The Multiple-Birth Hormone

Eight years ago, Swedish Gynecologist Carl Gemzell found that he could stimulate female ovulation with a hormone he extracted from human pituitaries (obtained at autopsy). Known as gonadotropin, it has made mothers out of nearly half the barren women who were injected with it. The trouble is that it sometimes makes them too fertile, and they give birth to twins, triplets, quadruplets.* Stillbirths have ranged as high as sextuplets.

Last week the hormone's peculiar potency was illustrated in two places half the world apart. New Zealand Housewife Shirley Ann Lawson--a descendant of Bounty Mutineer Fletcher Christian--gave birth to four girls and a boy in Auckland's National Women's Hospital. Only two days later, Karin Ohlsen, 33-year-old wife of a Swedish teacher, delivered three boys and two girls in Falun General Hospital near Stockholm. Both mothers had been given injections of Gemzell's hormone, and both women reacted by producing at least five ova at the same time. By midweek, four of the Swedish quints had died, but at week's end the other six Gemzell babies were alive under cover of their incubators.

* A flurry of phone calls from hormone-hunting wives flooded New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center last year, when word got out that of 21 women treated there, 15 became pregnant. The seven who completed their pregnancies bore three single babies, three sets of twins and one set of quads (TIME, Oct. 9, 1964).

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