Today in Technology History
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March 24
The birth control pill, a technology that has had an enormous effect on society, might not exist if not for two men born on March 24.
Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt was born exactly one century ago, on March 24, 1903, in northern Germany. He studied biochemistry and became a research professor, concentrating on hormones, a class of chemicals that regulate the body. In 1929, he became the first scientist to isolate a female sex hormone, and in the following years he successfully isolated more sex hormones -- including progesterone, a hormone that inhibits ovulation. Unfortunately, because he lived in Germany, his work suffered under the Nazi dictatorship: In 1936, he was forbidden to accept a professorship at Harvard, and in 1939 he was denied permission to accept the Nobel Prize that was awarded to him for his work with hormones. (He got his prize after the Nazis were gone.) He retired in 1971 and died in 1995, having made enormous contributions to our understanding of the chemicals that make our bodies work.
The American gynecologist John Charles Rock was born exactly 13 years before Butenandt, on March 24, 1890, in Massachusetts. He studied medicine and psychology at Harvard and he enjoyed the company of Boston's social elite. He did research on human conception, and in the 1950s he joined two other scientists in testing the use of progesterone -- one of the hormones that Butenandt had discovered -- as a contraceptive. This research led directly to the birth control pill. Rock's outspoken advocacy on behalf of the pill alienated him from his Catholic associates (he was devoutly Catholic himself) and made him a controversial public figure. He was forced into retirement in the early 1970s. Having neglected his finances, he died in penury in 1984.
The work of Butenandt and Rock -- one in pure science, the other in applied science -- has had long-term social consequences. Some of those consequences are only becoming apparent now, more than a generation after the birth control pill was introduced.
Related links:
Click here for a timeline of the history of the birth control pill.
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