♪ ♪
NARRATOR: On September 12, 1973,
on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,
a 29-year-old woman was wheeled into an operating room
at New York Hospital.
A surgeon made an incision into her abdomen
and withdrew an egg from her ovary.
If the procedure went as planned,
Doris Del-Zio would become the first woman in the world
to conceive a baby through in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
The surgeon put the egg in a test tube
and went to find Doris's husband.
And I waited until he had... had the egg in the tube,
and he had put the nutrients in, and he had sealed it,
and he gave it to me.
He says, "Get to Dr. Shettles."
I took the test tube,
and I put it under my arm to keep it warm, I thought,
and I went over to Columbia by cab.
NARRATOR: 15 minutes later, John Del-Zio arrived
at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Waiting for him in the lobby, near the men's room,
was the country's foremost expert on IVF,
Dr. Landrum Shettles.
DEL-ZIO: And he said, "Now, you take this other tube,
go into the men's room..." (chuckles)
"and get me some sperm."
So that's what I had to do.
And I went in and got the sperm.
Brought it out to him, handed it to him, and he says,
"Okay, I'll call you at the hospital tonight."
NARRATOR: Shettles headed straight to a lab on the 16th floor.
After years of frustration and disappointment,
he believed he was about to make history.
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NARRATOR: Back in the 1930s, Harvard scientists had mastered
in vitro fertilization in rabbits.
But the human egg refused to yield its secrets.
Nobody had seen a human embryo.
In fact, the earliest stages of human embryogenesis
had never been seen.
They were just a figment of our imagination.
We assumed they existed, because we assumed
that human reproduction was the same
as reproduction in other mammals.
NARRATOR: The Harvard experiments attracted the attention
of John Rock,
one of the nation's leading fertility specialists.
Rock was quick to see IVF's potential
to help infertile women.
In 1938, he hired researcher Miriam Menkin--
who had experience with IVF in rabbits--
to begin experimentation in humans.
MARGARET MARSH: Several hundred women had agreed
to have their eggs used for fertilization.
No success.
Week in, week out, no success.
Trying all these different techniques-- no success.
NARRATOR: Over the next six years, she recalled,
failure became routine.
Tuesday, Menkin would hunt for eggs in ovaries
removed from Rock's surgical patients.
Wednesday, she would mix the egg with sperm
donated from medical students.
On Thursday, she would pray.
Then, on Friday came disappointment--
no fertilization.
On the morning of February 6, 1944,
Menkin's routine was finally broken.
MARSH: She had a teething baby at home,
she was up for two nights running.
She went into the lab, she did her fertilization,
and she was watching the sperm attack the egg.
She was watching the sperm go round and round and round.
And she was tired.
She felt like she couldn't get up.
So she exposed the egg to the sperm
for a longer period of time.
NARRATOR: When Menkin looked into her microscope,
she was stunned to see a two-cell fertilized egg.
Miriam Menkin, when she saw the first fertilized egg,
was absolutely awestruck.
It was, she said, the most profound sight in the world.
She was unable to take her eyes from it.
NARRATOR: News of the achievement spread quickly
and the press coined the term "test tube baby."
The response shocked John Rock.
Infertile women inundated him with letters
begging for the promising new technology.
But just as the path-breaking research
was getting off the ground, Rock received devastating news.
Miriam Menkin told him she was leaving
to follow her husband to his new job in North Carolina.
Without Menkin, the project floundered,
and John Rock soon abandoned the experiments.
IVF research came to a standstill.
♪ ♪
For many Americans in the 1950s,
the prospect of "test tube babies"
seemed ripped from the pages of science fiction novels.
MARSH: Nobody knew what would happen
when you put human sperm and a human egg in a dish
and then you grew it and you implanted it
in a woman's uterus.
Nobody knew what would happen.
There was a cadre of people who thought
this is just going beyond what is appropriate for scientists,
that this is treading on the work
that belongs only to God and nature.
NARRATOR: But Landrum Shettles saw things differently.
He was convinced in vitro fertilization
was the next scientific frontier.
HENIG: Shettles seemed to have almost an obsession with human eggs.
He actually slept in his office.
He had seven children and a wife
in some little apartment on Claremont Avenue
in the Upper West Side of Manhattan,
and he chose to stay up on 168th Street in the hospital.
And in the middle of the night, he would just sort of be around,
be in the hallways with his white coat flapping behind him.
GEORGIANNA JAGIELLO: I would see him in the hall in his scrub greens
at all hours of the day and night.
He was a sort of mystical figure in the department.
Nobody really seemed to relate to him, particularly,
nor did he reach out very much to us in the research wing.
NARRATOR: In 1955,
that Shettles had managed to fertilize a human egg
and keep it alive for three days.
The 46-year-old scientist made an unlikely public figure.
Shettles had a thick Mississippi accent
from his... his farm boy days,
and he kind of looked like...
One of his colleagues called him
a large version of Truman Capote.
And his manner was strange
because he didn't look people in the eye.
He was... he was awkward.
He had some of the earmarks
of what you would think of as a genius.
He couldn't quite live in this world.
NARRATOR: In 1960, Shettles published
a photographic atlas showing microscopic human eggs--
called oocytes-- in early stages of development.
JAGIELLO: They were unique.
Here were human oocytes.
Sperm, one had seen,
but many of us had worked with mice and cows and sheep
and monkeys and species of that sort,
but to see human was very exciting;
really thrilling photographs.
NARRATOR: Throughout the 1960s,
Shettles struggled to grow an embryo until it was large enough
to reinsert into the womb.
Then, in 1969, he was stunned
to learn that two British researchers
were racing ahead of him.
After a series of breakthroughs,
physiologist Robert Edwards and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe
were ready to implant embryos into women's bodies.
♪ ♪
Test tube babies were no longer a fantasy.
They were on the horizon.
Many Americans were horrified.