with clear implications for contraceptive research and development (Osborn 1967:366).

The most extensive direct foundation support of reproductive scientists and centers prior to World War II seems to have come from the Rockefeller Foundation.^[36] There were two main avenues to direct Rockefeller Foundation funding: direct application or recommendation by foundation staff; and direct foundation sponsorship offered to centers of reproductive research initially supported by the NRC/CRPS for some years. The Rockefeller Foundation operated its own programs of support for life sciences research and recruited investigators for such support. Reproductive scientists who were directly funded as individuals by the Rockefeller Foundation included the following.

L. J. Cole, Department of Animal Genetics, University of Wisconsin. Physiology and endocrinology of reproduction in farm animals. Funded for about $6,800 for 1934–36.^[37]

George W. Corner, Department of Anatomy, University of Rochester Medical School. Physiology of reproduction in rhesus monkeys. Funded for a total of $13,200 between 1935 and 1938.^[38]

William W. Greulich, Department of Anatomy, Yale University School of Medicine. Endocrinological changes in human adolescence. Funded for $36,000 from 1939 to 1941.^[39]

Ross G. Harrison, Department of Zoology, Yale University Experimental embryological investigations. Funded for $22,000 from 1936 to 1938.^[40]

Charles B. Stockard, Department of Anatomy, Cornell Medical School (Peekskill Farm). Heredity and development interactions in mammals (dogs). Funded 1925–40 at $25,000 per year, for a total of about $375,000.^[41]

As noted previously, the NRC/CRPS had a policy of supporting major centers of reproductive research with key researchers as leaders. After about a decade, the NRC/CRPS membership realized that its ongoing commitments to a limited number of centers were preventing the agency from branching out in new directions. However, the committee did not want to abandon those centers that had more than fulfilled their goals. Negotiations between NRC/CRPS members, Rockefeller Foundation staff, and reproductive scientists resulted in several such centers being transferred from NRC/CRPS sponsorship to direct Rockefeller Foundation sponsorship (discussed in chapter 4), including the following.

Herbert M. Evans, Institute of Experimental Biology, University of California, Berkeley. Reproductive endocrinology and nutritional aspects of reproduction. Transferred from NRC/CRPS to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929; initial direct grant of $10,000 per year for five years, renewable for five years.^[42]

F. L. Hisaw, Biological Laboratories, Harvard University. Reproductive endocrinology. Received NRC/CRPS funds while at the University of Wisconsin; transferred to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937, with a grant of $18,000 for 1937–41.^[43]

Frank L. Lillie/Carl R. Moore, Department of Zoology, University of Chicago. Reproductive endocrinology and physiology. Joint sponsorship by both the Rockefeller Foundation and the NRC/CRPS for 1929–34 through a blanket grant to the University of Chicago for biological sciences research. Complete transfer to direct Rockefeller Foundation support in 1934.^[44]

P. E. Smith and E. E. Engle, Department of Anatomy, Columbia University. Reproductive endocrinology. Joint Rockefeller Foundation and NRC/CRPS sponsorship for 1934–38; fully transferred to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1938; annual funding in 1938 was $21,000. From 1934 to 1940, a total of $52,950 was provided to this center.^[45]

The Rockefeller Foundation also provided a grant of $2 million to Robert Yerkes and the Yale Laboratory of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, in 1929; some of these funds supported reproductive research (Yerkes 1935; Haraway 1989). There was also a prolonged but ultimately unsuccessful effort on the part of Edwin Embree of the Rockefeller Foundation to start a program in human biology from around 1925 to 1928 (Kohler 1991:125–28). In 1928 Embree himself became president of the Rosenwald Foundation, where he supported the reproduction-related work of E. E. Just on fertilization (Manning 1983). To my knowledge, Just was the only African-American reproductive scientist until after World War II. Rockefeller Foundation patronage during these decades shows a shift from support

from wealthy individual patrons to a more bureaucratic and corporate management of funding and programs by scientifically trained experts.^[46]

Direct foundation funding of reproductive research prior to World War II was considerable, definitely exceeding $1 million and probably approaching $2 million. The foundations providing such support were certainly in the mainstream of the biomedical research community. Despite the illegitimacy of the reproductive sciences and contraception, research funding was clearly and powerfully forthcoming.

Industrial Sponsorship Of Reproductive Research

The most elusive funding source and sponsor of the reproductive sciences is industry. These sources are both historically and contemporarily difficult to ferret out of the historical record, due in some part to the proprietary interests of the companies but also to the controversies attached to sex hormones and other technoscience products of reproductive research.^[47] Yet a wide variety of industries contributed funds and materials to university-based reproductive research efforts. The pharmaceutical industry in the United States and Europe also sponsored some reproductive research.

Industry funding and contributions of materials were generally arranged directly with universities or with reproductive scientists themselves, making systematic documentation scant, if not impossible to unearth. For example, Swift and Company, the Chicago meatpacking company, contributed a considerable amount of fresh materials to Frank Lillie's reproductive sciences center at the University of Chicago (Lillie 1917a,b). Mr. Swift himself was a member of the board of directors of the university.^[48] Similarly, George Corner's autobiography contains multiple accounts of obtaining sow uteri and ovaries from slaughterhouses, but payment is not mentioned unless the entire sow was purchased. Corner also returned some of his grant funds to the Rockefeller Foundation because "the contribution by various industries of materials" made purchase unnecessary.^[49]

The American Meat Packers Association (founded in 1906) transformed itself into the Institute of American Meat Packers (IAMP) in 1919, with a focus on industrial research and the development of new products and by-products. Interestingly, this led to the establishment of a research laboratory by the IAMP at the University of Chicago, not usually a very applied research site.^[50] The by-products of mutual interest to the packing industry, pharmaceutical companies, and reproductive scientists were, of course, glandular materials for hormone extraction. The meatpacking industry became the major supplier of such materials both to pharmaceutical houses for use in making organotherapeutic products and to reproductive and other scientists for research purposes (School of Commerce and IAMP

1924:285–88). IAMP research laboratory workers were in contact with reproductive scientists on campus, and members of the IAMP research staff held appointments in university departments, including F. C. Koch's Department of Biochemistry, enabling graduate students to work in the IAMP laboratory. Koch's department worked regularly with Lillie and Moore's center (Clarke 1993). Upon his retirement from the university, Koch himself became director of biochemical research for Armour and Company (American Foundation 1955:1:310–13).

In sharp contrast to the case in the Netherlands, where Organon was founded in 1923 to pursue intensive endocrinological research (Oudshoorn 1994:69), the pharmaceutical industry in the United States seems not to have sponsored much reproductive research prior to World War II, despite the fact that by the 1920s forty-six drug companies had established their own research laboratories (Shryock 1947:132). Moreover, beginning in World War I and continuing in the 1920s and 1930s, the NRC actively fostered cooperative research between universities and industry (Swann 1988:18). In contrast, Shering AG of Berlin, Germany, spent approximately $5 million on endocrinological research during the 1930s, and CIBA of Basel, Switzerland, committed a total of about $1 million (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:371), though how much of this was for reproductive endocrinology is unclear.

American pharmaceutical companies began to jump on the endocrinological bandwagon in the mid-1930s. For example, by 1940 Abbott Laboratories offered as specialty drugs "the increasingly important gland products, topped by the synthetic hormones Estrone, Estiol, and Progestin," which were marketed directly to physicians by "detail men." In 1940, about five hundred gallons of urine from pregnant mares were used to obtain one ounce of Estrone (Abbott Laboratories 1940:104, 62). Abbot Laboratories, located near Chicago, was the employer of choice for many life sciences graduates of the University of Chicago. Merck, too, entered the fray, instigating research at Rahway, New Jersey, and linking up with chemists at Princeton (Swann 1988:84). Their focus was on the production of "female" hormones for medical treatment of menopause and menstrual problems, Foucault's (1978) "hysterical woman."

Indirectly, however, pharmaceutical companies did contribute to the research budgets of university scientists, often providing research materials. For example, the Wisconsin group, including Hisaw and Fevold, acknowledged that Parke, Davis and Company, E. R. Squibb and Sons, and the Wilson Laboratories had provided dessicated anterior lobe powder for use in research (Long 1990:458). Another practice was the sale of a reproductive scientist's patent by a university to a pharmaceutical company. Such patents were generally secured for development of hormonal isolation, purification, and production procedures. Funds so generated were sometimes returned

to the campus research budgets of the scientists who had obtained the patents.^[51] The third major pattern of industrial support of university-based scientists was through consultancies. Finally, reproductive scientists often headed up pharmaceutical research departments late in their careers, as was true of Carl Hartman at Ortho and Fred Koch at Armour.

Beginning in 1939, funds for awards with honoraria were provided by pharmaceutical companies to honor outstanding reproductive and other scientists selected by the Endocrine Society. Lisser (1967:24–26) notes that recipients of the thousand-dollar E. R. Squibb and Sons Award (given 1940–53) included George Corner, Phillip Smith, Fred Koch, Edward Doisy, Carl Hartman, Herbert Evans, and C. N. Long. The Ciba Award was established in 1942 to recognize exceptional junior scientists. The Ayerst, McKenna, and Harrison Fellowship began in 1947, the Squibb Fellowship in 1956, the Schering Scholarship began in 1949, and the Upjohn Scholarship in 1955. Postgraduate Assemblies in Endocrinology, also sponsored by the Endocrine Society starting in 1948, held parties using a fund jointly created for the purpose by E. R. Squibb and Sons, Ciba Pharmaceutical Products, Schering Corporation, and Ayerst, McKenna and Harrison (Lisser 1967:20–26).

Standing in direct contrast to such sponsorship was the reluctance of several major American pharmaceutical companies as late as 1950 to become involved in contraceptive research, a reluctance widely noted in the literature. Companies typically feared that negative opinion among Roman Catholics might affect sales or lead to boycotts of all products. The illegitimacy of reproductive and contraceptive research thus extended to the marketplace.^[52]

The total value of industrial contributions and payments toward the reproductive research effort is probably indeterminable. But it clearly was significant and must be acknowledged in analyzing funding of the reproductive sciences.

Reproductive Sciences Funding Since World War II

With the increasing social legitimacy of reproductive and contraceptive research after World War II, funding increased. With the creation of overpopulation as a social problem in the mid-1950s, increases skyrocketed. Greep and his associates (1976:378, 383, 402–3) provided the estimates in Table 9, which include contraceptive research and development as well as reproductive sciences.^[53]

There were also some major changes in private sponsorship of the reproductive sciences after World War II. The decline of Rockefeller Foundation support continued as the foundation's investments in molecular biol-

ogy expanded and as other private resources appeared on the horizon. The Rockefeller Foundation seemed to be investing less in earlier hopes for rational control over human behavior (Morawski 1986:239–40), to which Weaver wrote his mid-1930s paean that began this book, and more in genetic control over "life itself." Two important new funding entities entered the reproductive arena during the 1940s and 1950s, both of which were key to the realignment of the reproductive sciences with (rather than in opposition to) contraceptive research.

Instead of sponsoring another NRC committee as his father had done, John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council in 1952. He apparently was frustrated in his efforts to lead the Rockefeller Foundation into more extensive, programmatic, and applied effort in reproduction, population, and contraception. The "philanthropoid" managers of the foundation were loath to have it directly involved in anything as controversial as birth control—particularly during the McCarthy era, when the foundation was already under scrutiny by conservatives. A new autonomous organization, the Population Council, was funded initially for about $500,000 per year (Reed 1983:271, 287). Most of its subsequent funding has come from Rockefeller sources and the Ford Foundation. The internationally oriented Population Council became the locus of development of contraceptives requiring medical rather than user initiative such as the IUD and long-acting hormonal implants such as Norplant. It has emphasized the cultivation of elite international connections and "quietly identified itself as a neutral, scientific organization" as part of its strategy to avoid controversy (Onorato 1991:1). By 1957, it had established a research laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where studies focused on stopping sperm development, immunological methods of fertility control, implants, and IUDs. The Population Council has become one of a handful of major actors in the international reproduction/population domain. Rockefeller "lent

the weight of his family's name to give credibility to a cause which could engender considerable controversy."^[54]

A second new actor on the scene was the Ford Foundation, which funded reproductive studies extensively from 1959 to 1983 (Hertz 1984). The Ford Foundation's program, situated in its International Division, included both basic reproductive sciences and contraceptive development. Since World War II, this new combination of basic and applied interests has been characteristic of most funding sources. Ford funding ranged from $1.5 million in its first year to a high of about $15 million for 1969, leveling off at about $3 million per year toward the end of its commitment. In addition to research support, the Ford Foundation funded the ambitious Greep reports (1976, 1977) and a series of Karolinska Symposia on Methods in Reproductive Endocrinology in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm and the World Health Organization. Like the NRC/CRPS, the Ford Foundation tended to support major centers of research rather than individual scientists. Its centers have included many that are recognizable from earlier eras of the reproductive sciences, along with new ones.

University of Wisconsin, 1963–82, $2,843,000. Funded in part explicitly because of its intersectional collaborations. Focus was on fertility control through use of ovarian hormones. Directed by R. K. Meyer, Department of Zoology.

Marshall Laboratory, Department of Physiology, Cambridge University, 1963–81, $928,000. Directed initially by Sir Alan Parkes and then by C. R. Austin, with a special readership held by R. G. Edwards. Focus on in vitro fertilization leading to the birth of the world's first "test-tube baby," Louise Brown, in 1978.

Karolinska Institute of Stockholm, 1962–82, $2,277,000. Directed by Egon Diczfalusy, focus was on the physiological role of the fetoplacental unit, and on means for monitoring the course of pregnancy. Became the first Research and Training Center of the World Health Organization Programme in Human Reproduction.

Laboratory of Human Reproduction and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School, 1965–83, initial grant of $3 million for a new building. Directed (in sequence) by Roy Greep, Kenneth Ryan, and John Biggers. Focus on hormonal factors controlling ovulation, implanation, tubal transport, spermatogenesis, and male contraception.

Weitzman Institute, Israel, 1962–83. $3,442,500. Directed by M. C. Shelesnyak and H. R. Lindner. Focus was on the role of histamines in nidation, radioimmunoassays of steroids and other hormones, and ovulation processes.

International Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, Columbia

University, 1962–83. Initial funding of $6,738,000. This became the Center for Reproductive Sciences, the Center for Human Male Infertility, and the Center for Population and Family Health. Directed by Howard C. Taylor.

The Ford Foundation also ran regional and nationwide programs, such as one in India that focused on primate research and one in Egypt that focused on contraception. One in Chile and Brazil became the Latin American Association for Research in Human Reproduction. The foundation supported the research and training efforts of the World Health Organization and also sponsored an extensive fellowship program and an array of international programmatic efforts (Hertz 1984:107–26).

After 1960, the U.S. federal government also became a major funder of the reproductive sciences. Federal expenditures on reproductive and contraceptive research skyrocketed from a 1961–65 total of about $19 million to a 1970–74 total of over $183 million (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:402–3). Within the National Institutes of Health, funding was provided especially through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD), founded in 1963, the year after the NRC/CRPS was terminated. A Center for Population Research was then developed within NICHHD in 1968. Federal funding for contraceptive research was also channeled through the Office of Population of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990:75).

Mastroianni and his associates (1990:80) provide an update on funding from 1973 to 1987, helpfully distinguishing between reproductive biology and contraceptive research in Table 10.^[55] This is essentially a continuation of the earlier chart by Greep and his colleagues, starting just after World War II. It shows a trend of expanding support both for basic reproductive sciences and for contraceptive research: "In current dollars, spending for reproductive biology research more than quadrupled, from $30 million in 1973 to $135 million in 1987; spending for contraceptive development grew from $7 million in 1973 to $36 million in 1987" (Mastroianni, Donaldson, and Kane 1990:79).

After about 1960, once it was clear that it was both relatively safe and profitable for pharmaceutical companies to produce contraceptives, industry expenditures on research grew dramatically. Between 1965 and 1974, the annual industry expenditure on reproductive and contraceptive research was about $12 million. Interestingly, over these same years, the industry proportion dropped from about 39 percent of the funding to 19 percent, while the government proportion rose from 38 to 61 percent (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:402–3). Around 1970, at least half a dozen major American pharmaceutical companies were each spending sev-

eral million dollars per year on contraceptive research and development. Since that time, however, most have dropped out of research and development participation, others have ceased or been forced to cease distribution of their contraceptive products because of safety problems (discussed in chapter 8), and only one major company (Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation) still has an active research and development program.^[56] Thus the post–World War II era has seen a shift in sponsorship of reproductive and contraceptive research from almost solely private and corporate philanthropy to include both governmental and industrial sponsorship. These new sources were then and remain problematic and unstable.

Conclusions

Contra Greep and his colleagues (1976), I found that a variety of funding sources were available for the reproductive sciences, most of them highly prestigious and well within the mainstream of the biomedical research community. Given that most external support for all types of research was ob-

tained through private philanthropic organizations during this era, the reproductive sciences enterprise was fairly typically funded. It was the stature of such private organizations (including three NRC committees), as well as the stature of the ultimate donors (the Rockefeller, Macy, and Markle Foundations, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington), that were particularly significant. This can perhaps be better appreciated if one recalls that even mainstream feminist organizations were not mentioning, much less supporting, birth control as an issue during the 1920s. Yet during these same years the Rockefeller-funded NRC/CRPS gleaned about 10 percent of all the funding of the NRC itself.^[57] Both the funds and the prestige lent crucial legitimacy to the enterprise in the decades before World War II.^[58] While the reproductive sciences did not share in initial federal largesse in terms of research support immediately following World War II, by the 1960s federal support had begun expanding to impressive levels. In addition, powerful new foundation support was forthcoming, which helped to consolidate the new alliance among the reproductive sciences, birth control, and population control worlds.

How such funding sources helped to shape research agendas on reproductive topics was addressed in more detail in chapters 4 and 6. We can also take note here of what was, by and large, either not funded or else funded less generously: simply means of contraception (which Margaret Sanger and other feminists had begun requesting from reproductive scientists in 1915); other women's health issues articulated through organizations concerned with women's health (such as the American Medical Women's Association and the Children's Bureau); and more physiological and comparative studies of reproductive phenomena. Instead, focus was on scientific means of contraception to be directed at what Foucault (1978:105) called "the Malthusian couple," with women as the configured users, and on reproductive endocrinological research for hormonal interventions directed almost exclusively at "the hysterical woman."

This entire chapter raises the broader issue of why such extensive funding was provided to the reproductive sciences by such prestigious sources despite the illegitimacy of this research. Clearly there were deep commitments among the major foundations to the development of improved means of control over reproduction—including birth control, population control, eugenics, and family planning. Interestingly, explicit discussion of why these commitments are important is rare in the archival materials, which tend to focus instead on how funding should be spent. The discussion of the illegitimacy of the reproductive sciences to which we next turn should heighten amazement at the existence of any such funding, much less funding of this scale and scope.