The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  …both the Hen and Housewife are so matcht,

  That her Son Born, is only her Son Hatch;

  That when her Teeming hopes have prosp’rous bin,

  Yet to Conceive, is but to Lay within.38

  Women are a great deal like men, except when they’re more like chickens.

  “I shall begin at the beginning,” says the director of the Hatchery, while giving a tour to a group of students, in the opening chapter of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel. The idea that eggs can exist outside of women’s bodies was a mainstay of twentieth-century science fiction. “Begin at the beginning,” Huxley’s students dutifully write in their notebooks. The tour continues: “ ‘These,’ he waved his hand, ‘are the incubators.’ And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. ‘The week’s supply of ova.’ ” In Huxley’s dark and terrible world, yet another new world, there are no mothers and no fathers, no families at all. Humans are conceived in the laboratory, and fetuses grow in test tubes.39

  Huxley’s fiction was ahead of science, but not by all that much. Before human eggs could be incubated, they had to be found. Aristotle had studied chickens; Harvey, deer. After Harvey, there followed something of an egg hunt. In 1827, a German scholar named Karl von Baer finally found a mammalian egg, the ovum of a dog. “Led by curiosity,” he wrote, “I opened one of the follicles and took up the minute object on the point of my knife, finding that I could see it very distinctly and that it was surrounded by mucus. When I placed it under the microscope I was utterly astonished, for I saw an ovule … so clearly that a blind man could hardly deny it.”40

  Meanwhile, Charles Darwin was undertaking his own investigation of genesis. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, a children’s book that doubled as a defense of Darwinism, was published four years later. The Huxley children, including Aldous and Julian, read it, not least because it featured a scene in which their grandfather T. H. Huxley, a supporter of Darwin’s, inspects a baby in a bottle. “Dear Grandpater,” Julian Huxley wrote to his grandfather when he was four, “have you seen a Water-baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day? Your loving JULIAN.”41

  In The Eggs of Mammals, in 1936, the Harvard-trained physiologist Gregory Pincus (who started out studying rats) offered a history of what happened next in the matter of hunting eggs: “Pfuger, 1863—cat; Schron, 1863—cat and rabbit; Koster, 1868—man; Slawinsky, 1873—man; Wagener, 1879—dog; Van Beneden, 1880—bat; Harz, 1883—mouse, guinea pig, cat; Lange, 1896—mouse; Coert, 1898—rabbit and cat; Amann, 1899—man; Palladino, 1894, 1898—man, bear, dog; Lane-Claypon, 1905, 1907—rabbit; Fellner, 1909—man.”42 The year 1909 is also when the word “ectogenesis” was coined.

  By then, chicken and deer and dogs and cats and bats and rats were giving way to mice, largely through the pioneering research and promotional work of a single man, C. C. Little. Mice are small and cheap and quiet and easy to care for, and they reproduce very quickly; gestation takes only three weeks.43 The first study of the egg of a mouse was published in 1883. A landmark account of conception, based on the study of mice, was published ten years later.44 Little, born in 1888, began breeding mice as a student at Harvard, just after the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel, who had deduced what became known as Mendel’s laws of inheritance in the 1850s and ’60s in an Augustinian monastery in Czechoslovakia.

  At Harvard, Little worked under W. E. Castle at the dawn of the field called, beginning in 1906, “genetics”; it was Castle who popularized Mendel’s long-forgotten work in the United States. Castle trained Pincus, as well.45 J. A. Long and E. L. Mark, who also worked in Castle’s lab and who, in 1911, published The Maturation of the Egg of the Mouse, bought their stock of mostly white and brown mice from dealers and fanciers.46 Little wanted to breed his own mice, to save money and to standardize the stock, allowing for more controlled research. In 1920, he launched the Mouse Club of America; three years later, he started holding meetings in Maine. In 1929, the year after Mickey Mouse was first seen in theaters, Little founded the Jackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, and appeared on the cover of Time. (Because of Little’s work, the mouse became the standard laboratory animal and Jackson Laboratory the leading supplier of mice for biomedical research, shipping, by the end of the twentieth century, more than two million mice annually. A mouse gene was the first gene ever cloned; the mouse genome was the first genome decoded.)47

  Still, mice aren’t men. There’s a limit to arguing by homology. Until 1840, no one knew that human females ovulate monthly, the menstrual cycle remained a mystery, and the question of what determines the sex of a human embryo was uncertain. Anatomists in Germany began collecting the products of miscarriages and abortions in order to study ovarian, embryonic, and fetal development in humans. In 1890, an American named Franklin Paine Mall, who had studied in Germany, began teaching at a new university in Worcester, Massachusetts, from which he sent a circular letter to more than half the physicians in the United States:

  My dear Doctor,

  During the last few years the kindness of several physicians has enabled me to procure for study about a dozen human embryos less than six weeks old. As a specialist in embryology I ask if you can aid me in procuring more material. It is constantly coming into your hands and without your aid it is practically impossible to further the study of human embryology.… Any material which may come into your possession should not be injured by handling nor should it be washed with water. Carefully place it in a tumbler and as soon as possible preserve it in a bath of alcohol.… When a specimen is to be sent by express it should be placed in a bottle completely filled with alcohol, with a very loose plug of absorbent cotton both above and below it.

  Thanking you in advance for any aid you may give me in procuring material, I am,

  Very Truly Yours,

  F. Mall.

  Clark University, Worcester, Mass.48

  Mall soon moved from Clark to Johns Hopkins, where he collected specimens from hospitals in Baltimore, a city filled with poor women and in which one out of every three children born out of wedlock died in infancy. He rarely kept records about the women from whose bodies his specimens came, but his scant notes include stories like this: a twenty-five-year-old woman, childless after four years of marriage, in whose uterus, examined after a hysterectomy, was found an embryo; a domestic servant who “fell into the hands of an abortionist”; a woman, one month pregnant, who committed suicide by swallowing lye. By 1917, Mall had gathered, into what had become the Carnegie Human Embryo Collection, more than two thousand embryos.49

  Similar collections were made in Europe. All those embryos and fetuses stored in jars made an impression on J.B.S. Haldane, a Scottish biologist credited with uniting Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolution and who happened to be a close friend of Aldous Huxley’s. It was Haldane who gave Huxley the idea for the Hatchery. In 1923, Haldane delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, a meditation on “the influence of biology on history.” He imagined a future in which a third of all children would be conceived and incubated in glass jars. Haldane’s lecture, published as Daedalus; Or, Science and the Future, contains a fictional history—a very early science fiction fantasy, a founder of the genre—of the experimental work (including his own) that had led to ectogenesis:

  It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1940 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann’s solution as a medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of the nutrition and support of the embryo was more di
fficult.… France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal Bull “Nunquauam prius audito,” and the similar fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960.50

  What actually happened was different. In 1934, Gregory Pincus claimed to have fertilized a rabbit egg in vitro. “Rabbits Born in Glass: Haldane-Huxley Fantasy Made Real by Harvard Biologists,” the New York Times reported. Three years later, Pincus was denied tenure at Harvard; his rabbit experiments had caused something of a scandal. In 1944, Pincus cofounded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where, in the 1950s, he and his colleagues Min Chueh Chang and John Rock developed the oral contraceptive known as the Pill.51 No ectogenetic child was produced in 1951. But in 1952 a young photographer named Lennart Nilsson did come across three jars containing human embryos, each only half an inch long, in an anatomy laboratory in the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm.

  Nilsson, born outside Stockholm in 1923, had always been interested in the mystery of life. “From the time he could toddle about Swedish countryside showed single-minded drive to explore secrets of nature,” one Life press release put it. When he was five years old, he fell through the ice on a lake near his home and, when he was pulled out, reported calmly, “There were some very interesting things to see down there.” When he was twelve, his father gave him a camera. By the time he was fifteen, he was selling his photographs to Swedish magazines. In that lab at the Karolinska, he took pictures of what was in those jars, and in 1953 he brought those pictures to New York, to show them to the editors at Life. Encouraged to pursue the work, Nilsson spent seven years in Swedish hospitals and gynecological clinics, taking pictures of dead embryos and fetuses, attempting to chronicle “the stages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth,” a project that helped invent the idea of being unborn as a stage of human life, a stage that was never on any board game.52

  Pincus’s contraceptive pill was sold beginning in 1960; it went a long way toward separating sex from reproduction. But separating reproduction from women hadn’t come nearly as far. Haldane had predicted that by 1968 sixty thousand children would be born ectogenetically in France alone. That prediction was wrong. Nevertheless, a great many people, including the millions of people who saw Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001, were thinking about ectogenesis.

  Kubrick was born in New York in 1928. His father, a physician, gave him a camera, and Kubrick, as a very young man, became a photographer for Look magazine. He made a series of films in the 1950s and found box office success in 1960 with Spartacus, followed by Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). Strangelove ends with a nuclear Armageddon: the extinction of all life on earth. The year Strangelove came out, Kubrick decided he wanted to make a science fiction film about outer space, where life might last forever, in another kind of mansion of happiness.

  He enlisted the help of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. The film, Clarke suggested, ought to be based on his 1948 story “The Sentinel,” which is set in 1996, although Kubrick was, for a time, much more interested in a novel of Clarke’s from 1953, called Childhood’s End. Clarke liked to imagine men without women, worlds in which generation, if it takes place at all, is the work of men of science, or men of the future, or aliens who, however inhuman, are, somehow, male. He had the idea that he and Kubrick ought to write a novel together, then write a screenplay from the novel. They began collaborating on the novel, which was to be called Journey Beyond the Stars, in April 1964. Clarke was also working at the offices of Time-Life, finishing a book called Man and Space for Time-Life Books.53

  Kubrick and Clarke consulted with NASA. They met with Marvin Minsky at MIT. They talked to Carl Sagan at Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. They worked with IBM on HAL, the computer on board their fictional spaceship, Discovery. At the time, Kubrick was obsessed with sex, aging, death, and laboratory mice. He told Playboy, “I understand that at Yale they’ve been engaging in experiments in which the pleasure center of a mouse’s brain has been localized and stimulated by electrodes; the result is that the mouse undergoes an eight-hour orgasm.”54 He met with Robert Ettinger, a physics teacher from Michigan who was interested in freezing the dead. He decided that the crew on board the Discovery would have to travel in cryogenic suspension.

  In April 1965, when Nilsson’s photographs of the “Drama of Life Before Birth” were published in Life, Kubrick decided to call his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Two months later, an unmanned probe, Mariner IV, came within six thousand miles of Mars and sent twenty-two photographs of the planet back to earth. Kubrick contacted Lloyd’s of London, “to price an insurance policy against Martians being discovered before the release of his film.” In September, A Child Is Born, the book version of Nilsson’s photographs, was published. On October 3, Kubrick decided how 2001 would end: its main character, David Bowman, a crew member on board the Discovery, would turn into an infant. Clarke wrote in his diary: “Stanley on phone, worried about ending … gave him my latest ideas, and one of them suddenly clicked—Bowman will regress to infancy, and we’ll see him at the end as a baby in orbit.” Shooting began in December. An unmanned Russian spacecraft landed on the moon in February 1966. On March 29, 1968, a special screening of 2001 was held for Life. The film was released in April and Clarke’s novel in July. Within the year, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walked on the moon.55

  In 2001, Kubrick and Clarke tell the story of human history; the film is Pilgrim’s Progress as told by MIT and IBM, with extraterrestrials playing the part of God. It begins with the dawn of man. Apes on an African plain become men not by evolution but by way of aliens, who send to earth a stone slab, a rectangular monolith (“the New Rock,” Clarke calls it in the novel), which makes possible conceptual leaps, including the use, by primates, of tools—the first machines. The discovery of a monolith on the moon in the year 1994 leads to another conceptual leap, interstellar travel, resulting in the voyage of the Discovery in 2001. Bowman serves as the ship’s captain on a voyage intended to take a hibernating crew past Saturn. After HAL kills the crew, Bowman disconnects the computer and is left alone on the Discovery. Orbiting a satellite of Jupiter, he finds another monolith and rides in a space pod to get a closer look. He passes through some sort of star gate, which takes him on a journey past the stars and into a room in an eighteenth-century mansion—it has the look of Versailles—where he eats some blue goo, falls asleep, ages into a very old man, and regresses into a baby and then a fetus.56

  As with the rest of the film, which contains very little dialogue, this regression is not explained, but in the novel, Clarke refers to the unborn Bowman as the Star-Child.57 Both the novel and the film close with the Star-Child approaching a blue-green earth. “Down there on that crowded globe,” Clarke writes, “history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.”58 The final scene of 2001 is that cover of Life magazine: a Lennart Nilsson–style shot of a fetus, cut out of a woman’s body, floating through space, in an egg.

  “Morally pretentious, intellectually obscure, and inordinately long,” the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called 2001, in a review in Vogue. Jay Cocks, a writer for Time who had been assigned a feature story about Kubrick, reported that at the appearance of the Star-Child at the first public screening of 2001, one critic snorted and walked out. The reviews were, Cocks said, “almost uniformly devastating.” Time canceled the feature.59 Renata Adler and Pauline Kael, two influential reviewers who, to say the least, didn’t often agree, despised it. They were both women. Adler, writing in the New York Times, found it extravagantly inane that 2001, the story of human history, ends with man’s “death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.” Kael, writing for Harper’s, called 2001 “monumentally unimaginative”: “Kubrick’s story line—accounting for evolution by extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of
all time.”60 ’Twas believed by the critics that he was crack-brained.

  Kubrick waved all this aside, dismissing his detractors as “dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound.” And the reviews were far from uniformly devastating. Life celebrated the film’s gadgetry and “hard science.”61 Audiences, meanwhile, adored it. It was a happening, good to watch while getting stoned, a different kind of voyage of life: 2001 was, as its ad campaign had it, “the ultimate trip.”62

  Kubrick’s 2001 told the story of the origins of man—without women. Women, meanwhile, were campaigning for equal rights with men, for what they called “personhood.” The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966, NARAL in 1969. In a speech in Chicago that year, Betty Friedan said, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies.” In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Alice Paul and first introduced to Congress in 1923, passed and went to the states for ratification. Opponents of the ERA, led by Phyllis Schlafly, supported, instead, a “human life amendment,” first proposed in 1973, eight days after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. The ERA was eventually defeated. The language of personhood was adopted by the pro-life movement. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, personhood amendments began appearing on state ballots. A 2011 Mississippi Personhood Amendment read, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization.” If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men. In American political history, this debate goes back only decades, but in the history of ideas, it goes back to a time before almost no one, least of all William Harvey, could imagine the body politic as female.