In fact, for a long stretch of his career he had been an outcast from the scientific establishment, rejected as a radical by Harvard, humiliated in the press, and left with no choice but to conduct his varied and oftentimes controversial experiments in a converted garage. No world-changing inventions were filed under his name. He would speed into a room, working a Viceroy between his yellowed fingers, and people would huddle close to hear what he had to say. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. Pincus was forty-seven years old, five feet ten and a half inches tall, with a bristly mustache and graying hair that shot from his head in every direction. The man was Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation. The woman was Margaret Sanger, one of the legendary crusaders of the twentieth century. Now her time was running out, which was why she had come to an apartment high above Park Avenue to meet a man who was possibly her last hope. It struck her as a reasonable wish, yet through the years one scientist after another had told her no, it couldn’t be done. Her desire, she said, was as strong and simple as ever: She wanted a scientific method of birth control, something magical that would permit a woman to have sex as often as she liked without becoming pregnant. Though her red hair had gone gray and her heart was failing, she had not given up. She was an old woman who loved sex and she had spent forty years seeking a way to make it better. TWENTY-EIGHT Believed to Have Magical Powers

TWENTY-FIVE Papa Pincus’s Pink Pills for Planned Parenthood Brilliantly researched and vividly written, The Birth of the Pillis a gripping account of a remarkable cultural, social and scientific journey Read more Together, these four determined men and women changed the world.Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building.

The birth of the pill jonathan eig