Hudson Hoagland and
Gregory Pincus -- the Worcester Foundation's co-founders -- knew that their focus on hormones and fertility and birth control had the broader dimension of the link between hormones and some forms of cancer.
Readers are introduced to important figures like feminists Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick, scientist
Gregory Pincus and Catholic doctor John Rock who battled his own church to advocate for the drug.
For his archetypal scientist, Eig focused on
Gregory Pincus, a brilliant but difficult chemist who was famously fired by Harvard and subsequently founded an independent research institute, which he initially supported by collecting donations door to door.
Birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger and philanthropist Katherine McCormick provided the passion and the purse strings, turning to scientist
Gregory Pincus and obstetrician-gynecologist John Rock to conjure up the first hormonal contraceptive.
Eig tells the story of the development of the first birth control pill through its key players: Sanger, unorthodox reproductive scientist
Gregory Pincus, freethinking heiress Katharine McCormick, and respected Roman Catholic obstetrician/ gynecologist John Rock.
She toiled alongside three other vital missionaries, including a brilliant and off-beat Jewish doctor named
Gregory Pincus. What drove Sanger, Pincus and their colleagues, John Rock and Katherine McCormick?
American biologist and researcher Dr
Gregory Pincus also co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.
Gregory Pincus and Hudson Hoagland of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.
By the time
Gregory Pincus, a reproductive physiologist, commenced his contraceptive hormone research, much work had already been done on the isolation and structure of the steroid hormones.
By 1954, he and a biologist,
Gregory Pincus, had begun experiments on the effectiveness of oral contraception on poor illiterate Puerto Rican women.
After Stanley's death in 1947, McCormick inherited thirty-six million dollars and despite her complaints about "confiscatory inheritance taxes" was able to fund not only the medical research efforts of John Rock and
Gregory Pincus, but also contribute greatly to women's education at MIT.
Interweaving archival material and talking-heads interviews, "The Pill" takes a mostly admiring view of
Gregory Pincus, the maverick scientist who--with a little encouragement from activist Margaret Sanger and a lot of money from philanthropist Katherine McCormick--developed a reliable oral contraceptive using female hormones during the 1950s.