On a
September morning in 1973, a hospital administrator in New York City learned of a rogue experiment in progress at his institution, and he ordered the removal from an incubator of a test tube containing a frothy mixture of human eggs and sperm. Had the experiment been allowed to continue, it might have resulted in the first human fetus created through in vitro fertilization. In
Pandora's Baby, the award-winning journalist Robin Marantz Henig tells the story of that confrontation, which ushered in a new era in
reproductive technology. She takes us back to the early days of IVF, when the procedure was viewed as crackpot science and its pioneers as outsiders in the medical world. Henig lays…
Adjectives like "judicious" and "level headed" (see the Publisher's Weekly review) don't do justice to this lively and probing and timely book. Henig has the gift of conveying complex scientific…
