Pandora's Baby

Book excerpt: On a September morning in 1973, a hospital administrator in New York City learned of a rogue experiment in progress at his institution and ordered the destruction of a test tube containing a frothy mixture of human eggs and sperm. Had the experiment been allowed to continue, it might have resulted in the first human fetus created through in vitro fertilization ... [A]ward-winning journalist Robin Marantz Henig ... takes us back to the early days of IVF, when the procedure was viewed as crackpot science and its pioneers as outsiders in the medical world. Henig lays out the ethical and political battlefield of the 1970s-a battlefield that is recreated with each new technology-and traces the sea change that has occurred in the public perception of "test tube babies." ... [T]hat it was the first step down the slippery slope toward genetic engineering, designer babies, and human clones ... [and] a compelling story from the not-so-distant past, which brilliantly presents the scientific and ethical dilemmas we confront ever more starkly as germ-line engineering and human cloning become possible.--Provided by publisher