American Experience (1988) s19e04 Episode Script
Test Tube Babies
1
How would you like to be the
world's first test tube baby?
What do you do on Father's Day?
You send a card
to the DuPont Corporation?
NARRATOR:
Tonight on American Experience:
WOMAN:
When they tell you that
you are incapable
of conceiving a child,
it's horrible.
NARRATOR:
A couple about to change
history.
WOMAN:
Nobody knew what would happen
when you put human sperm
and a human egg in a dish
and implanted it
in a woman's uterus.
NARRATOR:
A doctor preparing
to cross a line.
WOMAN:
This is treading on the work
that belongs only to God
and nature.
NARRATOR:
A controversy that still
echoes today.
MAN:
There are really very deep
and fundamental differences
between Americans about some
fundamental ethical questions.
NARRATOR:
What were the costs
MAN:
You killed my baby.
WOMAN:
He'll always be my baby.
NARRATOR:
to deliver test tube babies?
Tonight, on American Experience.
NARRATOR:
On September 12, 1973,
on the upper east side
of Manhattan,
a 29-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's husband.
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:
15 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.
DEL-ZIO:
And he said, "Now, you take
this other tube,
go into the men's room"
(chuckles)
"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 1930's,
Harvard scientists
had mastered in vitro
fertilization in rabbits.
But the human egg refused
to yield its secrets.
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:
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.
MARSH:
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.
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."
e 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.
MARSH:
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.
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.
HENIG:
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.
DR. GEORGIANNA JAGIELLO:
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.
Shettles had a thick
Mississippi accent
from his
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, 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.
JAGIELLO:
They were unique.
Here were human oocytes.
Sperm, one had seen,
uh, 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.
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.
HENIG:
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.
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 newfangled
Brave New World,
we will be in a position
to ensure that unhealthy or
imperfect children are not born.
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.
NARRATOR:
In Washington,
federal agencies placed
an unofficial moratorium
on IVF funding.
The progress of IVF in America,
of course, was greatly impeded
by the fact that the National
Institutes of Health,
the greatest granting agency
there is,
or at least with the greatest
amount of money,
would not entertain
any applications for IVF.
It was clear
that IVF opponents prevented
federal funding for IVF.
NARRATOR:
At Columbia Presbyterian,
administrators grew
increasingly concerned
that Shettles' research
might jeopardize
the hospital's reputation.
This was
a very conservative place.
It prided itself on being, uh,
let's put it this way,
not first to get there,
but maybe second to get there,
but that was okay
because the people
who got there first
didn't always know
what they were doing.
NARRATOR:
Shettles' superiors
repeatedly warned him
not to cross the line
into human experimentation.
If any one individual
does research
that goes against
some regulation,
like, does human research
without asking for permission,
then all the federal grants
are endangered.
NARRATOR:
The job of protecting Columbia
Presbyterian's interests
fell to Dr. Raymond Vande Wiele,
chair of the ob-gyn department.
CAPLAN:
Ray Vande Wiele
was very conservative,
strongly oriented
toward moral values,
particularly religious values.
This is a guy
who is the captain of the ship.
He was a guy who was large
and in charge.
NARRATOR:
Vande Wiele demoted Shettles
to a low-profile position
with few responsibilities.
But Landrum Shettles
was not easily deterred.
He still had access to a lab
and continued his IVF research.
Great scientists, he believed,
advance science
by defying
conventional thinking.
In January, 1973,
the Supreme Court ruled
in Roe v. Wade
to legalize abortion
and unleashed one
of the most polarizing debates
in the nation's history.
The course of IVF in America
would now become entangled
with the controversy
over the status of the embryo.
It seems that, in order
to achieve a successful
fertilization in vitro
in the laboratory, a number of
fertilized ova must be there,
and, of course, only one is
going to go through the process
of embryo transfer
into the uterus.
Now, what do you do
with these discards?
What are they?
So when the subject came up
to do in vitro fertilization,
you might have to do research
on an embryo,
that immediately raised
the question,
"Well, what is an embryo?"
That immediately raised
the question,
"When does life begin?"
MARSH:
You have increasingly vocal
anti-abortion forces saying
in order to create an embryo
that you might be able to
transfer into a woman's uterus,
you have to destroy
all these embryos
on the way to doing research,
and you're engaging in murder.
NARRATOR:
Opponents of abortion began
pressing the federal government
to ban embryo research.
Landrum Shettles believed
it was now or never.
If he didn't act quickly,
the government might move
to prohibit IVF.
That fall, he agreed
to try the procedure
on a couple from Florida.
Doris and John Del-Zio had been
married for five years.
Doris had a daughter
from her first marriage.
Still, she wanted a child
with John.
JOHN:
I felt that the bad portion
of life was behind me
and that we've got
something ahead
that we might look forward to
and-and make a future of it
for both of us.
We were both divorced.
I thought this might be the time
to start fresh.
NARRATOR:
But a ruptured appendix had left
her Fallopian tubes mangled
and scarred,
leaving Doris infertile.
DORIS:
When they tell you
that you are incapable
of conceiving a child,
it's horrible.
I'm not giving John a child.
It's my failure.
It's not John.
It's my failure.
NARRATOR:
Doris underwent
three painful surgeries
to open her damaged tubes.
Each attempt failed.
Her surgeon, Dr. William
Sweeney, urged her to stop.
DORIS:
He said, "I really think you're
crucifying yourself
with all this surgery
you're doing."
He said, "I know
you want a baby,
"but you got to accept the fact
that you just can't have
a child."
And I just could not accept
that fact.
NARRATOR:
Reluctantly, Sweeney decided
to tell Doris about Landrum
Shettles and the risky,
new procedure he was developing
to bypass
damaged Fallopian tubes.
Shettles could take an egg
extracted from her ovary,
fertilize it in a petri dish
and return it to her uterus.
As a child, I had polio,
and I always believed
that, because of the doctors
helping me overcome the polio,
that they were put up
on a pedestal,
and that they can do anything,
and that they were able
to help me walk again
and live a normal life;
that they were going
to help me with this.
We thought that this guy
is the guy,
this is the man that's going
to make a success
of what we wanted,
and we thought nothing
about not going ahead with it.
NARRATOR:
Landrum Shettles told no one
at Columbia Presbyterian
he was proceeding with an
experiment in human IVF.
Alone in a 16th-floor lab,
he mixed Doris' egg
and John's sperm in a test tube
and placed it an incubator
set to 98 degrees.
Later that day,
a young scientist
unexpectedly entered the lab.
She saw this unusual test tube
that looked kind of dark brown
red with a red stopper,
which meant it was a chemical
test tube, non-sterile.
And she came to my office
and said,
"I want you to look at this
because
I don't know what this is and
perhaps it shouldn't be there."
NARRATOR:
At 8:00 a.m.
the following morning,
Raymond Vande Wiele learned
of the experiment
taking place down the hall
from his office.
Vande Wiele was enraged.
CAPLAN:
I can't imagine that Vande
Wiele wasn't freaking out
that if this experiment hit
the papers,
that it could adversely impact
Columbia's funding,
it could get some sort of legal
authorities in there to say,
"What are you doing,
making this thing in the lab?"
and that the PR alone could be
damaging to the department.
NARRATOR:
Vande Wiele
ordered a staff member
to remove the test tube
from the incubator,
knowing it would destroy
the specimen.
Then, he went searching
for Shettles.
CAPLAN:
I happened to be
in the hallway
up where ob-gyn was,
and all of a sudden
here comes Landrum Shettles
flying down the hallway
at almost a run,
if not running, then close,
and he zooms around the corner.
And I'm sort of,
"Whoa, what was that?"
And he's trailed
within 30 seconds
by Raymond Vande Wiele,
who's a much bigger guy,
and this is more like a large
semi coming down the hallway
at a pretty fast clip.
And he's red-faced, and he's
mad, and he's muttering.
And he goes whipping around the
corner, clearly after Shettles.
NARRATOR:
When Vande Wiele
caught up with him,
Shettles knew his career
at the hospital was over.
The maverick scientist
was forced to resign.
Several hours later,
John Del-Zio was called away
from his wife's bedside
to take a phone call
from Dr. Sweeney.
And Dr. Sweeney says,
"Somebody at Columbia
"removed the test tube
from the incubator,
and we have to abort
the whole thing."
I said, I-I-I asked him,
"No part could be salvaged?"
He said, "No, no, it's-it's,
just forget about
the whole thing."
And we were both stunned.
And he said to me,
Dr. Sweeney said to me,
"I don't know what to tell her."
NARRATOR:
As evening
settled over the city,
Doris lay alone
in her hospital room.
The phone rang.
It was Landrum Shettles.
DORIS:
He said, "I'm so sorry, Doris."
He said, "I can't believe
they did this."
And I said, "Who did what?"
He said, "You don't know?"
And I said, "No.
What are you talking about?"
He said, "Dr. Vande Wiele
destroyed the specimens."
And I said,
"No! No! It couldn't
it couldn't they couldn't
they couldn't."
And I just lay there all night.
And I couldn't sleep.
And I'm just laying there
and crying.
And early the next morning
before daybreak,
the door opened and Dr. Sweeney
walked in
And he came over
and he just held me,
and just let me cry.
That was the end of my-my dream.
And it was the beginning
of a nightmare.
NARRATOR:
Back home in Florida,
Doris Del-Zio could not let go
of the past.
She was aloof,
didn't want to even
have anything to do, er, uh,
sexually, you know.
And for a long period of time,
she was affected in that,
in that way.
Uh
She felt that she wasn't
a woman anymore.
NARRATOR:
Then, John received a call
from Landrum Shettles.
And Dr. Shettles explained to me
that if we don't do something
to show that we had opposed
the actions of Dr. Vande Wiele,
then perhaps experimentation
on procedures like this
could not go on in
the United States in the future.
And I was really upset
about this at this point,
because I didn't want to go
to a lawsuit.
I said,
"John, I can't face it."
And he said we have a lawsuit.
But they couldn't do it
without me.
NARRATOR:
The Del-Zios sued
Columbia Presbyterian
for a million
and a half dollars,
accusing Raymond Vande Wiele
of inflicting severe
mental pain and anguish.
The progress of IVF in America
was about to shift
from the lab to the courtroom.
In England, Edwards and Steptoe
were transferring
fertilized eggs
back into the mother's body.
But the embryos wouldn't take.
One, two, ten, 100 transfers
And no pregnancies.
JONES:
The problem was many times
you changed two or three things,
and then if you got
a little inkling
that something was working,
you weren't sure
which one it was.
So that it became
a very troublesome
trial-and-error sort of thing
to get all these little
technical details right.
NARRATOR:
For nearly a decade,
the pair persevered
without government funding.
Then in November 1977,
they achieved
a successful pregnancy
for a factory worker
named Lesley Brown.
The fate of IVF would rest
on the health of this baby.
While the world waited
for the arrival
of the first test tube baby,
the Del-Zios' lawsuit
finally came to trial.
DORIS:
I was stunned.
The whole street was closed off.
There were TV trucks and
cameras all over the place.
There were people
running after me.
I didn't know where
they were coming from.
It was like a mob scene.
And they were all running at me
with-with microphones.
The court was completely packed
with people from
all over the world:
from South America,
from China, from Japan.
I couldn't believe it!
I could not believe it.
I sat there completely stunned.
NARRATOR:
The press dubbed
the Del-Zio case
the test tube baby death trial.
How are you feeling?
Nervous and hopeful.
The defense
the defense is saying
that this procedure would
have endangered your life.
Do you agree
with that?
No comment.
No comment.
I'm sorry.
Dr. Shettles
has no comment.
No comment.
HENIG:
The Del-Zios said that
something had been done to them
by Raymond Vande Wiele and
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
And the defense chose instead
to put on trial
Landrum Shettles.
How do you feel about the baby?
We have no opinion
about the matter.
Thank you.
HENIG:
He was presented as
a once-promising
scientist who couldn't
do his work anymore,
who was taking shortcuts,
and who was-was so inept
that he couldn't possibly
have been actually
growing an embryo in there.
The defense claims the procedure
was a Model-T operation.
How do you defend
your handling of it?
Well, I think that Mr. Lindbergh
flew the Atlantic
in the Spirit of St. Louis.
I can't compare the Spirit of
St. Louis with a 707,
but he got to Paris.
If Mr. Lindbergh, sitting out
there in Long Island,
if his airplane had been
destroyed before he took off,
he couldn't have
gotten to Paris.
And that's exactly
what happened to us.
We had an airplane sitting up
there, ready to fly to Paris,
and somebody destroyed it.
NARRATOR:
Once the trial began,
Vande Wiele's attorneys
called Doris to the stand.
For the next three days, she was
grilled by a battery of lawyers.
They're defending Columbia,
the giant.
And here we were, defending
me and Doris.
It was like David and Goliath.
HENIG:
And at one point,
one of the lawyers says,
"Why did you even
file this lawsuit?"
She said,
"I didn't want this
to happen again."
And he said, "You mean, you-you
didn't want to allow
the kind of rash experimentation
that Landrum Shettles did?"
Which was, of course,
the defense,
you know, this was
all rash experimentation.
And she said, "No, I didn't
want anyone else
to have a Dr. Vande Wiele
kill their baby."
You know, "You killed my baby."
The her response
all the time was,
"That was going to be my baby
and you killed my baby."
HENIG:
And there was sort of a hush
in the courtroom,
and-and the lawyer said,
"You don't mean that. You didn't
think that was a baby."
And she said, "Yes! It was.
He killed my baby."
To this day, it was my baby.
It'll always be my baby.
I don't know which baby it was,
but it was my baby.
NARRATOR:
On July 25, 1978,
nine days into the trial,
the drama in the courtroom
was overshadowed
by events in England.
Good evening.
The first baby ever conceived
outside the mother's body
was born in England
The so called "test tube baby,"
born by cesarean section.
It is a girl,
in excellent health.
A beautiful, normal baby,
the doctors said.
And they said this may open the
way for some, though not all,
women who cannot have children
otherwise.
NARRATOR:
With the birth
of Louise Joy Brown,
Edwards and Steptoe
had pried open the mystery
of human reproduction that had
eluded Landrum Shettles.
DORIS:
I guess I'll always wish
that was my baby.
I'll always want my child.
And it does hurt
a little bit to know
that I'll never be able
to have a baby,
but it can't take away from the
joy I feel for Mrs. Brown today.
Well, we're overjoyed,
overjoyed, for Mrs. Brown,
of course, and for science,
which is what we're talking
about mostly now.
I was very angry.
I says, "We didn't
We're not the first
in this country to do it,"
because I was thinking
in terms of the United States
being the first to do
something like this.
And I was angry at first,
and I said,
"Well, I hope that this
will show the jury
"that it's possible,
that we certainly
can win this case now."
NARRATOR:
After a month-long trial, the
jury found Raymond Vande Wiele
guilty of wrongfully causing
emotional distress,
but awarded the Del-Zios
only $50,000 in damages
A fraction of their request.
I think the court, when it tried
to wrestle with the question
of what to do, didn't know how
to compensate
for a hypothetical.
Maybe there had been
an embryo made.
Maybe that embryo
could have become a baby.
Maybe that baby
would have been normal.
That's a lot of maybes,
and courts don't like
to award a lot of money
on the basis of a lot of maybes.
NARRATOR:
Shettles never regained
his reputation
and the Del-Zios
never had a baby,
but the trial forced Americans
to grapple
with their conflicted attitudes
toward in vitro fertilization.
(applause)
How would you like to be the
world's first test tube baby?
What do you do on Father's Day?
You send a card
to the DuPont Corporation?
(laughter)
I understand after the baby
was conceived in the laboratory,
a pair of beakers
smoked a cigarette
and stared at the ceiling.
A test tube baby, yes, indeed.
Both mother and baby
are doing very well indeed.
HENIG:
She was on the cover
of every magazine
and every newspaper,
and-and she was called
the baby of the century,
and it was an incredible circus
around the birth
of Louise Brown, because
people had been so sure that she
was going to be a monster, that
when she turned out to be just
this chubby-cheeked,
blonde newborn
who was quite beautiful,
there was so much relief.
PHIL DONAHUE:
We clearly have a beautiful,
beautiful and normal baby.
You couldn't get in your home
when you came home from
the hospital with the baby.
That's right, yes.
Because of the press?
Press. Uh
people wanting to see Louise.
Because everyone
got the wrong impression.
What was the wrong
impression, Mr. Brown?
Well, when they say
"test tube baby,"
everybody had the impression
that she was going to be
about nine foot tall and about
a quarter-inch wide
You know, something kind of
out of, you know,
out of a-a comic strip
sort of thing.
Yes.
And they were very, very
surprised when they seen her.
CAPLAN:
Who knew whether
the next ten babies
were going to turn out
to have birth defects
and be stillborn and have all
kinds of problems? Nobody.
But the appearance of this
clearly healthy, happy kid
basically silenced the critics.
NARRATOR:
In America, attitudes
shifted quickly.
Across the country,
infertile couples began
to clamor
for in vitro fertilization.
In response, critics of IVF
stepped up pressure
on Washington.
The idea of IVF
started to spread in 1980.
1980 is the year that Ronald
Reagan became president,
and one of Reagan's
constituencies was
the conservative,
religious Republicans,
and so Reagan made sure
that there would be
no federal funding for any
research on human embryos.
NARRATOR:
Politicians scrambled
to placate both sides.
If it could move forward without
federal involvement,
I think most people in congress
and the state legislatures
were ready to say,
"God bless it.
It's off my desk."
It wasn't that IVF was banned;
it was just that federal funds
couldn't be used.
So it's a very clever political
ploy in the United States.
It could be done freely
in private enterprise,
but we weren't going to use
any government funds
and so the government was being
more "ethical" that way.
And that's the way
the entire history of IVF
began in the United States.
NARRATOR:
IVF in America
would start up again
with two physicians
on the verge of retirement.
Drs. Howard and Georgeanna Jones
were leading experts
in reproductive medicine
at Johns Hopkins.
Even Robert Edwards had sought
the couple's advice.
All that was behind them.
JONES:
Now, when Georgeanna
and I had to retire,
the question was:
What do we do?
Do we go fishing?
We consulted our children
And we have three children
And they unanimously voted
that we should go fishing.
NARRATOR:
The Joneses were ready to settle
into a quiet, academic life
in Norfolk, Virginia,
when their plans were up-ended
by the birth of Louise Brown.
The reporter
from the local newspaper
came to our home on the day
that Louise Brown had been born.
While we were moving in,
she interviewed us
about this nice thing
had happened.
We gave her all sorts of good
information about that,
and then, as she was leaving,
she said,
"Could this be done in Norfolk?"
And it sounded like a flip
question,
and I gave her a flip answer.
I said, "Of course."
And she said,
"What would it take?"
And I said
it would take some money,
and as a result of that,
a former patient called up
and said, "I see by the paper
you need some money.
How much do you need?"
And I had never been asked
that question before,
and I don't think I've ever been
asked that question since.
NARRATOR:
The Joneses soon announced their
plan to open an IVF clinic.
Anti-abortion activists
in Norfolk
immediately rallied
their forces to stop them.
ANNOUNCER:
This is News 3.
REPORTER:
Charles Dean is president
of the Tidewater chapter
of the Virginia Society
for Human Life.
Dean claims that fertilized eggs
have and will be destroyed
by doctors in the clinic.
Basically, the manipulation
an-and destruction
of-of human beings, tiny human
beings at their earliest stage,
is, has to be unacceptable
to any civilized society.
REPORTER:
Dr. Howard Jones, who heads up
the in vitro clinic,
says that doctors plan to
re-implant all fertilized eggs,
not destroy them.
But fertilization, whether
natural or in vitro,
isn't perfect, he says,
and in those cases,
abortion will be offered
as an alternative.
It seems to me that it
would be um, unwise
and indeed, um
even malpractice
not to offer these women
the same opportunity
that patients who are normally
pregnant have.
NARRATOR:
Anti-abortion groups
found it hard
to fight a technology that
enabled couples to have a baby.
The momentum was now
on the side of IVF.
CAPLAN:
If you get babies
and they're the biological
offspring of those couples,
and those couples don't have
many other options,
I think most Americans
say, "Who cares?"
Test tube baby technology
is seen by almost every American
as pro-life technology.
NARRATOR:
On March 1, 1980,
the first in vitro
fertilization clinic in America
opened its doors.
Thousands of women flooded
the Joneses with letters,
phone calls and telegrams
begging for the procedure.
In the two years following
the birth of Louise Brown,
there had been numerous attempts
at IVF around the world,
but only two more successes.
The science of in vitro
fertilization
was still in its infancy.
LUCINDA VEECK GOSDEN:
In the beginning, the lab was
a bit of a black box.
We didn't have
a manual to follow.
There hadn't been a number of
published papers to that point
showing us do this, push that,
collect this, do that.
We had to learn very much on our
own through trial and error.
NARRATOR:
To start, seven couples
arrived in Norfolk
from across the country.
Following Robert Edwards' model,
the Joneses began tracking
the women's menstrual cycles.
They're all elevated
over the normal,
and we know that
GOSDEN:
In that first year when we were
working with natural cycles,
we were forced by the patients'
reproductive biology
to collect eggs when their
bodies said it was appropriate.
So quite often we were
at the hospital
at 1:30 in the morning,
4:00 in the morning.
JONES:
One of the first things
was that
we weren't sure we were going
to get the egg the egg!
And I recall going back
to the office after each time,
and as I'd walk in the office,
the girls in the office said,
"Did you get it?"
That would be the question,
and most of the time
we had to say no.
NARRATOR:
A year later,
there were still no pregnancies.
The Joneses were stymied.
JONES:
We sought the advice
of everybody we could.
One of our colleagues said,
"You need to work in the dark.
You must remember that the sperm
and egg have never seen light."
And therefore, when we began, we
did indeed use infrared lights.
Well, that turned out
not to be the case.
The sperm and egg have
no light receptors
and they don't know whether
it's light or dark.
But this is the type
of technical thing
And I'm sure I could make
a list of 50 of these
little technical details
That had to be worked out.
NARRATOR:
The turning point came
when Georgeanna Jones started
using hormones
to stimulate her patients'
ovaries to produce more eggs.
Her decision to begin
using hormones
was a great boon
to our patient population,
because instead of having
a single oocyte
that we would hope
would become fertilized,
we now had two or three
we could work with
in the laboratory,
and thus the chances for our
patients were much greater.
NARRATOR:
A young couple
from Massachusetts,
Judy and Roger Carr, were among
the first to try the new method.
Months earlier,
Judy had nearly died
when an embryo lodged
itself outside her uterus.
During emergency surgery, her
fallopian tubes were removed
Leaving her infertile.
My physician walked into
the room with a brochure,
waving it, saying,
"Well, I don't know
if you're interested in
anything like this, but"
He said, "It's some husband
and wife,
"and they're starting
something new
"for couples that can't
conceive children.
So, you might want
to look into it."
NARRATOR:
In March, 1981,
Judy began a regimen
of three hormone shots a day.
Weeks later, two of her eggs
were retrieved
and one fertilized.
Dr. Jones cautioned the Carrs
not to get their hopes up.
I remember him asking us
specifically,
"Are you are you
a betting man?"
And he essentially said, "You
know, you put your money down
and you take your chances."
NARRATOR:
Soon the results came in
Judy was pregnant.
JUDY:
We can't be this lucky.
This could not be happening
to us.
This is like
winning the lottery.
You know, one in a million,
or whatever it is,
and we just happened to be
that one couple.
Can you tell yet what sex
it's going to be?
Is it still too early?
Right now it's probably
still too early.
In another three weeks,
we might be able to tell.
NARRATOR:
Judy's pregnancy was
remarkably ordinary-?
Until a sonogram raised concern.
As she approached term,
her head size began to fall
to the lower limits of normal.
We were concerned that this
slowing of the head growth
might be associated
with general abnormalities.
Georgeanna kept saying,
"Don't worry.
"Judy's small and Roger's small.
"It's going to be a small baby.
Don't be nervous
about it."
NARRATOR:
For the next month, Howard Jones
could not shake his fear.
In the tense hours before the
scheduled cesarean birth,
he planned for the worst.
I had written out
a press release,
which said that
the baby had been born,
that there was an abnormality,
we were distressed about this,
we hoped that the privacy of
the patient would be regarded.
NARRATOR:
As he entered the delivery room
on December 28, 1981,
Howard Jones folded the press
release into his pocket.
At 7:46 a.m.,
America's first test tube baby
was born.
You're going to feel
a pushing on you,
is that okay?
Weighing five pounds, 12 ounces,
she was much bigger than
the sonogram had indicated.
Good, good baby.
And in perfect health.
The Carrs named her Elizabeth.
ROGER:
All right ladies.
Here she is Elizabeth!
Oh, she's doing good.
Hello! Hello!
(laughs)
MAN:
The announcement itself was
made by Dr. Howard Jones.
JONES:
This morning at 7:46,
a daughter
was born
to Mrs. Judith Carr,
a 28-year-old school teacher.
The father is
Mr. Roger Carr,
a 30-year-old
mechanical engineer.
JUDY:
Not only was she perfect
and normal,
she had full head of hair
and, you know,
healthy, healthy looking
and very pink and?-
and everything you hope for.
MARSH:
When Elizabeth Carr was born,
it emboldened
other medical centers
to go ahead and start up
their own IVF clinics
and to say
to the federal government,
"We're not going to worry about
getting your money for this.
We're going to risk it."
NARRATOR:
Over the next two decades,
Howard and Georgeanna Jones
would continue to perfect
in vitro fertilization
and train the first generation
of IVF doctors
in the United States.
By 1985, 115 children owed
their existence to the Joneses.
JUDY:
The first baby reunion
was perhaps
the most special to me.
The staircase was just filled
with parents holding
their babies.
And to see all those couples
with those beautiful babies,
that's the first time it hit me
just what had happened
over the course
of the past five years.
HENIG:
It was a little surprising
how quickly
people got used to IVF.
But, not really if
you think about
how people get used to
all sorts of new technology.
That's sort of the pattern
that it takes,
is that at first it seems like
it's abhorrent
and it's something that we
absolutely shouldn't do.
And then for a while it seems
kind of miraculous.
(children laughing)
And then after a while,
the technology just becomes part
of the fabric of daily life.
In 1983, ten years after
he stopped Landrum Shettles'
experiment,
Raymond Vande Wiele becomes
the co-director
of the first IVF clinic
in New York City.
It's not because
he was a hypocrite,
or even because he changed
that much.
It's because society changed
and IVF became
just the next thing to do
for infertile couples.
CAPLAN:
Clinics popped up
all over the place.
Some programs would put
eight embryos back at a time,
to try and get
a better success rate.
Other places would say,
"That's immoral.
We're only going
to use three."
Some people would treat
gay people.
Some people would treat
single moms.
So the whole field wound up
being a kind of wild, wild west
where the free market reigned.
GEORGE:
The doctor who gave us
Louise Brown
recalled looking at her
in the petri dish,
and said, "She was
beautiful then,
and she's beautiful now."
There are really very deep
and fundamental differences
between Americans
about some fundamental ethical
questions:
how we regard the human being;
how we regard human life.
We are not united as a
people on these questions.
NARRATOR:
Since the birth
of Elizabeth Carr,
over 400,000 IVF babies have
been born in America.
There are now more
than 2 million
"test tube" babies in the world.
There's more at American
Experience on-line.
Visit companion Web sites
for each American Experience
episode,
with interactive features,
additional interviews
plus rare videos and photos.
All this and more at pbs.org.
Captioned by
access.wgbh.org
How would you like to be the
world's first test tube baby?
What do you do on Father's Day?
You send a card
to the DuPont Corporation?
NARRATOR:
Tonight on American Experience:
WOMAN:
When they tell you that
you are incapable
of conceiving a child,
it's horrible.
NARRATOR:
A couple about to change
history.
WOMAN:
Nobody knew what would happen
when you put human sperm
and a human egg in a dish
and implanted it
in a woman's uterus.
NARRATOR:
A doctor preparing
to cross a line.
WOMAN:
This is treading on the work
that belongs only to God
and nature.
NARRATOR:
A controversy that still
echoes today.
MAN:
There are really very deep
and fundamental differences
between Americans about some
fundamental ethical questions.
NARRATOR:
What were the costs
MAN:
You killed my baby.
WOMAN:
He'll always be my baby.
NARRATOR:
to deliver test tube babies?
Tonight, on American Experience.
NARRATOR:
On September 12, 1973,
on the upper east side
of Manhattan,
a 29-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's husband.
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:
15 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.
DEL-ZIO:
And he said, "Now, you take
this other tube,
go into the men's room"
(chuckles)
"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 1930's,
Harvard scientists
had mastered in vitro
fertilization in rabbits.
But the human egg refused
to yield its secrets.
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:
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.
MARSH:
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.
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."
e 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.
MARSH:
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.
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.
HENIG:
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.
DR. GEORGIANNA JAGIELLO:
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.
Shettles had a thick
Mississippi accent
from his
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, 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.
JAGIELLO:
They were unique.
Here were human oocytes.
Sperm, one had seen,
uh, 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.
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.
HENIG:
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.
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 newfangled
Brave New World,
we will be in a position
to ensure that unhealthy or
imperfect children are not born.
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.
NARRATOR:
In Washington,
federal agencies placed
an unofficial moratorium
on IVF funding.
The progress of IVF in America,
of course, was greatly impeded
by the fact that the National
Institutes of Health,
the greatest granting agency
there is,
or at least with the greatest
amount of money,
would not entertain
any applications for IVF.
It was clear
that IVF opponents prevented
federal funding for IVF.
NARRATOR:
At Columbia Presbyterian,
administrators grew
increasingly concerned
that Shettles' research
might jeopardize
the hospital's reputation.
This was
a very conservative place.
It prided itself on being, uh,
let's put it this way,
not first to get there,
but maybe second to get there,
but that was okay
because the people
who got there first
didn't always know
what they were doing.
NARRATOR:
Shettles' superiors
repeatedly warned him
not to cross the line
into human experimentation.
If any one individual
does research
that goes against
some regulation,
like, does human research
without asking for permission,
then all the federal grants
are endangered.
NARRATOR:
The job of protecting Columbia
Presbyterian's interests
fell to Dr. Raymond Vande Wiele,
chair of the ob-gyn department.
CAPLAN:
Ray Vande Wiele
was very conservative,
strongly oriented
toward moral values,
particularly religious values.
This is a guy
who is the captain of the ship.
He was a guy who was large
and in charge.
NARRATOR:
Vande Wiele demoted Shettles
to a low-profile position
with few responsibilities.
But Landrum Shettles
was not easily deterred.
He still had access to a lab
and continued his IVF research.
Great scientists, he believed,
advance science
by defying
conventional thinking.
In January, 1973,
the Supreme Court ruled
in Roe v. Wade
to legalize abortion
and unleashed one
of the most polarizing debates
in the nation's history.
The course of IVF in America
would now become entangled
with the controversy
over the status of the embryo.
It seems that, in order
to achieve a successful
fertilization in vitro
in the laboratory, a number of
fertilized ova must be there,
and, of course, only one is
going to go through the process
of embryo transfer
into the uterus.
Now, what do you do
with these discards?
What are they?
So when the subject came up
to do in vitro fertilization,
you might have to do research
on an embryo,
that immediately raised
the question,
"Well, what is an embryo?"
That immediately raised
the question,
"When does life begin?"
MARSH:
You have increasingly vocal
anti-abortion forces saying
in order to create an embryo
that you might be able to
transfer into a woman's uterus,
you have to destroy
all these embryos
on the way to doing research,
and you're engaging in murder.
NARRATOR:
Opponents of abortion began
pressing the federal government
to ban embryo research.
Landrum Shettles believed
it was now or never.
If he didn't act quickly,
the government might move
to prohibit IVF.
That fall, he agreed
to try the procedure
on a couple from Florida.
Doris and John Del-Zio had been
married for five years.
Doris had a daughter
from her first marriage.
Still, she wanted a child
with John.
JOHN:
I felt that the bad portion
of life was behind me
and that we've got
something ahead
that we might look forward to
and-and make a future of it
for both of us.
We were both divorced.
I thought this might be the time
to start fresh.
NARRATOR:
But a ruptured appendix had left
her Fallopian tubes mangled
and scarred,
leaving Doris infertile.
DORIS:
When they tell you
that you are incapable
of conceiving a child,
it's horrible.
I'm not giving John a child.
It's my failure.
It's not John.
It's my failure.
NARRATOR:
Doris underwent
three painful surgeries
to open her damaged tubes.
Each attempt failed.
Her surgeon, Dr. William
Sweeney, urged her to stop.
DORIS:
He said, "I really think you're
crucifying yourself
with all this surgery
you're doing."
He said, "I know
you want a baby,
"but you got to accept the fact
that you just can't have
a child."
And I just could not accept
that fact.
NARRATOR:
Reluctantly, Sweeney decided
to tell Doris about Landrum
Shettles and the risky,
new procedure he was developing
to bypass
damaged Fallopian tubes.
Shettles could take an egg
extracted from her ovary,
fertilize it in a petri dish
and return it to her uterus.
As a child, I had polio,
and I always believed
that, because of the doctors
helping me overcome the polio,
that they were put up
on a pedestal,
and that they can do anything,
and that they were able
to help me walk again
and live a normal life;
that they were going
to help me with this.
We thought that this guy
is the guy,
this is the man that's going
to make a success
of what we wanted,
and we thought nothing
about not going ahead with it.
NARRATOR:
Landrum Shettles told no one
at Columbia Presbyterian
he was proceeding with an
experiment in human IVF.
Alone in a 16th-floor lab,
he mixed Doris' egg
and John's sperm in a test tube
and placed it an incubator
set to 98 degrees.
Later that day,
a young scientist
unexpectedly entered the lab.
She saw this unusual test tube
that looked kind of dark brown
red with a red stopper,
which meant it was a chemical
test tube, non-sterile.
And she came to my office
and said,
"I want you to look at this
because
I don't know what this is and
perhaps it shouldn't be there."
NARRATOR:
At 8:00 a.m.
the following morning,
Raymond Vande Wiele learned
of the experiment
taking place down the hall
from his office.
Vande Wiele was enraged.
CAPLAN:
I can't imagine that Vande
Wiele wasn't freaking out
that if this experiment hit
the papers,
that it could adversely impact
Columbia's funding,
it could get some sort of legal
authorities in there to say,
"What are you doing,
making this thing in the lab?"
and that the PR alone could be
damaging to the department.
NARRATOR:
Vande Wiele
ordered a staff member
to remove the test tube
from the incubator,
knowing it would destroy
the specimen.
Then, he went searching
for Shettles.
CAPLAN:
I happened to be
in the hallway
up where ob-gyn was,
and all of a sudden
here comes Landrum Shettles
flying down the hallway
at almost a run,
if not running, then close,
and he zooms around the corner.
And I'm sort of,
"Whoa, what was that?"
And he's trailed
within 30 seconds
by Raymond Vande Wiele,
who's a much bigger guy,
and this is more like a large
semi coming down the hallway
at a pretty fast clip.
And he's red-faced, and he's
mad, and he's muttering.
And he goes whipping around the
corner, clearly after Shettles.
NARRATOR:
When Vande Wiele
caught up with him,
Shettles knew his career
at the hospital was over.
The maverick scientist
was forced to resign.
Several hours later,
John Del-Zio was called away
from his wife's bedside
to take a phone call
from Dr. Sweeney.
And Dr. Sweeney says,
"Somebody at Columbia
"removed the test tube
from the incubator,
and we have to abort
the whole thing."
I said, I-I-I asked him,
"No part could be salvaged?"
He said, "No, no, it's-it's,
just forget about
the whole thing."
And we were both stunned.
And he said to me,
Dr. Sweeney said to me,
"I don't know what to tell her."
NARRATOR:
As evening
settled over the city,
Doris lay alone
in her hospital room.
The phone rang.
It was Landrum Shettles.
DORIS:
He said, "I'm so sorry, Doris."
He said, "I can't believe
they did this."
And I said, "Who did what?"
He said, "You don't know?"
And I said, "No.
What are you talking about?"
He said, "Dr. Vande Wiele
destroyed the specimens."
And I said,
"No! No! It couldn't
it couldn't they couldn't
they couldn't."
And I just lay there all night.
And I couldn't sleep.
And I'm just laying there
and crying.
And early the next morning
before daybreak,
the door opened and Dr. Sweeney
walked in
And he came over
and he just held me,
and just let me cry.
That was the end of my-my dream.
And it was the beginning
of a nightmare.
NARRATOR:
Back home in Florida,
Doris Del-Zio could not let go
of the past.
She was aloof,
didn't want to even
have anything to do, er, uh,
sexually, you know.
And for a long period of time,
she was affected in that,
in that way.
Uh
She felt that she wasn't
a woman anymore.
NARRATOR:
Then, John received a call
from Landrum Shettles.
And Dr. Shettles explained to me
that if we don't do something
to show that we had opposed
the actions of Dr. Vande Wiele,
then perhaps experimentation
on procedures like this
could not go on in
the United States in the future.
And I was really upset
about this at this point,
because I didn't want to go
to a lawsuit.
I said,
"John, I can't face it."
And he said we have a lawsuit.
But they couldn't do it
without me.
NARRATOR:
The Del-Zios sued
Columbia Presbyterian
for a million
and a half dollars,
accusing Raymond Vande Wiele
of inflicting severe
mental pain and anguish.
The progress of IVF in America
was about to shift
from the lab to the courtroom.
In England, Edwards and Steptoe
were transferring
fertilized eggs
back into the mother's body.
But the embryos wouldn't take.
One, two, ten, 100 transfers
And no pregnancies.
JONES:
The problem was many times
you changed two or three things,
and then if you got
a little inkling
that something was working,
you weren't sure
which one it was.
So that it became
a very troublesome
trial-and-error sort of thing
to get all these little
technical details right.
NARRATOR:
For nearly a decade,
the pair persevered
without government funding.
Then in November 1977,
they achieved
a successful pregnancy
for a factory worker
named Lesley Brown.
The fate of IVF would rest
on the health of this baby.
While the world waited
for the arrival
of the first test tube baby,
the Del-Zios' lawsuit
finally came to trial.
DORIS:
I was stunned.
The whole street was closed off.
There were TV trucks and
cameras all over the place.
There were people
running after me.
I didn't know where
they were coming from.
It was like a mob scene.
And they were all running at me
with-with microphones.
The court was completely packed
with people from
all over the world:
from South America,
from China, from Japan.
I couldn't believe it!
I could not believe it.
I sat there completely stunned.
NARRATOR:
The press dubbed
the Del-Zio case
the test tube baby death trial.
How are you feeling?
Nervous and hopeful.
The defense
the defense is saying
that this procedure would
have endangered your life.
Do you agree
with that?
No comment.
No comment.
I'm sorry.
Dr. Shettles
has no comment.
No comment.
HENIG:
The Del-Zios said that
something had been done to them
by Raymond Vande Wiele and
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
And the defense chose instead
to put on trial
Landrum Shettles.
How do you feel about the baby?
We have no opinion
about the matter.
Thank you.
HENIG:
He was presented as
a once-promising
scientist who couldn't
do his work anymore,
who was taking shortcuts,
and who was-was so inept
that he couldn't possibly
have been actually
growing an embryo in there.
The defense claims the procedure
was a Model-T operation.
How do you defend
your handling of it?
Well, I think that Mr. Lindbergh
flew the Atlantic
in the Spirit of St. Louis.
I can't compare the Spirit of
St. Louis with a 707,
but he got to Paris.
If Mr. Lindbergh, sitting out
there in Long Island,
if his airplane had been
destroyed before he took off,
he couldn't have
gotten to Paris.
And that's exactly
what happened to us.
We had an airplane sitting up
there, ready to fly to Paris,
and somebody destroyed it.
NARRATOR:
Once the trial began,
Vande Wiele's attorneys
called Doris to the stand.
For the next three days, she was
grilled by a battery of lawyers.
They're defending Columbia,
the giant.
And here we were, defending
me and Doris.
It was like David and Goliath.
HENIG:
And at one point,
one of the lawyers says,
"Why did you even
file this lawsuit?"
She said,
"I didn't want this
to happen again."
And he said, "You mean, you-you
didn't want to allow
the kind of rash experimentation
that Landrum Shettles did?"
Which was, of course,
the defense,
you know, this was
all rash experimentation.
And she said, "No, I didn't
want anyone else
to have a Dr. Vande Wiele
kill their baby."
You know, "You killed my baby."
The her response
all the time was,
"That was going to be my baby
and you killed my baby."
HENIG:
And there was sort of a hush
in the courtroom,
and-and the lawyer said,
"You don't mean that. You didn't
think that was a baby."
And she said, "Yes! It was.
He killed my baby."
To this day, it was my baby.
It'll always be my baby.
I don't know which baby it was,
but it was my baby.
NARRATOR:
On July 25, 1978,
nine days into the trial,
the drama in the courtroom
was overshadowed
by events in England.
Good evening.
The first baby ever conceived
outside the mother's body
was born in England
The so called "test tube baby,"
born by cesarean section.
It is a girl,
in excellent health.
A beautiful, normal baby,
the doctors said.
And they said this may open the
way for some, though not all,
women who cannot have children
otherwise.
NARRATOR:
With the birth
of Louise Joy Brown,
Edwards and Steptoe
had pried open the mystery
of human reproduction that had
eluded Landrum Shettles.
DORIS:
I guess I'll always wish
that was my baby.
I'll always want my child.
And it does hurt
a little bit to know
that I'll never be able
to have a baby,
but it can't take away from the
joy I feel for Mrs. Brown today.
Well, we're overjoyed,
overjoyed, for Mrs. Brown,
of course, and for science,
which is what we're talking
about mostly now.
I was very angry.
I says, "We didn't
We're not the first
in this country to do it,"
because I was thinking
in terms of the United States
being the first to do
something like this.
And I was angry at first,
and I said,
"Well, I hope that this
will show the jury
"that it's possible,
that we certainly
can win this case now."
NARRATOR:
After a month-long trial, the
jury found Raymond Vande Wiele
guilty of wrongfully causing
emotional distress,
but awarded the Del-Zios
only $50,000 in damages
A fraction of their request.
I think the court, when it tried
to wrestle with the question
of what to do, didn't know how
to compensate
for a hypothetical.
Maybe there had been
an embryo made.
Maybe that embryo
could have become a baby.
Maybe that baby
would have been normal.
That's a lot of maybes,
and courts don't like
to award a lot of money
on the basis of a lot of maybes.
NARRATOR:
Shettles never regained
his reputation
and the Del-Zios
never had a baby,
but the trial forced Americans
to grapple
with their conflicted attitudes
toward in vitro fertilization.
(applause)
How would you like to be the
world's first test tube baby?
What do you do on Father's Day?
You send a card
to the DuPont Corporation?
(laughter)
I understand after the baby
was conceived in the laboratory,
a pair of beakers
smoked a cigarette
and stared at the ceiling.
A test tube baby, yes, indeed.
Both mother and baby
are doing very well indeed.
HENIG:
She was on the cover
of every magazine
and every newspaper,
and-and she was called
the baby of the century,
and it was an incredible circus
around the birth
of Louise Brown, because
people had been so sure that she
was going to be a monster, that
when she turned out to be just
this chubby-cheeked,
blonde newborn
who was quite beautiful,
there was so much relief.
PHIL DONAHUE:
We clearly have a beautiful,
beautiful and normal baby.
You couldn't get in your home
when you came home from
the hospital with the baby.
That's right, yes.
Because of the press?
Press. Uh
people wanting to see Louise.
Because everyone
got the wrong impression.
What was the wrong
impression, Mr. Brown?
Well, when they say
"test tube baby,"
everybody had the impression
that she was going to be
about nine foot tall and about
a quarter-inch wide
You know, something kind of
out of, you know,
out of a-a comic strip
sort of thing.
Yes.
And they were very, very
surprised when they seen her.
CAPLAN:
Who knew whether
the next ten babies
were going to turn out
to have birth defects
and be stillborn and have all
kinds of problems? Nobody.
But the appearance of this
clearly healthy, happy kid
basically silenced the critics.
NARRATOR:
In America, attitudes
shifted quickly.
Across the country,
infertile couples began
to clamor
for in vitro fertilization.
In response, critics of IVF
stepped up pressure
on Washington.
The idea of IVF
started to spread in 1980.
1980 is the year that Ronald
Reagan became president,
and one of Reagan's
constituencies was
the conservative,
religious Republicans,
and so Reagan made sure
that there would be
no federal funding for any
research on human embryos.
NARRATOR:
Politicians scrambled
to placate both sides.
If it could move forward without
federal involvement,
I think most people in congress
and the state legislatures
were ready to say,
"God bless it.
It's off my desk."
It wasn't that IVF was banned;
it was just that federal funds
couldn't be used.
So it's a very clever political
ploy in the United States.
It could be done freely
in private enterprise,
but we weren't going to use
any government funds
and so the government was being
more "ethical" that way.
And that's the way
the entire history of IVF
began in the United States.
NARRATOR:
IVF in America
would start up again
with two physicians
on the verge of retirement.
Drs. Howard and Georgeanna Jones
were leading experts
in reproductive medicine
at Johns Hopkins.
Even Robert Edwards had sought
the couple's advice.
All that was behind them.
JONES:
Now, when Georgeanna
and I had to retire,
the question was:
What do we do?
Do we go fishing?
We consulted our children
And we have three children
And they unanimously voted
that we should go fishing.
NARRATOR:
The Joneses were ready to settle
into a quiet, academic life
in Norfolk, Virginia,
when their plans were up-ended
by the birth of Louise Brown.
The reporter
from the local newspaper
came to our home on the day
that Louise Brown had been born.
While we were moving in,
she interviewed us
about this nice thing
had happened.
We gave her all sorts of good
information about that,
and then, as she was leaving,
she said,
"Could this be done in Norfolk?"
And it sounded like a flip
question,
and I gave her a flip answer.
I said, "Of course."
And she said,
"What would it take?"
And I said
it would take some money,
and as a result of that,
a former patient called up
and said, "I see by the paper
you need some money.
How much do you need?"
And I had never been asked
that question before,
and I don't think I've ever been
asked that question since.
NARRATOR:
The Joneses soon announced their
plan to open an IVF clinic.
Anti-abortion activists
in Norfolk
immediately rallied
their forces to stop them.
ANNOUNCER:
This is News 3.
REPORTER:
Charles Dean is president
of the Tidewater chapter
of the Virginia Society
for Human Life.
Dean claims that fertilized eggs
have and will be destroyed
by doctors in the clinic.
Basically, the manipulation
an-and destruction
of-of human beings, tiny human
beings at their earliest stage,
is, has to be unacceptable
to any civilized society.
REPORTER:
Dr. Howard Jones, who heads up
the in vitro clinic,
says that doctors plan to
re-implant all fertilized eggs,
not destroy them.
But fertilization, whether
natural or in vitro,
isn't perfect, he says,
and in those cases,
abortion will be offered
as an alternative.
It seems to me that it
would be um, unwise
and indeed, um
even malpractice
not to offer these women
the same opportunity
that patients who are normally
pregnant have.
NARRATOR:
Anti-abortion groups
found it hard
to fight a technology that
enabled couples to have a baby.
The momentum was now
on the side of IVF.
CAPLAN:
If you get babies
and they're the biological
offspring of those couples,
and those couples don't have
many other options,
I think most Americans
say, "Who cares?"
Test tube baby technology
is seen by almost every American
as pro-life technology.
NARRATOR:
On March 1, 1980,
the first in vitro
fertilization clinic in America
opened its doors.
Thousands of women flooded
the Joneses with letters,
phone calls and telegrams
begging for the procedure.
In the two years following
the birth of Louise Brown,
there had been numerous attempts
at IVF around the world,
but only two more successes.
The science of in vitro
fertilization
was still in its infancy.
LUCINDA VEECK GOSDEN:
In the beginning, the lab was
a bit of a black box.
We didn't have
a manual to follow.
There hadn't been a number of
published papers to that point
showing us do this, push that,
collect this, do that.
We had to learn very much on our
own through trial and error.
NARRATOR:
To start, seven couples
arrived in Norfolk
from across the country.
Following Robert Edwards' model,
the Joneses began tracking
the women's menstrual cycles.
They're all elevated
over the normal,
and we know that
GOSDEN:
In that first year when we were
working with natural cycles,
we were forced by the patients'
reproductive biology
to collect eggs when their
bodies said it was appropriate.
So quite often we were
at the hospital
at 1:30 in the morning,
4:00 in the morning.
JONES:
One of the first things
was that
we weren't sure we were going
to get the egg the egg!
And I recall going back
to the office after each time,
and as I'd walk in the office,
the girls in the office said,
"Did you get it?"
That would be the question,
and most of the time
we had to say no.
NARRATOR:
A year later,
there were still no pregnancies.
The Joneses were stymied.
JONES:
We sought the advice
of everybody we could.
One of our colleagues said,
"You need to work in the dark.
You must remember that the sperm
and egg have never seen light."
And therefore, when we began, we
did indeed use infrared lights.
Well, that turned out
not to be the case.
The sperm and egg have
no light receptors
and they don't know whether
it's light or dark.
But this is the type
of technical thing
And I'm sure I could make
a list of 50 of these
little technical details
That had to be worked out.
NARRATOR:
The turning point came
when Georgeanna Jones started
using hormones
to stimulate her patients'
ovaries to produce more eggs.
Her decision to begin
using hormones
was a great boon
to our patient population,
because instead of having
a single oocyte
that we would hope
would become fertilized,
we now had two or three
we could work with
in the laboratory,
and thus the chances for our
patients were much greater.
NARRATOR:
A young couple
from Massachusetts,
Judy and Roger Carr, were among
the first to try the new method.
Months earlier,
Judy had nearly died
when an embryo lodged
itself outside her uterus.
During emergency surgery, her
fallopian tubes were removed
Leaving her infertile.
My physician walked into
the room with a brochure,
waving it, saying,
"Well, I don't know
if you're interested in
anything like this, but"
He said, "It's some husband
and wife,
"and they're starting
something new
"for couples that can't
conceive children.
So, you might want
to look into it."
NARRATOR:
In March, 1981,
Judy began a regimen
of three hormone shots a day.
Weeks later, two of her eggs
were retrieved
and one fertilized.
Dr. Jones cautioned the Carrs
not to get their hopes up.
I remember him asking us
specifically,
"Are you are you
a betting man?"
And he essentially said, "You
know, you put your money down
and you take your chances."
NARRATOR:
Soon the results came in
Judy was pregnant.
JUDY:
We can't be this lucky.
This could not be happening
to us.
This is like
winning the lottery.
You know, one in a million,
or whatever it is,
and we just happened to be
that one couple.
Can you tell yet what sex
it's going to be?
Is it still too early?
Right now it's probably
still too early.
In another three weeks,
we might be able to tell.
NARRATOR:
Judy's pregnancy was
remarkably ordinary-?
Until a sonogram raised concern.
As she approached term,
her head size began to fall
to the lower limits of normal.
We were concerned that this
slowing of the head growth
might be associated
with general abnormalities.
Georgeanna kept saying,
"Don't worry.
"Judy's small and Roger's small.
"It's going to be a small baby.
Don't be nervous
about it."
NARRATOR:
For the next month, Howard Jones
could not shake his fear.
In the tense hours before the
scheduled cesarean birth,
he planned for the worst.
I had written out
a press release,
which said that
the baby had been born,
that there was an abnormality,
we were distressed about this,
we hoped that the privacy of
the patient would be regarded.
NARRATOR:
As he entered the delivery room
on December 28, 1981,
Howard Jones folded the press
release into his pocket.
At 7:46 a.m.,
America's first test tube baby
was born.
You're going to feel
a pushing on you,
is that okay?
Weighing five pounds, 12 ounces,
she was much bigger than
the sonogram had indicated.
Good, good baby.
And in perfect health.
The Carrs named her Elizabeth.
ROGER:
All right ladies.
Here she is Elizabeth!
Oh, she's doing good.
Hello! Hello!
(laughs)
MAN:
The announcement itself was
made by Dr. Howard Jones.
JONES:
This morning at 7:46,
a daughter
was born
to Mrs. Judith Carr,
a 28-year-old school teacher.
The father is
Mr. Roger Carr,
a 30-year-old
mechanical engineer.
JUDY:
Not only was she perfect
and normal,
she had full head of hair
and, you know,
healthy, healthy looking
and very pink and?-
and everything you hope for.
MARSH:
When Elizabeth Carr was born,
it emboldened
other medical centers
to go ahead and start up
their own IVF clinics
and to say
to the federal government,
"We're not going to worry about
getting your money for this.
We're going to risk it."
NARRATOR:
Over the next two decades,
Howard and Georgeanna Jones
would continue to perfect
in vitro fertilization
and train the first generation
of IVF doctors
in the United States.
By 1985, 115 children owed
their existence to the Joneses.
JUDY:
The first baby reunion
was perhaps
the most special to me.
The staircase was just filled
with parents holding
their babies.
And to see all those couples
with those beautiful babies,
that's the first time it hit me
just what had happened
over the course
of the past five years.
HENIG:
It was a little surprising
how quickly
people got used to IVF.
But, not really if
you think about
how people get used to
all sorts of new technology.
That's sort of the pattern
that it takes,
is that at first it seems like
it's abhorrent
and it's something that we
absolutely shouldn't do.
And then for a while it seems
kind of miraculous.
(children laughing)
And then after a while,
the technology just becomes part
of the fabric of daily life.
In 1983, ten years after
he stopped Landrum Shettles'
experiment,
Raymond Vande Wiele becomes
the co-director
of the first IVF clinic
in New York City.
It's not because
he was a hypocrite,
or even because he changed
that much.
It's because society changed
and IVF became
just the next thing to do
for infertile couples.
CAPLAN:
Clinics popped up
all over the place.
Some programs would put
eight embryos back at a time,
to try and get
a better success rate.
Other places would say,
"That's immoral.
We're only going
to use three."
Some people would treat
gay people.
Some people would treat
single moms.
So the whole field wound up
being a kind of wild, wild west
where the free market reigned.
GEORGE:
The doctor who gave us
Louise Brown
recalled looking at her
in the petri dish,
and said, "She was
beautiful then,
and she's beautiful now."
There are really very deep
and fundamental differences
between Americans
about some fundamental ethical
questions:
how we regard the human being;
how we regard human life.
We are not united as a
people on these questions.
NARRATOR:
Since the birth
of Elizabeth Carr,
over 400,000 IVF babies have
been born in America.
There are now more
than 2 million
"test tube" babies in the world.
There's more at American
Experience on-line.
Visit companion Web sites
for each American Experience
episode,
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additional interviews
plus rare videos and photos.
All this and more at pbs.org.
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