From yuck to yippee: the public learns to love a once controversial technology--again.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Column

IN 2010, 32 years after the research of Robert G. Edwards and Patrick Steptoe resulted in the birth of the world's first test tube baby, Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The biochemist Joseph Goldstein once quipped that he knew in vitro fertilization (IVF) "was a great leap because Edwards and Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely trinity--the press, the pope, and prominent Nobel laureates." Politicians and the public also reacted to Edwards' initial research with horror at the time. But once he and Steptoe succeeded in producing a healthy baby girl, revulsion swiftly gave way to approval.

In 1969 a Harris poll found that a majority of Americans believed producing test tube babies was "against God's will." In the 1970s the government imposed a moratorium on federal funding of IVF research and Congress considered legislation that would have outlawed it altogether. Yet just one month after the birth of the world's first test tube baby, Louise Joy Brown, a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans approved of IVF and more than half would consider using it if they were infertile. Edwards' scientific career traces the yuck-to-yippee arc that characterizes public reaction to much technological progress: initial fear and loathing followed by a warm embrace.

Consider contraception. Under the Comstock Act of 1873, Americans who trafficked in birth control could be "imprisoned at hard labor in the Penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years each offense, or fined not less than $100 nor more than $2,000, with costs of court." The moral crusader Anthony Comstock was made a special agent of the Post Office, and he spent the next 42 years vigorously enforcing the new law.

By the beginning of the 20th century, agitation for birth control information was increasing--and so was official pushback. In 1915 William Sanger, husband of the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, was convicted of giving a copy of his wife's pamphlet Family Limitation to a Comstock agent. He was fined $150, and when he refused to pay he was sentenced to 30 days in jail. The presiding justice told Sanger: "Such persons as you who circulate such pamphlets are a menace to society. There are too many now who believe it is a crime to have children. If some of the women who are going around and advocating equal suffrage would advocate women having children they would do greater service." The New Fork Times disapprovingly...