And to do that, he would have to add a player to his team-a doctor who could reassure patients they were safe and would convey to the drug companies supplying the drugs that no one would be harmed. He knew that his progestins (synthetic forms of progesterone) stopped ovulation in rabbits and rats. Now that Pincus had settled roughly on the hormone progesterone as the key to his pill, he needed to build the team to do the scientific work, forge alliances with manufacturers, conduct his trials, and, if all went well, spread the news of the coming invention so that it might have a chance at acceptance. Years of disappointment had taught Pincus that it wasn’t always the science that determined an experiment’s success it was often the forces surrounding the science, including public sentiment. It was the rumbling before a seismic shift. As one of his colleagues put it: “He wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb because he didn’t have any limb.” For the first time, many Catholics began compartmentalizing their beliefs about sex and religion. But the best reason the project suited Pincus was that he had nothing to lose. And it required not only scientific knowledge but also an entrepreneurial spirit. It concerned the area of science he knew best: mammalian reproduction. Yet in many ways, the pill project was perfect for Pincus. And even if it did work, how would one test such a thing? Who would dare manufacture it? Who would prescribe it? Thirty states and the federal government still had anti-birth control laws on the books. Such a pill would never work, other scientists had told Sanger. When Pincus met the feminist crusader Margaret Sanger in 1950 and she implored him to go to work on the development of a birth-control pill, he knew the project carried enormous risk. He’d been unceremoniously dumped by Harvard and forced to start his own laboratory in a converted garage.

His whole career had been a recovery process, one attempt after another to start over. For years the biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus had been searching for a project that might establish his greatness, only to watch ideas come and go like love affairs, beginning with promise and ending in hurt feelings.

The birth of the pill by jonathan eig