Host-Mothers

Two years ago Harvard's Physiologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus placed a rabbit's ova in a bottle with a rabbit's sperm, shook them together for 20 minutes. Next he placed the fertilized ova in the fallopian tube of a rabbit doe who 33 days later bore a litter of six healthy bunnies. They were no kin to her. She was simply their host-mother (TIME, March 12, 1934).

Last year Dr. Pincus fertilized rabbit ova with rabbit sperm in the same way, tried to make the ova develop in glass containers. That ectogenic experiment failed.

Thereupon Dr. Pincus proceeded to perform other genetic tricks which, when he reported them to the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Washington last week, stirred the Press to front-page speculation as to the imminence of immaculate conceptions and substitute motherhood in humans.

Dr. Pincus' newest trick was a modification of the late (1859-1924) Jacques Loeb's method of producing fatherless sea urchins by soaking sea urchin eggs in very salty water, of producing fatherless frogs by pricking frog eggs with a needle. Dr. Pincus soaked some rabbit ova in brine. Other rabbit ova he heated to 113DEG F., about 10DEG above normal. When he placed salted or heated ova in the fallopian tubes of rabbits, the rabbits became pregnant. Too impatient to wait 33 days for normal parturition, he killed the does, slit them open, found well-developed rabbit embryos inside, proclaimed the first parthogenesis of a mammal.

Household affairs kept Dr. Pincus from leaving Cambridge for Washington last week. His absence permitted science editors to have a field day. Wrote William Laurence of the New York Times: "As rabbits and men belong to the mammalian group, the work is viewed as pointing toward the possibility of human children being brought into the world by a host-mother not related by blood to the child."

Wrote John Joseph O'Neill of the New York Herald Tribune: ''One of the earliest applications of the discovery is expected to make motherhood possible to women who are handicapped by some dysfunction of the physiological processes and are unable to go through a full period of pregnancy. It will also be a godsend to those women who desire children but do not wish to bear them for the full period of gestation."

Wrote Gobind Behari Lal of the Hearst publications: "Since such parthogenic eggs can have no male chromosomes, all such fatherless children will ipso facto be girls."

Snapped Dr. Pincus in Cambridge: "I am not interested in the implications of this work."

--(.)--

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.