Dramatic Discovery
The subjects are right out of today’s headlines: the making of life in a laboratory, the ability to select the best genetic material, the tinkering with nature that cloning and artificial reproduction represent.
But the play “ICSI,” which will receive its first American reading here on Saturday, is not the creation of a fiction writer playing casually with a hot topic. It is real science, from the pen of a man who knows it well: Carl Djerassi, the chemist who nearly 50 years ago discovered the compounds that made possible the birth control pill.
“My fiction is often about reproductive science,” says Djerassi, who has written four novels. (The latest of these is last year’s “Menachem’s Seed,” from whose story line “ICSI” is derived.) “I write from a position of factual authority, but all scientists can do that. What scientists never bother about--they are not even interested in it, but I have become extremely interested in it--is seeing whether they can disguise this factual authority in an interesting dress.”
Few people can claim more experience on both sides of that divide. Djerassi spent 40 years as a scientist, academic and entrepreneur before deciding 14 years ago, at age 60, to become an author. While he still carries a full teaching load as a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, he closed his businesses and labs several years ago to otherwise concentrate on his fiction. There, his mission, as he sees it, is to explain the culture of science to the layman.
“As an organic chemist, it doesn’t matter to me what the public thinks of my work, only what other scientists think, so there is little reason to try to explain what I do,” says Djerassi, a short, distinguished-looking man with gray hair and beard. “And it is very competitive. Who publishes first is constantly a question in science. So by nature, scientists are insular and not forthcoming.”
They are also, he argues, too often cavalier about the ethical issues raised by their work. Djerassi sees fiction as providing the perfect vehicle through which to explore the social impact of pioneering discoveries.
That was the motivation behind his writing the play “ICSI,” whose title is the acronym for intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a process in which a single sperm is injected into a human egg outside the womb to fertilize it before it is returned to the womb for gestation. In the play, a scientist fertilized her own egg with the sperm of her married lover, who thought himself impotent. Such ethical issues as whether it was right for her to do so without his consent or to perform the experiment on herself, and how the act might affect her lover’s marriage, are all aired in the course of three acts.
Djerassi, a child of divorced parents, both Jewish doctors, came to America with his mother as a teenager in 1939 to escape the Nazis. He got his bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in Ohio at 18 and his PhD in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin at 21.
While attending graduate school and working as a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry, he shared at the age of 19 in the discovery of an artificial antihistamine used in a popular allergy drug.
“That was pretty heady stuff for a teenager,” Djerassi says. “But that was at a time when things moved much faster than they do now. The development course for new drugs was three or four years; now it’s easily 10 or more. To see the very first thing I worked on not only work, but, gee whiz, hundreds of thousands of people actually took it, well, that was just great.”
Djerassi moved on to a company called Syntex in Mexico City, which was doing work on artificial steroids. It was there on Oct. 15, 1951, that he isolated norethisterone as the active ingredient in the first commercial birth control pill.
Djerassi eventually gained control of Syntex and moved it to California. There, he says, he long led a “polygamous” life, running a multimillion-dollar research business while teaching at Stanford.
But it was Syntex that made him rich. He and his third wife, Stanford English professor Diane Middlebrook, live in a penthouse apartment on exclusive Russian Hill in San Francisco and spend their summers going to the theater in London. He is a leading collector of the work of the Swiss abstract expressionist Paul Klee. He established the Djerassi Foundation, an artists colony, on a huge ranch in the hills above Stanford he bought with Syntex money--he called it SMIP, as in “Syntex made it possible”--after his artist daughter, Pamela, committed suicide on the property in 1978.
But at an age--74--when an indolent retirement would be enough for most men, Djerassi today revels like a giddy teenager in his career as a playwright.
He is already at work on his next play, this one based on the writings of an early-19th-century female chemist. His fifth novel, already in the works, is about Silicon Valley culture and money and how it can corrupt research at a university.
For all that, Djerassi says his dual career as scientist and artist sometimes leaves him feeling estranged from both of his professional communities--the literary and the scientific.
“Scientists don’t read much fiction. They think I have just given up on their field. The literary people look at me as a scientist who is now trying to hobnob. [They make] cracks like, ‘Gee, maybe I should go into the lab for a couple of years and see what kind of chemistry I can do.’ But I couldn’t have written my fiction if I didn’t steep myself in the scientific culture for my entire adult life.”
Regardless of what reading his fiction and theater may get, Djerassi’s main legacy is the pill. He says he doesn’t ever get tired of talking about it--or, more precisely, its legacy.
“I don’t talk about the history of it,” he says in his modest campus office. “But there are legal, cultural, economic, religious, psychological and political aspects [of contraception] that change all the time.”
With the 50th anniversary of the pill coming in 2001, Djerassi continues to write about contraception and its issues for scientific and popular journals. Many of his views are unmistakably radical. He says it would be nice if someone invented a male pill (“for equity”), but since there is no clamor for it or money behind it, he sees very little possibility of that happening. He does advocate that as one effective contraceptive method, young men should be sterilized after storing a quantity of their own sperm, as sort of a self-directed savings account.
“I think that the direction the world is going is that sex and procreation will be divorced,” he says. “You will have sex for fun, and reproduction under the best possible genetic conditions for the eventual offspring. You pick the best egg. You pick the best sperm. I’m not talking about eugenics and the master race concept. I’m talking about wife and husband, within your pair. You screen the embryo, not for blue hair, but for genetic diseases. If you have the colon cancer gene, why implant it? Tay-Sachs? Sickle-cell anemia? Why implant it?”
He hopes the play “ICSI” will help explain his views on some of these issues. And he is determined to find new issues on which to speak out as long as he is able.
“I intend to be the Strom Thurmond of academia,” he says with a wry grin. “I look ahead because I know time is running out. I am not going to live forever. But I always think something wonderful will be around the corner for me to do.”
