Technology & Medicine › Atomic & space age
The contraceptive pill
approved May 1960 (US)· Invention or discovery· Germs, drugs & genetics
Well documentedSolid records, physical evidence or scientific consensus.
A daily hormone pill that prevents ovulation, giving women a reliable contraceptive under their own control.
See it on the Technology & Medicine map →How it works
Activist Margaret Sanger and heiress Katharine McCormick, who paid for most of the research, backed biologist Gregory Pincus; he and Min Chueh Chang tested hormones that stop ovulation, and gynaecologist John Rock ran trials. The key drugs were progestins, lab-made relatives of progesterone, synthesized by Carl Djerassi in Mexico City (1951) and Frank Colton at Searle (1952). Large trials ran in Puerto Rico from 1956. The US approved Searle's Enovid for contraception in 1960.
Why it mattered
Within five years about 6.5 million American women used it. Economists link it to women staying in education longer and entering law, medicine and business in larger numbers.
How we know
FDA approval records, trial reports, Searle's sales data and US surveys; economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz traced its effect on women's careers in a 2002 study.
Still unknown or debated
The Puerto Rico trials are criticized for telling women little about risks; how much the Pill itself, versus wider social change, drove women's gains is debated.
Connections (2)
▸Insulin paved the way for hormone drugs like The contraceptive pillMostly agreed
The connection
Insulin's success in the 1920s showed that a hormone could be purified, standardized and sold as an everyday drug, building the modern hormone industry. The Pill applied the same idea to sex hormones: a lab-made progestin mimics the hormone signals of pregnancy, so the ovaries stop releasing eggs.
When and how
Insulin in Toronto, 1921–22; the Pill developed by Pincus and Chang in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and Rock near Boston in the 1950s, using progestins made in Mexico City and near Chicago.
How sure are we?
The link is indirect: histories of endocrinology describe insulin encouraging drug firms to invest in hormones, but the Pill rests on separate steroid chemistry from the 1930s–50s.
Debates and open questions
How much credit goes to insulin specifically, rather than to earlier thyroid and adrenaline drugs and the broader rise of hormone science, is a matter of interpretation.
▸The contraceptive pill was followed in reproductive medicine by In vitro fertilisation (IVF)Mostly agreed
The connection
Both came out of the new science of reproductive hormones. John Rock, a Pill pioneer, had reported test-tube fertilization of human eggs with Miriam Menkin in 1944. IVF uses hormone drugs to ripen several eggs at once. Together the two gave people new control over when, and whether, to have children.
When and how
Rock's clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, from the 1940s to the 1950s; Steptoe and Edwards in Oldham and Cambridge, England, 1968–1978.
How sure are we?
The link is mostly thematic and personal: Rock's work spanned both, and histories of reproductive medicine place them in one line of hormone research.
Debates and open questions
Whether Rock and Menkin truly fertilized human eggs in 1944 is doubted today; the cells were never transferred, and the methods of the time could not confirm it.