As the State grapples with infertility treatment regulation, the creator the Pill talks to Kate Holmquist about the babies of the future
The man who created the Pill believes that young, affluent, educated professionals will soon have no need for it. Conception will soon be taken out of the bedroom and put into the laboratory, making sex a purely recreational activity, predicts Carl Djerassi, who will outline his views in Limerick, Cork and Dublin next week. Egg and sperm banking, followed by sterilisation and - in time - in vitro conception, will be the new form of birth control "within this generation", Djerassi predicts.
Such a scenario represents a sizeable leap from the situation in the Republic, where there is still no regulation for infertility treatment - currently governed by the Medical Council's code of ethics. But in its long-awaited report, which was published this week, the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction recommends that a new body should be set up to oversee all aspects of infertility treatment.
It's a toss up which is the more fascinating - the history of the Pill that Carl Djerassi, a chemist, created in 1951, or the way he has since spent the tens of millions he made from investing in the company, Syntex, that manufactured it. Djerassi, now 82, has won a dozen major science awards, obsessively amassed one of the world's largest collections of Paul Klee paintings, founded one of the US's most well-endowed and influential artists' colonies, has written six novels and three plays and married three times.
The last item on his CV he regards as "not a compliment", and evidence that he is as "egotistical and driven" as other high-calibre scientists (although his most recent marriage to Stanford English professor and poet Diane Middlebrook has lasted 20 years).
He mines this scientific ruthlessness in his play, Calculus, which will be performed in the Schrödinger Lecture Theatre at Trinity College Dublin this week, directed by Philip O'Sullivan.
Calculus, set in 1712, is about how Sir Isaac Newton - "the worst person imaginable" - ruthlessly defended his claim to have invented calculus, against that of Gottfried Leibniz. A verbally and intellectually lively piece, it has been performed in 26 productions around the world, most recently as an opera.
But what will surely fire the imaginations of the public is Djerassi's belief that the the privileged young will soon control their fertility using technologies originally designed to aid infertile couples. Young people will have their sperm and eggs frozen at their peak, then they will be sterilised so that they can have sex without the risk of pregnancy until they choose to have their babies conceived in test tubes.
The advantages for young men, he believes, will be control over insemination for the first time in history, eliminating the possibility of impregnating women with whom they do not want to have children.
The advantages for young women will be that they will be able to build their careers in their 20s and early 30s, knowing that they can safely postpone childbirth until their mid-30s and 40s. And because young eggs are healthier, this will greatly reduce the risk of birth defects.
The advantage for the children conceived in this way will be that "every child will be a wanted child" within a stable relationship in which both parents are committed to conceiving, he argues.
"This is the opposite of the destruction of the nuclear family. There will be no more shotgun marriages, inadvertent disasters and there will be far fewer abortions. This will encourage quality fathering and allow career women choice over when they want to become mothers," Djerassi says.
Soldiers going to war will be able to leave behind the banked raw materials of conception, and young men who die in accidents will have their sperm harvested and banked within 36 hours of their deaths so that their widows can have their babies.
IT MAY SOUND unromantic and cold now, but the revolution brought about by the Pill shows how quickly attitudes can change, and it may not be long before seduction and warmth are seen as emotions for the bedroom, while conception is regarded as a job for the lab.
Djerassi was stunned, on his last visit to Trinity College in 1996, to see the revolution in social mores that had occurred since his previous visit in 1981. He sees the Irish as hypocritical in the way we outlaw abortion, while thousands of women travel to England each year for the procedure. Such medical tourism is a way for the Irish to avoid State restrictions, he points out.
Djerassi says that fertile people who choose to conceive in the laboratory will be spared the traumatic process of amniocentesis and mid-term abortion of foetuses with disorders. "This is not eugenics when there are three embryos in a dish and you choose to implant the healthy one," Djerassi asserts.
Yet while Djerassi supports assisted reproduction for the fertile as a means of family planning, he believes that infertility treatment is based on the "dubious" premise that infertility is a "disease", such as infection, which must be treated. Infertile couples are likely to be passing infertility on to the next generation, he warns.
"There is a very good case to say that while the 'infection' is tragic, on an evolutionary basis there are very good genetic reasons for arguing that by treating the 'infection' we are, within one generation, jumping over evolutionary barriers that have taken thousands of years to develop," he explains. Two million IVF babies and one million ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection - where a single sperm is injected into an egg) babies have been born, so the "experiment" is already underway and results will not be known for perhaps 50 years, he says.
An early riser who spends half an hour naked on his cross-country ski machine before breakfast each day, Djerassi got a television only at the age of 60 - and rarely watches it. He believes TV has "homogenised" the minds of the young over the past few generations. The consequent lack of original thinking and sharp questioning shows in the students that he regularly meets on his visits to universities around the world, he says.
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN is eager to encourage creative thinking in its students by supporting synergies between departments, which is one reason why Prof Denis Weaire, of the physics department, is acting as producer of Djerassi's play Calculus, as well as inviting Djerassi to deliver the annual Schrödinger Lecture next Thursday.
So important is Djerassi to the evolution of science that Prof Weaire likens attending a lecture by Djerassi to his own experience of seeing Francis Crick in Cambridge 50 years ago.
Djerassi says: "What we are preaching in universities is intellectual monogamy, when we should preach intellectual polygamy. We are creating specialists in a time when we need generalists who can see the big picture," he argues, adding wryly, "People like me."
• Carl Djerassi will give his lecture, Sex and Reproduction: Time for Divorce? at: University of Limerick, next Mon, 7pm; University College Cork, Kane Science Building, Wed, 4.30pm; TCD, Burke Lecture Theatre, Thur, 5pm.A staged reading of Calculus will take place in the Schrödinger Lecture Theatre, TCD, Tues, Thurs and Fri at 8pm, admission €5. Tickets available from the physics department, TCD