politic,
but no members at all. 36 “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man,” Rousseau wrote. “In everything connected with sex, woman and man are in every respect related but in every respect different.” 37 But different, how? The
poet who supplied the dedication to Harvey’s
Generatione
put it best:
…both the
Hen
and
Housewife
are so matcht
,
That her Son
Born,
is only her Son Hatch;
That when her
Teeming
hopes have prosp’rous bin
,
Yet to
Conceive,
is but to
Lay within.
38
Women are a great deal like men, except when they’re more likechickens.
“I shall begin at the beginning,” says the director of the Hatchery, while giving a tour to a group of students, in the opening chapter of
Brave New World
,Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel. The idea that eggs can exist outside of women’s bodies was a mainstay of twentieth-centuryscience fiction. “
Begin at the beginning
,” Huxley’s students dutifully write in their
notebooks. The tour continues: “ ‘These,’ he waved his hand, ‘are the incubators.’ And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. ‘The week’s supply of ova.’ ” In Huxley’s dark and terrible world, yet another new world, there are no mothers and no fathers, no families at all. Humans are conceived in the laboratory, and fetuses grow in test tubes. 39
Huxley’s fiction was ahead of science, but not by all that much. Beforehuman eggs could be incubated, they had to be found.Aristotle had studied chickens; Harvey, deer. After Harvey, there followed something of an egg hunt. In 1827, a German scholar namedKarl von Baer finally found amammalian egg, the ovum of a dog. “Led by curiosity,” he wrote, “I opened one
of the follicles and took up the minute object on the point of my knife, finding that I could see it very distinctly and that it was surrounded by mucus. When I placed it under the microscope I was utterly astonished, for I saw an ovule … so clearly that a blind man could hardly deny it.” 40
Meanwhile,Charles Darwin was undertaking his own investigation of genesis.
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859.
Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
, a children’s book that doubled as a defense of Darwinism, was published four years later. The Huxley children, including Aldous and Julian, read it, not least because it featured a scene in which their grandfatherT. H. Huxley, a supporter of
Darwin’s, inspects a baby in a bottle. “Dear Grandpater,”Julian Huxley wrote to his grandfather when he was four, “have you seen a Water-baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day? Your loving JULIAN.” 41
In
The Eggs of Mammals
, in 1936, the Harvard-trained physiologistGregory Pincus (who started out studying rats) offered a history of what happened next in the matter of hunting eggs: “Pfuger, 1863—cat; Schron, 1863—cat and rabbit; Koster, 1868—man; Slawinsky, 1873—man; Wagener, 1879—dog; Van Beneden, 1880—bat; Harz, 1883—mouse, guinea pig, cat; Lange, 1896—mouse; Coert,
1898—rabbit and cat; Amann, 1899—man; Palladino, 1894, 1898—man, bear, dog; Lane-Claypon, 1905, 1907—rabbit; Fellner, 1909—man.” 42 The year 1909 is also when the word “ectogenesis” was coined.
By then, chicken and deer and dogs and cats and bats and rats were giving way to mice, largely through the pioneering research and promotional work of a single man,C. C. Little. Mice are small and cheap and quiet and easy to care for, and they reproduce very quickly; gestation takes only three weeks. 43 The first study of the egg of a
mouse was published in 1883. A landmark account of conception, based on the study of mice, was published ten years later. 44 Little, born in 1888, began breeding mice as a student at Harvard, just after
but no members at all. 36 “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man,” Rousseau wrote. “In everything connected with sex, woman and man are in every respect related but in every respect different.” 37 But different, how? The
poet who supplied the dedication to Harvey’s
Generatione
put it best:
…both the
Hen
and
Housewife
are so matcht
,
That her Son
Born,
is only her Son Hatch;
That when her
Teeming
hopes have prosp’rous bin
,
Yet to
Conceive,
is but to
Lay within.
38
Women are a great deal like men, except when they’re more likechickens.
“I shall begin at the beginning,” says the director of the Hatchery, while giving a tour to a group of students, in the opening chapter of
Brave New World
,Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel. The idea that eggs can exist outside of women’s bodies was a mainstay of twentieth-centuryscience fiction. “
Begin at the beginning
,” Huxley’s students dutifully write in their
notebooks. The tour continues: “ ‘These,’ he waved his hand, ‘are the incubators.’ And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. ‘The week’s supply of ova.’ ” In Huxley’s dark and terrible world, yet another new world, there are no mothers and no fathers, no families at all. Humans are conceived in the laboratory, and fetuses grow in test tubes. 39
Huxley’s fiction was ahead of science, but not by all that much. Beforehuman eggs could be incubated, they had to be found.Aristotle had studied chickens; Harvey, deer. After Harvey, there followed something of an egg hunt. In 1827, a German scholar namedKarl von Baer finally found amammalian egg, the ovum of a dog. “Led by curiosity,” he wrote, “I opened one
of the follicles and took up the minute object on the point of my knife, finding that I could see it very distinctly and that it was surrounded by mucus. When I placed it under the microscope I was utterly astonished, for I saw an ovule … so clearly that a blind man could hardly deny it.” 40
Meanwhile,Charles Darwin was undertaking his own investigation of genesis.
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859.
Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
, a children’s book that doubled as a defense of Darwinism, was published four years later. The Huxley children, including Aldous and Julian, read it, not least because it featured a scene in which their grandfatherT. H. Huxley, a supporter of
Darwin’s, inspects a baby in a bottle. “Dear Grandpater,”Julian Huxley wrote to his grandfather when he was four, “have you seen a Water-baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day? Your loving JULIAN.” 41
In
The Eggs of Mammals
, in 1936, the Harvard-trained physiologistGregory Pincus (who started out studying rats) offered a history of what happened next in the matter of hunting eggs: “Pfuger, 1863—cat; Schron, 1863—cat and rabbit; Koster, 1868—man; Slawinsky, 1873—man; Wagener, 1879—dog; Van Beneden, 1880—bat; Harz, 1883—mouse, guinea pig, cat; Lange, 1896—mouse; Coert,
1898—rabbit and cat; Amann, 1899—man; Palladino, 1894, 1898—man, bear, dog; Lane-Claypon, 1905, 1907—rabbit; Fellner, 1909—man.” 42 The year 1909 is also when the word “ectogenesis” was coined.
By then, chicken and deer and dogs and cats and bats and rats were giving way to mice, largely through the pioneering research and promotional work of a single man,C. C. Little. Mice are small and cheap and quiet and easy to care for, and they reproduce very quickly; gestation takes only three weeks. 43 The first study of the egg of a
mouse was published in 1883. A landmark account of conception, based on the study of mice, was published ten years later. 44 Little, born in 1888, began breeding mice as a student at Harvard, just after
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