Science: Science, Aug. 14, 1944

On Nature’s Heels

Man will never be happy until he has proved that he is at least as smart as nature. One thing he would like to show the world is that he can reproduce himself scientifically. Artificial insemination was one step. He took another step last week, with the first recorded fertilization of a human ovum outside the mother’s body. In Science last week Harvard Gynecologist John Rock and his assistant, Miriam F. Menkin, reported this scientific affront to womanhood. In a small watch glass, the two researchers put a human egg, cut from a woman’s ovary. Next they put in some live male sperm. They let the mixture stand for an hour at room temperature, then placed it in an incubating flask with a culture of human blood serum. After 40 hours, they had a two-celled organism, the apparent beginnings of a human being.

Dr. Rock was proud, but not that proud. He wanted it distinctly understood that he was making no claims of having created a test-tube baby. He has succeeded in thus fertilizing three ova. One of his products had reached the three-cell stage of growth. But Dr. Rock modestly doubted that science would ever be able to reproduce the complex of hormones and other substances in a mother’s body required to develop the billions of cells that make up a human embryo. His experiments, however, have made it possible for the first time to see the beginnings of human conception. Dr. Rock further hoped that his methods might help supposedly sterile women to have children.

Trial Rabbits. The Harvard experiments are a development from similar work on rabbits by Biologist Gregory Pincus at Clark University (TIME, March 12, 1934). Dr. Pincus, after fertilizing rabbits’ eggs with sperm in glass, planted the resulting cells in a female rabbit’s uterus and she bore normal, healthy bunnies.* Other investigators have nursed a monkey’s egg, fertilized in its mother’s body, to the eight-cell stage in glass. Six years ago Philadelphia’s Cancer Specialist Stanley Philip Reimann, by pricking a human ovum with a glass needle, succeeded in stimulating it to an apparent beginning of growth.

* Not to be confused with parthenogenesis, the artificial production of young without sexual fertilization (e.g., by chemical means).