Word: pincus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Advise Dr. Pincus to forget his formula and insure male survival on this earth...
...indeed ironic for a man to show women that men can be eliminated as a reproductive factor. Of course your article [reporting how Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus fertilized a rabbit ovum without the help of a male rabbit and brought the offspring successfully to birth] stated: "This work will in no way affect the manner of living or customs," but just let some women get their hands on his formula and develop it further and in another hundred years or so, men will be absent from this earth...
Last week Dr. Pincus exhibited a further marvel-a fatherless rabbit, born from an ovum which had never encountered the male fertilizing element at all. This process, called parthenogenesis, occurs naturally among certain insects, has been artificially induced by man in sea urchins and frogs, but never before in a mammal. Dr. Pincus used high temperature, hormone treatments and hypertonic salt solutions* to fertilize the ovum, and his canny microsurgical technique got the egg well started toward normal development in the host mother's reproductive tract...
...male spermatozoon is what determines the sex of the offspring. If the spermatozoon has a male-determining chromosome pattern in its nucleus, the sex will be male; if not, female. Since there was no spermatozoon in the case of the fatherless rabbit, therefore no male-determining pattern, the Pincus rabbit is a female. She seems to be perfectly normal. Mated to an ordinary buck, she produced a normal litter. These bunnies are the first in rabbit history with no maternal grandfather...
Naturally a swarm of newshawks, callous to the delicate distinctions of science, bore down on Dr. Pincus to find out how soon mammalian parthenogenesis could be applied to humans. The scientist dodged these embarrassing queries. A spokesman for him huffed: "Dr. Pincus' work will make possible certain manipulations and experiments which will aid in the study of cellular and biological growth. It is ridiculous to even think that such work could be done with human beings. This work will in no way affect the manner of living or customs...