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Pandora’s Baby
How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution
By Robin Marantz Henig
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004
On a September morning in 1973, a hospital administrator in New York City learned of a rogue experiment in progress at his institution, and he ordered the removal from an incubator of a test tube containing a frothy mixture of human eggs and sperm. Had the experiment been allowed to continue, it might have resulted in the first human fetus created through in vitro fertilization.
In Pandora's Baby, the award-winning journalist Robin Marantz Henig tells the story of that confrontation, which ushered in a new era in reproductive technology. She takes us back to the early days of IVF, when the procedure was viewed as crackpot science and its pioneers as outsiders in the medical world. Henig lays out the ethical and political battlefield of the 1970s -- a battlefield that is recreated with each new technology -- and traces the sea change that has occurred in the public perception of "test tube babies."
It's a human story, of men and women grappling with the moral implications of a scientific discovery: researchers, couples yearning for babies, hospital administrators, and bioethicists. Through these people Henig brings to life the argument made most forcefully against IVF in the early days: that it was the first step down the slippery slope toward genetic engineering, designer babies, and human clones. Even though this argument is worrisome and antiprogressive, Henig says, many of its most scary prophecies seem to be coming true.
Praise for Pandora's Baby
"Beautifully written and timely. . . . Henig, the author of seven previous books, deftly explores the slippery slope that begins with manipulating the creation of life but has the potential to lead to a world that could have been created by Aldous Huxley.... as Henig wisely demonstrates, we adapt 'to new discoveries the way we have so often adapted, incorporating them into the shifting terrain of genomes, genes and generation.'"
The New York Times Book Review
"Lively history . . . an impressively detailed narrative. . . Henig worries that we have forgotten the dark, tortured, surreptitious and often just plain weird origins of in vitro technology. She exhumes these beginnings, and in the process reminds readers of just how tentative and suspect IVF was. She also stresses how very recent this lurch into the brave new baby-making world has been and how, like so many other technologies, IVF moved rapidly from horrified disbelief into routine acceptance."
The Washington Post Book World
"An engrossing, hard-to-put-down read telling how a once highly controversial potential advance becomes a widely appreciated tool for today’s life."
James D. Watson, Nobel laureate and author, The Double Helix
"Gracefully written . . . brilliantly probes the philosophical and social issues surrounding that most intimate of scientific endeavors: the creation of human life."
Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
"[A] judicious history . . . [Henig's] level-headed book provides a welcome context for the current debate over cloning.
Publisher's Weekly
"Henig manages to treat a complex and emotionally charged topic evenhandedly even as research presses ever forward with cloning and cross-species experimentation."
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