American Experience

Narrator: On September 12, 1973, on the upper east side of Manhattan, a twenty-nine-year-old woman was wheeled into an operating room at New York Hospital. A surgeon made an incision into her abdomen and withdrew an egg from her ovary.

If the procedure went as planned, Doris Del-Zio would become the first woman in the world to conceive a baby through in vitro fertilization or IVF. The surgeon put the egg in a test tube and went to find Doris’ husband.

John Del-Zio: And I waited until he had-had the egg in the tube, and he had put the nutrients in, and he had sealed it, and he gave it to me. He says, “Get to Dr. Shettles.” I took the test tube, and I put it under my arm to keep it warm, I thought, and I went over to Columbia by cab.

Narrator: Fifteen minutes later, John Del-Zio arrived at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Waiting for him in the lobby near the men’s room was the country’s foremost expert on IVF — Dr. Landrum Shettles.

John Del-Zio: And he said, “Now, you take this other tube into the men’s room, and get me some sperm.” So that’s what I had to do. And I went and got sperm. Brought it out to him, handed it to him, and he says, “Okay, I’ll call you at the hospital tonight.”

Narrator: Shettles headed straight to a lab on the 16th floor. After years of frustration and disappointment, he believed he was about to make history.

Back in the 1930s, Harvard scientists had mastered in vitro fertilization in rabbits. But the human egg refused to yield its secrets.

Lee Silver, Geneticist: Nobody had seen a human embryo. In fact, the earliest stages of human embryogenesis had never been seen. They were just the figment of our imagination. We assumed they existed because we assumed that human reproduction was the same as reproduction in other mammals.

Narrator: The Harvard experiments attracted the attention of John Rock, one of the nation’s leading fertility specialists. Rock was quick to see IVF’s potential to help infertile women. In 1938, he hired researcher Miriam Menkin — who had experience with IVF in rabbits — to begin experimentation in humans.

Margaret Marsh, Historian: Several hundred women had agreed to have their eggs used for fertilization. No success. Week in, week out. No success. Trying all these different techniques. No success.

Narrator: Over the next six years, she recalled, failure became routine. Tuesday, Menkin would hunt for eggs in ovaries removed from Rock’s surgical patients. Wednesday, she would mix the egg with sperm donated from medical students. On Thursday, she would pray. Then, on Friday — came disappointment — no fertilization. On the morning of February 6, 1944, Menkin’s routine was finally broken.

Margaret Marsh, Historian: She had a teething baby at home, she was up for two nights running. She went into the lab, she did her fertilization, and she was watching the sperm attack the egg. She was watching the sperm go round and round and round. And she was tired. She felt like she couldn’t get up. So she exposed the egg to the sperm for a longer period of time.

Narrator: When Menkin looked into her microscope, she was stunned to see a two-cell fertilized egg.

Margaret Marsh, Historian: Miriam Menkin, when she saw the first fertilized egg, was absolutely awestruck. It was, she said, the most profound sight in the world. She was unable to take her eyes from it.

Narrator: News of the achievement spread quickly and the press coined the term; “test tube baby.” The response shocked John Rock. Infertile women inundated him with letters begging for the promising new technology. But just as the path-breaking research was getting off the ground, Rock received devastating news. Miriam Menkin told him she was leaving to follow her husband to his new job in North Carolina. Without Menkin, the project floundered — and John Rock soon abandoned the experiments. IVF research came to a standstill.

For many Americans in the 1950s, the prospect of “test tube babies” seemed ripped from the pages of science fiction novels.

Margaret Marsh, Historian: Nobody knew what would happen when you put human sperm and a human egg in a dish, and then you grew it and you implanted it in a woman’s uterus. Nobody knew what would happen.

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: There was a cadre of people who thought this is just going beyond what is appropriate for scientists, that this is treading on the work that belongs only to God and nature.

Narrator: But Landrum Shettles saw things differently. He was convinced in vitro fertilization was the next scientific frontier.

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: Shettles seemed to have almost an obsession with human eggs. He actually slept in his office. He had seven children and a wife in some little apartment on Claremont Avenue in the upper west side of Manhattan. And he chose to stay up on 168th Street in the hospital. And in the middle of the night, he would just sort of be around, be in the hallways with his white coat flapping behind him.

Georgianna Jagiello, Geneticist: I would see him in the hall in his scrub greens, at all hours of the day and night. He was a sort of mystical figure in the department. Nobody really seemed to relate to him particularly, nor did he reach out very much to us in the research wing.

Narrator: In 1955 Life magazine reported that Shettles had managed to fertilize a human egg and keep it alive for three days. The 46-year-old scientist made an unlikely public figure.

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: His — Shettles had a thick Mississippi accent from his farm boy days, and he kind of looked like- one of his colleagues called him a large version of Truman Capote. And his manner was strange because he didn’t look people in the eye, he was awkward. He had some of the earmarks of what you would think of as a genius. He couldn’t quite live in this world.

Narrator: In 1960, Shettles published Ovum Humanum, a photographic atlas showing microscopic human eggs — called oocytes — in early stages of development.

Georgianna Jagiello, Geneticist: They were unique. Here were human oocytes. Sperm, one had seen. But many of us had worked with mice and cows and sheep and monkeys and species of that sort, but to see human was very exciting — really thrilling photographs.

Narrator: Throughout the 1960s, Shettles struggled to grow an embryo until it was large enough to reinsert into the womb. Then, in 1969, he was stunned to learn that two British researchers were racing ahead of him. After a series of breakthroughs, physiologist Robert Edwards and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe were ready to implant embryos into women’s bodies. Test tube babies were no longer a fantasy — they were on the horizon. Many Americans were horrified.

Lee Silver, Geneticist: The idea that you could take a human embryo which you’ve created in the Petri dish, which is already very unnatural and abnormal, and then take that embryo and put it back into a woman’s uterus and have a baby born, was appalling to most people. Even to scientists and most other doctors it felt uncomfortable.

Robin Marantz Henig, Author: There was a real belief that if you were going to mess around with eggs and sperm in a Petri dish, and make a baby, that you could do some real chromosomal damage and create monsters.

Robert George, Legal Scholar: Even testing in animals wouldn’t really, at the end, tell us whether this would be safe in humans. So there were some people who were warning that we simply shouldn’t go down this road. Many people were concerned will we come to see the technological production of children as in fact superior in the long run because in the new-fangled Brave New World, we will be in a position to ensure that unhealthy or imperfect children are not born.

Arthur Caplan, Bioethicist: Well, I think there was a fear of the slippery slope; that if it would work for infertile couples, then maybe people would start to say: Hey, I’d like to have a smart baby, or an athletic baby, or some other desirable kind of traits in my baby. And if you could pick the sperm and the egg, then maybe that’s the way that we’ll all have babies… It was about eugenics. It was about making super-babies, perfect babies, better babies.