Disciplining Reproduction – Modernity, American Life Sciences, & The Problems of Sex - Hardcover

Clarke, Adele E

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520207203 ISBN 13: 9780520207202

Publisher: University of California Press, 1998

Synopsis

This volume traces the complicated paths through which physiological approaches to reproduction led to endocrinological approaches, creating along the way new technoscientific products from contraceptives to hormone therapies to new modes of assisted conception - for both humans and animals. The author focuses on the changing relations and often uneasy collaborations among scientists and the key social worlds most interested in their work - major philanthropists and a wide array of feminist and medical birth control and eugenics advocates - and recounts how the reproductive sciences slowly acquired standing.

About this title

About the Author

Adele E. Clarke is Associate Professor of Sociology and History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

From the Back Cover

"A book that will alter substantially our conceptions regarding the development and influence of a crucial modern science."—Philip J. Pauly, Rutgers University

"Clarke gives us a window into a part of the history of science that has never before been made so accessible but one about which there is great concern. . . . An extremely valuable work."—Emily Martin, Princeton University

"As an excellent case study of the powerful analytical potential of the social world's approach, Disciplining Reproduction is a major contribution to theory building in science studies."—Nelly Oudshoorn, University of Amsterdam

From the Inside Flap

"A book that will alter substantially our conceptions regarding the development and influence of a crucial modern science."Philip J. Pauly, Rutgers University

"Clarke gives us a window into a part of the history of science that has never before been made so accessible but one about which there is great concern. . . . An extremely valuable work."Emily Martin, Princeton University

"As an excellent case study of the powerful analytical potential of the social world's approach,Disciplining Reproduction is a major contribution to theory building in science studies."Nelly Oudshoorn, University of Amsterdam

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the Problems of Sex

By Adele E. Clarke

University of California Press

Copyright 1998 Adele E. Clarke
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520207203
Chapter One
Framing the American Reproductive Sciences

One day in 1914, embryologist Frank R. Lillie, chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago, received from the manager of his farm a pair of twin calf fetuses with their placentas intact, still wrapped in the excised womb. The genitalia of one of the fetuses looked rather strange. Thus began Lillie's research on the freemartin, which led to the radical conclusion that embryonic sex differentiation is dependent on blood-borne hormones (Lillie 1917a,b). Freemartins were deemed to be sterile female co-twins to males, fetuses that developed from separate eggs but whose placentas had merged in utero, allowing the crossing of blood systems. Hormones, Lillie concluded, were clearly implicated in the production of sex.1

In 1917, George Papanicolaou, a zoologist in the Anatomy Department at Cornell University Medical School, was engaged in sex determination research. One day he decided to see whether cells scraped from the vaginal walls of the guinea pigs he was using could indicate at what stage of the estrus cycle the guinea pigs were (Carmichael 1973:4749). The technique worked wonderfully. With it, researchers could infer the activity of internal organs, and thus analyze the biological activity of hormones on a routine basis. They could even do so over time, and the process was quick and cheap, and did not require sacrificing the animals (Stockard and Papanicolaou 1917a,b). The fundamental biological assay technique of modern reproductive endocrinological research had been constructed.2

During 1917, Margaret Sanger, perhaps the most prominent birth control activist of the twentieth century, was deeply involved in framing the project of achieving women's access to effective means of contraception to enhance women's autonomy. She stated the following goals: "For though the subject is largely social and economic yet it is in the main physical and

medical , and the object of those advancing the cause is to open the doors of the medical profession, who in turn will force open the doors of the laboratories where our chemists will give the women of the twentieth century reliable and scientific means of contraception hitherto unknown" (Chesler 1992:146).

On a cold Christmas morning in 1921, George Washington Corner, a physician and fledgling reproductive scientist, awoke in Baltimore to discover that it was snowing. He was in the midst of a series of experiments on the monkey Macaca rhesus at Johns Hopkins Medical School to determine the parameters of the menstrual cycle, a project that required catching each monkey every day to check the vaginal washings for red blood cells. With public transport halted by the snow, Corner walked five miles to the lab, fed the monkeys, and did his monitoring tasks (Corner 1981:164). By 1929 Corner had mapped out the hormonal action of progesterone, an essential actor in the menstrual cycle and subsequently an actor in birth control pills.3

One day in 1928, Harold H. Cole was hired as an assistant professor of animal husbandry at the Davis agricultural college farm of the University of California, Berkeley. He had earlier done research on the estrus cycle in the dog and cow, and for his first new project began to seek a hormone test for pregnancy in the cow and horse, based on Ascheim and Zondek's discovery of a gonadotropin in the urine of pregnant women. Using the immature rat for the assay, he and G. H. Hart soon discovered a new reproductive hormone that came to be known as pregnant mare serum gonadotropin (PMSG). PMSG then led reproductive scientists to a much broader understanding of the complex flows of reproductive hormones. The patent on PMSG funded Cole's and others' reproductive research at Davis for many years (Cole and Hart 1930; Cole 1977).

On Valentine's Day in 1934, Warren Weaver, the new director of the Natural Sciences Division of the newly reorganized Rockefeller Foundation, was developing his own agenda for research support. He framed the problematics before the foundation as follows:

Can man gain an intelligent control of his own power? Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men? Can we obtain enough knowledge of the physiology and the psychobiology of sex so that man can bring this pervasive, highly important, and dangerous aspect of life under rational control? Can we unravel the tangled problem of the endocrine glands, and develop, before it is too late, a therapy for the whole hideous range of mental and physical disorders which result from glandular disturbances? Can we solve the mysteries of the various vitamins so that we can nurture a race sufficiently healthy and resistant? Can we release psychology from its present confusion and ineffectiveness and shape it into a tool which every man can use every day? Can man acquire

enough knowledge of his own vital processes so that we can hope to rationalize human behavior? Can we, in short, create a new science of man?4

The Rockefeller Foundation Board answered in the affirmative.

One day in June 1953, Gregory Pincus opened the door of the fledgling Worcester Institute of Experimental Biology to welcome two women. One was Margaret Sanger, and the other was Katherine McCormack, widow of the International Harvester scion and a benefactor of many of Sanger's projects. Pincus, son of an agricultural scientist from New Jersey, had a Ph.D. in genetics and physiology from Harvard, and his reproductive research included experiments in artificial parthenogenesis. Pincus and his colleague Hudson Hoagland, both unwilling refugees from academia, had founded the Worcester Institute in 1944 and were trying to establish it as a freestanding research shop, doing various kinds of experimental work on contract for pharmaceutical companies and others. The hormone research that Sanger and McCormack discussed with Pincus that day in 1953 ultimately led to the birth control pill of which Pincus is a commonly designated "father." McCormack gave him a check for $10,000 on the spot and several million subsequently.5

Each of the individuals just introduced represents one of the major social worlds involved in the disciplining of reproduction in the twentieth century: reproductive scientists in biology, medicine, and agriculture; philanthropic foundations; and birth control advocates. This book offers a wide-angle view of each of these worlds and of their interrelations as, through their often uneasy collaborations, the reproductive sciences emerged and coalesced as scientific disciplines in a world often hostile to their development.

Significantly, in part due to the illegitimacy of pursuing the reproductive sciences, this disciplinary endeavor formed later than the study of other major organ systems such as circulation or respiration, though once established it grew rapidly. For example, not a single English-language book on the reproductive sciences was published until agricultural scientist F. H. A. Marshall's Physiology of Reproduction appeared in Britain in 1910. Yet by 1940, investigators in the United States had both developed and coalesced the study of reproductive phenomena into a scientific discipline in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Numerous major research centers together formed an established and growing scientific enterprise. Reproductive scientists had garnered close to $2 million in external research support from major mainstream science sponsors such as the Rockefeller Foundation. And the prestigious National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, founded in 1921, had funded basic research on reproduc-

tion generously for two decades. The committee provided legitimacy and prestige to the reproductive sciences during their formative years. By 1940, preeminence in the reproductive sciences had clearly passed from British and other European centers to the United States. In what became known as "the American century," American reproductive scientists would retain global leadership until its end.

By the 1960s, some of the major technoscientific products of the reproductive sciences had been developed and tested: estrogen "replacement" therapy for treatment of menopausal women, diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent premature labor in pregnant women and as a feed additive for beef cattle, the birth control pill, and the intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD). Moreover, these reproductive technologies were being distributed widely both in what was then known as the Third World, particularly former colonies, and in the industrialized United States through newly inaugurated federal family planning programs intended for every county (Davis 1991).

By the 1960s, then, reproduction was disciplined. The modern American reproductive sciences as a disciplinary formation were successfully entrenched and had established resources and enduring relationships with key audiences, sponsors, and consumers of their technoscientific products. This book tells what I believe are the major stories of the making of the discipline. From 1910 to 1963 there were profound changes in the orientations not only of reproductive scientists but also of their key sponsors and marketsthe social worlds of birth control, population control, and eugenics movements, and of private philanthropies. All reconstructed their identities, goals, and work in relation to each other within the wider arena focused on reproduction. They mutually articulated new positions and commitments that were transformed into quid pro quos, and those relationships persist today.

This book attempts to answer the questions: How was this disciplinary project accomplished, by what actors, under what conditions, in whose interests, and with what historical and contemporary consequences? The formation and coalescence of the American reproductive sciences involved complex intersections of a stunning array of actorshuman and nonhuman.6 Scientists of impeccable background and others who were marginalizedBohemian free lovers, major foundations, rats, guinea pigs, birth control advocates and opponents, cows, opossums, eugenicists, women's and men's bodies (both dead and alive), schools of medicine and agriculture, freemartins, stallion urine, primates, plastics, vaginal cells, sexologistseach and all and many others were involved. From the outset, the intersections among them formed an arena in which many social worlds were in contestation. This arena was a site of considerable and sustained controversy that shaped the disciplinary project itself. The controversy continues to this day.

In the remainder of this chapter, I frame some keywords used throughout the book, discuss five crosscutting themes, and provide a brief overview and user's guide to the book.

Keywords

Keywords dwell on the boundaries between ordinary and technical discourse. They are often "bedeviled by semantic shadows" (Keller and Lloyd 1992:2). For Raymond Williams (1976) they refer to commonly used terms plagued in their usage by multiple current and historically varying meanings. Because the keywords of this project are laden with particular and dense meanings, they are best clarified in advance. They include disciplining, reproduction, modernity, "the problems of sex," basic research , and technoscience .

Disciplining

I argue that reproduction was disciplined in several senses between 1910 and 1963. First, in the sense of disciplinary formation, a scholarly specialty in reproduction was essentially initiated after 1910. A nucleus of reproductive (in contrast with evolutionary, developmental, and/or genetic) problems was then increasingly addressed by researchers in sufficient mutual communication and interaction for reproductive science to be identified as a distinctive social world.7 By 1940, recognizable collective lines of work by identifiable workers were pursued in disciplinary centers of research in each of the three professional contexts of biology, medicine, and agriculture.

But disciplines are complicated sites. They are often rife with conflict as well as cooperation, marked by competing paradigms of concern and competing hierarchies of power. Different constituents often have different agendas and even different overall projects in mind. Here the term disciplining becomes inflected with connotations of exercising control over participating individuals and groups both within the discipline and related to itsharing its wider arena of concern. Disciplining thus can involve policing and enforcing particular perspectives. It can operate not only from the top down but also from the bottom up, sideways, and orthogonally. It can be directed at "allies" and "enemies" as well as at implicated strangers and the nonhuman. Disciplines mark territories and usually seek to do so vividly. They are simultaneously constitutive and controlling.8

In modernity, the focus of the collective disciplinary project of the reproductive sciences was also disciplining in another and more specific sense: as exercising control over reproduction itself. The fundamental goal was the development of modern technoscientific means and mechanisms through which human beings could exercise increasing control over their

own and other species' reproduction. Control over the timing, means ("artificial" or "natural"), and frequency of conception, and especially its prevention, was at the heart of the modernist reproductive project. This assertion, of course, raises issues of who "controls" or "disciplines" whose reproduction, evoking Foucault's (1975, 1977) analysis of biopower. He argues that the two key sites of modern biopower are the body and population. There has been considerable scholarly attention to the former in the late twentieth century. As we move into the twenty-first, I suspect this volume will be part of a refocusing of attention on the latter (e.g., Haraway 1995; Greenhalgh 1996; Ginsberg and Rapp 1995).

Reproduction

Reproduction here refers to the sexual reproduction of predominantly mammalian species. Both nonmammalian and plant reproduction were also studied assiduously during the early twentieth century, but I do not discuss them.9 But the term reproduction , like sexuality (Foucault 1978), is itself a historical conception, though not included in Williams's (1976) Keywords . Here I provide only a brief glimpse of these instructive complications.

In 1782, John Wesley commented on Buffon's natural history that Buffon "substitutes for the plain word Generation , a quaint word of his own, Reproduction , in order to level man not only with the beasts that perish, but with nettles or onions" (Jordanova 1995:372). This is the earliest mention of the changing terminology. The processes of creation of new life that had linked humans to God were thereby shifted linguistically to abstract biological processes that marginalize human agency. Jordanova further notes that "having children" then becomes conceptually linked to copying, as in reproduction furniture. She argues that the concept was in transition over the eighteenth century, moving from home and nonprofessional domains to public and professional ones. Much of the symbolic import of generation was then hidden behind the new scientific and rationalized discourse.10 Strathern (1992:23) sustains this point, noting that we end up with a cultural discourse that leads us to "imagine the very reproduction of persons in a non-relational way." I agree that the symbolic and relational aspects of reproduction do not remain quiescent but continue to burst forth in controversies over reproductive sciences, technologies, and interventions.

Duden (1991:28) links this terminological shift to other disciplines, arguing that "it was medicine, demography and political science which replaced the expressions of generatio whether Latin or vernacularwith 'reproduction.' Prior to this new definition, there simply was no term in which insemination, conception, pregnancy and birth could have been subsumed." This new definition separated the older scientific nomenclature of the nineteenth century, where the inner landscape was imprinted with the

names of its anatomist discoverers, from the new functional terminology of demography and political economy. Conceptually, Duden argues, reproduction emerged and was linked to the context of production as that term moved into the center of political economy around 1850. Thus even the term reproduction itself is modern and inflected by economics.

One of the recurrent problems of the twentieth-century reproductive scientists I studied was their own lack of clarity in terminology, leading to misunderstandings that persisted for years (and, some would argue, that still persist intentionally) (e.g., Lillie 1932; Allen 1932). For present purposes, I have used the following terms as carefully as possible:

sex biological attributes of male and female gender social, cultural, and psychological practices associated with males and females sexuality human sexual/erotic concerns, identities, and interactions, including but far from limited to intercourse (animal sexuality is ignored) reproductive system/ reproduction the bodily systems of males and females allowing conception, gestation, and birth of new members of mammalian species

All of these, of course, are complex, multiple, ultimately interactive, and meaningful boundaries among them are blurred.11

I have used reproductive sciences as a generic term to include, umbrella-like, all of the following: reproductive physiology, reproductive endocrinology, nonpathological gynecologic and obstetric research, urologic and andrologic research, and animal science and veterinary science addressing reproductive phenomena. That is, a core argument of this book is that reproduction was disciplined simultaneously in three professional domains: biology, medicine, and agriculture. I needed an overarching term to refer to the enterprise in its broadest senses, as the specificities not only can be narrower but also were historically politicized. For example, when George Corner, with whom I started the book, was quite senior, he said, "I never did and still do not see any reason to call myself anything more than an anatomist" (Raacke 1983:931), despite being known for his reproductive physiology of the female cycle and endocrinological work. Today many (but not all) in the field, broadly conceived, use the term reproductive sciences .

Modernity

The reproductive sciences between 1910 and 1963 constituted a modernist enterprise par excellence.12 Modern approaches sought universal laws of re-

production toward achieving and/or enhancing control over reproduction. During the modern era, the reproductive processes focused on most intently by reproductive scientists and clinicians included menstruation, contraception, abortion, birth, and menopause; agricultural reproductive scientists also focused on artificial insemination. Control over reproduction was and still is accomplished by means of Fordist mass productionoriented emphases on the rationalization of reproductive processes, including the production and (re)distribution of new goods, technologies, and health care services that facilitate such control. The engineering of new technologies to enhance control over reproduction, to be mass-produced and distributed, was and remains the modernist goal, ever widening and deepening the global consumer pool.

In sharp contrast, postmodern approaches to reproduction are centered on transformation of reproductive bodies and processes, seeking to flexibly redesign those very bodies and processes to achieve a variety of goals. The reproductive processes focused on since the 1960s are conception and (in)fertility, pregnancy, heredity and clinical genetics, and male reproduction. In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are the central postmodern reproductive technologies in both clinical and agricultural settings. Redesign of bodies is achieved through strategies of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989) of reproductive capacities. These include fertility and sex preselection services, genetic and fetal screening, counseling, and treatment. The economic aim is to create new market niches for elaborated reproductive services.

In short, the common distinction embodied in the phrase "the new reproductive technologies," which began to appear in scholarly as well as popular media in the 1970s, constituted a significant boundary, starting a new era. The "new" reproductive technologies are the postmodern transformative ones (including artificial insemination, even though it was developed earlier). George Corner (1981:165) reflected in his autobiography: "The world is agog with the news of the first 'test-tube' baby. I hardly need to point out that the success of that procedure and similar methods such as artificial insemination in corpore mulieris depends basically upon knowledge of the primate cycle that has been worked out since the beginning of the century by a few embryologists and gynecologists in Europe and America, of whom I am one." The test-tube baby moment can be viewed as the beginning of postmodern reproduction. As Franklin (1995:326) notes, there have been "significant shifts in the cultural grounding of assumptions about 'the facts of life.'"

While the modernist reproductive body is Taylored, the postmodern body is tailored. However, there is considerable traffic across the varyingly constructed boundaries. In fact, I argue strongly for the simultaneity of even premodern (primarily herbal) approaches to controlling reproduc-

tion with modern and postmodern approaches. Modern modes of control over reproduction are requisite (and usually presumed available) for the implementation of postmodern approaches. There is a historically dynamic and cumulative, not an exclusive, relation.13

Both modern and postmodern approaches to reproduction are achieved through technoscientific reconfigurations of "nature" that intervene by going "beyond the natural body" (Oudshoorn 1994). Over the past century, the desire for control over reproduction expanded the legitimacy of the scientific study of reproductive processes, which, essentially in tandem, supported the legitimacy of human intervention in reproductive processesof both other species and our own. Here representation in the lab is followed almost immediately by intervention (Hacking 1983) in the field, coop, sty, pasture, operating room, and bedroom. The legitimacy of both representing and intervening in reproductive processes remains contested. However, technoscientific capacities for intervening have expanded from modernist "control over" reproductive processes in both humans and animals to postmodernist "manipulation of" both processes and products (e.g., Austin and Short 1972/1986). In fact, the human/nonhuman distinction is of decreasing relevance to reproductive and genetic scientists as reproduction is more fully rationalized. Only as the century-plus-long visions of collaborative scientific creations via genetic screening and therapies used conjointly with reproductive technologies are enacted now and in the future will the dreams of Warren Weaver and many others for "a new science of man" come to full fruition.

This study begins in modernity in 1910, the year in which Marshall published his Physiology of Reproduction, signaling the formation of an explicit field of endeavor or line of work in the reproductive sciences in Western Europe and the United States. I am not arguing that scientific problems of reproduction were ignored prior to 1910 (see, e.g., Gasking 1967; Farley 1982), and I discuss turn-of-the-century work and approaches at some length in chapter 2. But it was after 1910, especially in the United States, that research on reproduction became focused on an organized, coherent set of problems with both a clearer scope and clearer boundaries with other disciplines.

I end my examination of the formation and coalescence of the American reproductive research enterprise around 1963. For many sciences in the American context (e.g., physics, chemistry), World War II was a boundary line between historic eras, but this was true only in a very limited sense for the reproductive sciences. Because of their highly controversial status, the reproductive sciences did not benefit until the 1960s from the federal largesse that began immediately after the war through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (Greep, Koblinsky, and Jaffe 1976:37285). I end my story when the new, modern, scientific

methods of contraception, developed with private rather than federal support, were first distributed under U.S. government sponsorship both in the United States and internationally. At about this time, significant new federal and private funding began to flow directly to the reproductive sciences and contraceptive development; then, arguably, the modern era began to segue into postmodernity, and a different set of stories about the reproductive sciences began to be enacted.

"The Problems of Sex"

Three lines of scientific research were developing and expanding simultaneously in the early twentieth century, all of which were blurrily associated with the term "the problems of sex": (1) sexology, or sexuality research, which focused on behavioral activities and aspects including gender, primarily in humans but also in nonhuman primates and other animals;14 (2) the reproductive sciences, which focused on the biological, medical, and agricultural aspects of sex and reproductive systems; and (3) contraceptive and fertility research, which focused on directly developing enhanced control over human reproduction through prevention and/or enhancement of conception by means of technoscientific interventions.15

Constructing strong boundaries among these three lines of research was itself a major effort of reproductive scientists during this period. Points of intersection and boundary construction with the other two lines of work are therefore addressed at some length. Chapter 4 examines how reproductive scientists from biology and medicine diverted the founding mission of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex from its initial focus on studies of human sexualitysexologyto a new emphasis on basic reproductive biology, especially reproductive endocrinology. In chapter 6 I take up the ferocious construction of the boundary between what was to be legitimate academic reproductive science versus explicitly applied contraceptive research. The latter was almost completely exiled from the academy until after 1963.

Basic Research and Technosciences

I have largely limited my scope to what has been traditionally termed "basic" research work undertaken by investigators in biology, medicine, and agriculture on aspects of mammalian reproduction, as well as work viewed by such individuals as directly contributing to fundamental knowledge of mammalian reproduction. These modern investigators sought knowledge of basic reproductive laws and functions.

By "basic" research, I mean investigations toward understanding "normal" reproductive form and function through morphological, anatomical, physiological, endocrinological and other biochemical approaches. For

such research on humans, Fletcher and colleagues (1981:286) use the interesting term "normality studies," referring to investigations of the biology of nondiseased humans. Such a term would also be appropriate for agricultural investigations of basic mammalian reproductive functions in domestic species.

Thus my focus on "basic" research largely excludes investigations of disease, pathology, and treatment interventions. In reproduction as elsewhere, the "normal" is constituted in distinction from the "pathological" (Canguilhem 1978; Foucault 1978). And certainly many reproductive scientists in fact focused on diseases and other pathologies and/or hoped their work would contribute to effective interventions (e.g., Pratt 1932). But for reasons of scope, I generally exclude such work. However, in chapter 6 I do address research on contraception, assuredly considered "applied" research by reproductive scientists and assuredly sought as a technoscientific intervention into normal processes.

But the meanings of the term technosciences here are more complicated than mere reference to applied research. First, the term challenges traditional notions that basic research produces technologies in a unidirectional fashion. Instead, the two are loosely viewed as co-constitutive, as hybrid (Latour 1987). Second, it challenges the notion that there is in fact some pure form of research that is totally distinguishable from its application (e.g., Kline 1995). Most life sciences research undertaken in the twentieth century has at least been informed by applied concerns, if not guided by them. The term technoscience thus signals these complications. Pickstone (1993b:438) also argues that the term has a "specific historical meaning for fields where knowledge, and practice and the economy were intimately related, where knowledge was saleable," where science involved "the creation and sale of knowledge products."

Considerably greater cultural authority generally accrues to basic scientists than to applied scientists or the developers of new technologies. On the other hand, the latter may glean greater fiscal rewards, especially through ties to industry, which have tended to become more direct across the century.

Themes

This book tells multiple stories about the reproductive sciences. I center my investigation on the theme of disciplinary formation, examining relations among the heterogeneous social worlds involved and implicated in the wider reproductive arena. Other crosscutting themes include illegitimacy, controversy, and boundaries; gender and the technosciences; and the control of life through the rationalization of reproduction in modernity.

Disciplinary Formation

Recent approaches to examining disciplinary formation and the production of new knowledge in science and technology studies and beyond have challenged earlier assumptions that science and scientific knowledge were somehow different and better (truer) than other kinds of knowledge, somehow asocial in terms of the actual contents of science, and somehow less politically and economically driven in their constitution, institutionalization, and practices than the social sciences, the arts and humanities, or, for that matter, business. These newer studies often assumed that adequate accounts of disciplinary formation require addressing both what were called "internalist" and "externalist" dimensions, including theories, ideas, people, research materials, instruments, institutions, research funding, and contiguous fields. They were concerned with concrete practices, constructed boundaries, and constitutive contextual elements of any and all kinds that appeared empirically salient.16 Rosenberg (1979b) has termed these more inclusive approaches studies of "the ecology of knowledge" and its production.17

A crucial orthogonal angle of vision has focused intently over the past decade or so on private funding sources such as patrons and foundations as central organizing and intervening agencies in the formation and development of disciplines and specialties, especially before World War II. Some of these scholars view foundations as the visible hand of capitalism intervening to control the production of knowledge for their own good. Others foreground foundations' commitments to solving social problems through the application of science.18 Foundations and philanthropists are certainly central actors followed about in the stories told here. While they undoubtedly had agendas, their actions and commitments were heterogeneous and complicated, open to multiple readings and resistances, a point to which I return in conclusion.

Most recently, additional inflections have been added to understandings of disciplinary formation by "new knowledge studies" critically inquiring into processes of knowledge construction. These approaches study both concrete practices and institutions. In addition, they place greater emphasis on the circulation and consumption of both academic and nonacademic (official/unofficial, approved/subjugated) knowledges. Concern centers on the institutionalization and professionalization of official knowledge production, including articulations among universities, governments, foundations, and interest groups. There also has been special interest in boundary transgressions (e.g., Klein 1996; Gieryn 1995). Drawing extensively on Foucault, the new knowledge studies additionally seek to specify what goes unstudiedwhat Evelynn Hammonds (1994) calls "black (w)holes"sites

of particular tensions of omission. What goes unstudied may not be seen or perceived, or it may be refusedworthy of note regardless. The new knowledge studies have a radically heterogeneous character: "Disciplinarity is about the coherence of a set of otherwise disparate elements: objects of study, methods of analysis, scholars, students, journals, and grants to name a few. ... [D]isciplinarity is the means by which ensembles of diverse parts are brought into particular types of knowledge relations with each other" (Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan 1993:3).19 Those relations are, then, the objects of study.

Issues of "internal" and "external" approaches to the histories of science and technology have, over the years, been moved alternately between foreground and background. Shapin (1992:351) asserts, and I agree, that it does not suffice merely to wave a wand and state that neither extreme is worthy; instead, we still need "systematic exploration of the complex situated practices historical actors have used to construct their internal and their external domains." But, with Pickstone (1993b), I would add that ways of knowing are themselves cultural formations, and that we also need to examine how others construct sciences and their productions. That is, most sciences and technologies implicate other actors who also should be taken into account.

In the historiography of disciplinary formation, Abir-Am (1985) takes up the basic problem of whether any representation of a science is intrinsically hagiographic, as any advertising can be deemed good advertising. She also asserts that in many scientists' "insider history" accounts, differences and conflicts are papered over (rather than focused on) to further empower the historical disciplinary claims that are being made. Abir-Am calls for a more elaborated analysis of power, conflict, and hierarchy within histories of sciences as ways of opening those histories to the important questions of how things might have been otherwise.

The social worlds and arenas approach, discussed next, allows for precisely such questions. It takes a nondeterminative, empirical approach to disciplinary formation and technology development.

Social Worlds and Arenas

I view the reproductive sciences as social worldscommunities of practice and discourse. My goal is to provide historical sociological portraits of these worlds and of the other major social worlds with which they related in the broader American reproductive arenaphilanthropic and birth/population control worlds. I seek to capture the fundamental identities of these worlds and to specify their relationships in Park's (1952) tradition of relating the "Big News." I do not map the reproductive sciences as a self-

contained discipline, for that would be partial at best. Rather, I view the reproductive sciences as "situated knowledges" (Haraway 1991), appropriately examined within the broader arena in which they were formed and where they "matter" most.

The roots of social worlds theory lie within the Chicago school of sociology and its symbolic interactionist concerns with the making of communities and organizations and with studying their ecologies in particular ways.20 The commitments of individual actors to collective action, to group work of some kind (be it state building, social movement organizing, or doing reproductive science), structurally situate those individuals. Social groups (such as disciplines and skilled occupations) are then conceived as "social wholes" (Thomas 1914) that make meaning together and act together locally on the basis of those meanings. Social worlds are, for Mead, Strauss, and myself, "universes of mutual discourse."21

Social worlds form fundamental "building blocks" of collective action and are the principal affiliative mechanisms through which people organize social life. Society as a whole can be conceptualized as consisting of a shifting mosaic of social worlds that both touch and interpenetrate.22 Participation usually remains highly fluid. Some participants cluster around the core of the world and mobilize those around them (Hughes 1971:54). These "entrepreneurs" (Becker 1963) typically remain at the core over time. Social worlds and subworlds themselves become units of analysis in the study of collective action.

The concept of an arena of concern and action, composed of multiple social worlds, is central to my view of the reproductive sciences. In arenas, all the social worlds that focus on a given issue meet and interact. The collective actors/social worlds involved in an arena can be stunningly heterogeneous. In arenas, "various issues are debated, negotiated, fought out, forced and manipulated by representatives" of the participating worlds and subworlds (Strauss 1978:124). The analyst needs to elucidate which worlds and subworlds come together in a particular arena and why, what their perspectives are, and what they hope to achieve through collective action.23

In arenas, establishing and maintaining boundaries between worldsincluding gaining social legitimation for the worlds themselves and a variety of claims-making activitiesare key activities (Aronson 1984). Indeed, the very history of a social world is commonly constructed in the boundary-making process (Strauss 1982).24 We can also ask whether there are implicated actors individuals and/or groups or nonhuman entitieswho, while they do not participate actively (for whatever reasons), are the targets of or will likely be affected by actions taken within the social world or arena (Clarke and Montini 1993). For example, women as the primary users/consumers of the technoscientific products of the reproductive sci-

ences are usually implicated actors in this arenanot present but clearly targeted.

I use the term enterprise (Estes 1979) here to capture and emphasize several particular aspects of the overall reproductive sciences endeavor. The reproductive sciences can be constructed as a set of "going concerns" (Hughes, 1971:53), commodities in a marketplace with producers, audiences, sponsors, and consumers. To some, using such business terms will seem inappropriate. But lines of scientific work resemble other lines of work and owe their continued existence to organized markets and funding for that work. Latour's (1983, 1988) interpretation of Louis Pasteur's transformation of the countryside into his "laboratory" can be viewed as an analysis of the organization of markets for bacteriological research. Sapp's (1983) analysis of competition for control of the field of heredity is similar. Social movements within professions and disciplines, commonly framed as scientific reform movements, are often efforts to organize new markets for the work (Bucher 1988). In short, there is a political economy of disciplinary formation, which market analyses can illuminate. Recent studies of disciplinarity and knowledge production, discussed previously, also echo such concerns (Becher 1989:12949).

Three features of the social worlds and arenas approach are particularly salient to the study of disciplinary formation. First, the approach includes all the key actors in the arena, analyzing their properties and perspectives along with the key issues confronting the arena as a whole. This approach not only follows the scientists (Latour 1987) but also attempts to follow everyone and everything else (human and nonhuman) in the situation or arena.25 Second, the arenas approach is deeply situational and contingent, with contexts and conditions empirically fleshed out, close to the anthropological tradition of thick description. Interactionists assume that things could have been otherwise and try to examine especially consequential moments, turning points, trajectories and careers (of concepts, people, technologies). Histories matter.

Third, in social worlds analysis there is movement to and fro among what have been termed "internal" (scientific, theoretical, methodological) and "external" (social, cultural, economic, institutional) elements. It is the relations among all these elements, typically heterogeneous, that are most intriguing. For it is here in the complexities of dense situations that disciplinary coherence is constructed. It is these ongoing relations that I attempt to portray in this book, taking up the contents and practices of the reproductive sciences from the practical value of "golden hands" in performing intricate lab surgeries such as rat hypophysectomy (removal of the anterior pituitary gland) to the negotiations between reproductive scientists and birth control advocates over decades. The social worlds/arenas approach

enables me to elaborate for the reproductive sciences what Rosenberg (1979b) called an "ecology of knowledge" and the conditions of its production.

Illegitimacy, Controversy, and Boundaries

A third theme of this volume concerns the enduring illegitimacy, marginality, and controversial status of the reproductive sciences as a discipline. I underscore the consequences of controversy for the construction of the boundaries of the discipline, for its practitioners, and for women as the major consumers of its technoscientific products. I use the term illegitimate to feature both playfully and seriously the construction of reproductive sciences as "bastard science" and to show how its sustained practice generates sustained controversy. The reproductive sciences are marked on the one hand by great potency in the world and on the other hand by shame.

I both contradict and complicate Foucault's analysis of the relations between the reproductive sciences and sexology. I quote him for clarity's sake below (Foucault 1978:5455, emphasis added). The two claims that I complicate are italicized:

When we compare these discourses on human sexuality with what was known at the time about the physiology of animal and plant reproduction, we are struck by the incongruity. Their feeble content from the standpoint of elementary rationality, not to mention scientificity, earns them a place apart in the history of knowledge. They form a strangely muddled zone. Throughout the nineteenth century, sex seems to have been incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation. From one to the other, there was no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration ... [W]e would have to see something more than uneven scientific development ... the one would partake of that immense will to knowledge which has sustained the establishment of scientific discourse in the West, whereas the other would derive from a stubborn will to nonknowledge.

In contrast to Foucault, I argue that the reproductive sciences were quite late to develop in a modern fashion compared with disciplines centered on other major organ systems. Further, the reproductive sciences were and remain illegitimate science precisely because of their historical and specific relations to sexuality and sexology. The "immense will to knowledge" of Western science in terms of investigating reproduction was actually relatively quiescent until well into the twentieth century.

Moreover, for the "will to knowledge" to express itself, not only did there need to be explicit support for the formation of the reproductive sciences, specifically the birth control, eugenics and neo-Malthusian movements. The

very boundaries between what would count as studies of sex (sexology) and studies of reproduction (the reproductive sciences) also needed to be negotiated and constructed. What this ultimately involved was what could be considered a division of labor between these two disciplines emerging in the early decades of the twentieth century. This division of labor concerns what Foucault (1978:1035) discussed as:

four great strategic unities which, beginning in the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex. ...

1. A hystericization of women's bodies ...

2. A pedagogization of children's sex ...

3. A socialization of procreative behavior ...

4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure ...

Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth centuryfour privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian [contracepting] couple, and the perverse adult.

I argue that the division of labor ultimately negotiated allocated to sexology and psychiatry some aspects of the hysterical woman, children's sexuality, and perverse pleasures. The Malthusian couple and the project of the socialization of procreative behavior fell to the reproductive sciences, along with those aspects of the hysterical woman deemed related to the menstrual/reproductive cycle. (Foucault planned later volumes that would have taken up each of those four topics/objects of knowledge.) This division of scientific labor largely persists.

The study of reproduction was, and for many remains, transgressive. Throughout their disciplinary efforts, reproductive scientists regularly and routinely confronted the fundamental problem of the illegitimacy of reproduction as a focus of scientific work. Because the entire field was deemed at least problematic and at worst reprehensible by various constituencies, its very institutionalization was marked by surprising and shifting alliances, episodic organizational efforts, a constant vigilance, and strong desires for enhanced legitimacy. Rather than follow the more common patterns of emergent disciplines of establishing a freshly and explicitly focused society, journal, and routine funding sources, relations with other social worlds from professional organizations to funding sources have been negotiated and renegotiated over time as circumstances of legitimacy shifted. Much has been indirect, tentative, and temporary that, for other emergent scientific disciplines, was direct, explicit, and fairly permanent.

How reproductive scientists negotiated the challenging social opposition to the construction of an autonomous scientific enterprise is a core theme

of this book.26 Some of the major actors chose to address the illegitimacy of their science directly. In 1921, for example, they chose to name the most prestigious institution in the interwar American reproductive arena the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. And they chose to talk and write explicitly about "the problems of sex." Yet the legitimacy problems of the reproductive sciences have not abated. If anything, "the problems of sex" are now even more hotly, openly, and explicitly contested. The public debate about abortion in the United States over the past decade, coupled with terrorist acts and murders of abortion providers, has brought home again and again how contested these topics are. Abortion is but the tip of the iceberg.

What then is the iceberg? The cultural primacy of sex and reproduction in most human beings' lives on the planet in terms of manhood, womanhood and adulthood places the concerns of sexology and the reproductive sciences at the heat of social life. Further, the embeddedness of reproductive phenomena in family and kinship systems, commonly fundamental to the very ordering of life itself, maintains its cultural centrality (Strathern 1992). But these are not easy issues, and in modernity anxieties about sexuality, reproduction, and families abound. Parenting, like sexuality, can be construed as both sacred and obscene. Issues so central to life itself tend to be contested with a stunning extremity. Franklin (1993) points out that the new reproductive technologies have been used not to challenge but rather to reinforce traditional familial and kinship formations. These conceptive technologies are often made inaccessible to homosexuals, inserting homophobia where it had not dwelt. The center requires the margins.

Boundaries are core elements in the analysis of disciplinary formation and knowledge production. But in controversial, marginalized, outlier disciplines, things are more complicated, and transgressions and gerrymandering are rife. Further, the reproductive sciences exhibit multiple boundaries of concern, all of which are somehow problematic. First is the boundary between science and society, usually claimed by science.27 Second are the boundaries delimiting one scientific discipline from another, typically most important during disciplinary emergence (e.g., Keating, Cambrosio, and McKenzie 1992). Third are the boundaries constructed within a discipline between what is to count as "basic" versus "applied." Fourth, especially in modernity, are the boundaries between the "normal" and the "pathological" (Canguilhem 1978; Fletcher, Fletcher, and Greganti 1981). Fifth are the boundaries of hierarchy, prestige, and cultural authority within a discipline, which typically are highly consequential for individual careers. Last are the boundaries of hierarchy, prestige, and cultural authority among scientific disciplines so consequential for both individual and disciplinary careersthe rank ordering of the sciences themselves (e.g., Whitley 1982).

We enter the historical story of the reproductive sciences as all of these

boundaries are about to be constructed or reconstructed within the cultural terrain of the sciences established in the late nineteenth century. The boundary between the embryonic reproductive sciences and society is faint and shifting. It is transparent and hence easily transgressed and vulnerable to gerrymandering by political groups. Getting contraceptive research into the laboratories was, after all, Sanger's transgressive goal. The boundaries between scientific disciplines are central to the story because the establishment of the boundaries around genetics and developmental embryology also clarified the parameters of the reproductive sciences. Another boundary between disciplines was contestedthat between the reproductive sciences and sexologywhich we will watch reproductive scientists assiduously construct in the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. The basic-versus-applied distinction was also problematic for disciplinary formation, as illustrated by the fact that the boundary between the reproductive sciences and contraceptive research remains contested and liminal.

The issues of marginality have been studied extensively in cultural, artistic, and social practices (e.g., Ferguson et al. 1990). Transferring this project to the sciences, looking at a marginal science and the kinds of boundary work involved in establishing and maintaining such an enterprise, tells us much about boundaries themselves and the construction of legitimacy. A core theme of this book, then, is the marginality of the reproductive sciences as they have been ignored, overshadowed, and otherwise made invisible by other sciences during the twentieth century. Such invisibling, especially by other life sciences like genetics, has been a strategy to prevent these other sciences from becoming contaminated by clear association and thereby risking marginalization.

Further, due in part to this marginalization, the formation of the reproductive sciences has been among the most ignored by scholars, despite the discipline's importance to and intervention in millions of human lives throughout the world in even its most remote corners (e.g., Tsing 1993). Although investment in reproductive research has been limited, it is likely that the technoscientific products produced downstream, such as contraceptives, have affected more individuals per dollar invested than any other technologies, with the possible exception of large technological systems such as electricity, telecommunications, and transportation. Gender is implicated.

Gender and the Technosciences of Reproduction

Intensive research on sex, gender, and the technosciences, one of the social worlds in which I participate, has been under way since the 1970s. A core project here has been examination of the construction of sex/gender

differences both within and across disciplines from the social sciences to the natural sciences and from classical times to the present. Such studies are intrinsically comparative, both within and across sexes and genders (Jordanova 1993). We have learned much about gender and sex from dissecting classical anatomy, physiology, gynecology, neuroendocrinology, neurology, genetics, space biology, and the rhetorical, material, and other practices of many sciences.28

It is difficult to conceive of a more sex- and gender-constructing and maintaining discipline and set of practices and discourses than those of the reproductive sciences, and this is another theme of the book. Through studies of these sciences, feminists have begun to address the socially constructed character of the concept of sex as used within the life sciences. That is, the earlier distinction feminists made between sex as biological/natural and gender as cultural/social/political/economic has itself been exploded. Today both concepts, sex and gender, are understood as social constructions. The constructions of nature done by scientists can and do, of course, take material concerns"real bodies"into account, as constructions of cultural and social phenomena can do as well. It is the meanings attributed to both nature and culture that are indelibly social, cultural, and deeply historical as well. The attributions are, after all, done by humans. In the case of gender, social scientists have been the primary researchers, while in the case of sex, life scientists have done the bulk of the construction work. But these are matters of emphasis and not exclusion. The concepts of sex and gender deeply implicate each other (Oudshoorn 1996c; see also Oudshoorn 1994, 1995, 1996a,b).

Focusing on the modern reproductive sciences, Borell's groundbreaking work demonstrated the centrality of both sex and gender to early British endocrinology, as the "male" and "female" hormones were being identified and birth control came to the forefront of concern. Oudshoorn has focused on the consequences of the organizational relations of the clinic, the laboratory, and pharmaceutical companies for the development of sex hormones and a new conceptualization of "the gendered hormonal body" in the Netherlands and Europe. Her work demonstrates how enhanced access to women as patients was central to both the production of knowledge and the subsequent distribution of technoscientific treatments that go "beyond the natural body." Hall focused on the construction of American reproductive endocrinology, while Rechter examines early clinical applications of the "male" and "female" hormones and their representation in popular media.29 Long (1997) has examined how medicine produced what it calls a "controlled vocabulary" for the category "woman" in the early twentieth century. She asks how medicine established a linguistic hegemony over gendered subjects and objects, noting that the Index Catalogue of America's National Library of Medicine had no entry for "Male" or "Man" until

1955, while "Women" are constant subjects of attention. Martin's (1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992) work attends to the use of metaphor in these vocabularies past and present. The production of sex itself has also been an especially rich topic.30 Further, U.S. and transnational women's health movements have been increasingly influential concerning the biomedical inscription of bodies, (re)creations of gender, and dynamics of male dominance through science, technology, and medicine.31

We are now able to grasp analytically how sex and gender not only are constructed and produced within disciplines but also are made robust by simultaneous alignments across multiple disciplines. That is, we can see how one discipline can rely on another's "conclusions" as foundational in the production of its own knowledge.32 This has been a pattern of considerable import in the sciences, especially in relation to gender. Yet disciplinary axes of sexing and gendering are intrinsically unstable and changing, and require regular rearticulation and reframing to maintain their cutting (i.e., classificatory) edges. Hence much work in the sciences as well as on the sciences remains focused on sex and gender. Problems of sex and gender, like race, do not resolve.

Evelyn Fox Keller argues that we need a new taxonomy for this area of study. She suggests (1995:32) it be schematized as "those studies examining the history of (1) women in science; (2) scientific constructions of sexual difference; and (3) the uses of scientific constructions of subjects and objects that lie both beneath and beyond the human skin (or skeleton)." In the first two, the focus is on women, sex, and gender in science. In the last, currently of considerable concern, the focus is on "gender in science," trading "between historical studies of gender, language and culture in the production of science." My emphasis in this book on the organizational culture of the reproductive sciences during their formation and coalescence addresses this very point.

Keller (1995:33) goes on: "Metaphors of gender can be seen to work, as social images in science invariably do, in two directions: they import social expectations into our [scientific] representations of nature, and by so doing they serve to reify (or naturalize) cultural beliefs or practices." Most feminist studies of the technosciences have focused on the latter, emphasizing the negative effects of such reifications on women. Some other feminist studies, and my project is included here, instead take up the influence of social expectations of gender on the course of scientific knowledge per se.33 In particular, I discuss the effects on the reproductive sciences of the insistence on retaining the "male" and "female" hormone designations, and the related, broader struggles between a reductionist endocrinological and a more physiologically oriented biology of sex (see chapter 5).

Much feminist research on the technosciences, as elsewhere, places

women or gender at the analytic center as the objects and/or subjects of inquiry, in attempting to compensate for prior omissions. I have chosen instead to examine sciences and technologies of particular relevance to women, those that often have profound consequences for women's lives. That is, I have sought here to understand the social and technical implications of the organization of the American reproductive sciences per se for women during the twentieth century. Rather than study downstream effects on women, I study the upstream production of knowledges and technologies. These implications are discussed most explicitly in chapter 6 on the development of means of contraception in negotiations with heterogeneous groups concerned with birth control. As Fausto-Sterling (1990:14) has stated: "We don't understand all that much about how science functions as a social activity, one in which ideology plays a part in the creation of the science and the science, thus created, feeds back upon the ideology." The historical moment of disciplinary formation is, of course, especially significant in terms of the very frameworks of conceptualization established. What kinds of knowledge will be produced, and how will it be distributed and used in terms of sex and gender?34

Controlling Life

The last major theme of the book seeks to situate the rationalizing of reproduction in modernity, which I see as one strategy within a larger modernist movement toward enhanced control over life itself. Modernity consists of many efforts to rationalize and industrialize a variety of life processes.35 The phrase "controlling life" is from Philip Pauly's (1987) important book on Jacques Loeb and his disciples in the early and midtwentieth century, for whom an "engineering ideal of biology" was central. Loeb is an almost mythic character in the history of the life sciences, symbolizing scientific beliefs that biological processes can be fully reduced to physics and chemistry and then reengineered by humans for the good of mankind. Interestingly, one of his disciples was Gregory Pincus, a "father" of the birth control pill. Pincus was a reproductive scientist extraordinaire and a key actor as scientific statesman in the formation of the transnational reproductive arena that has come to maturity over the last several decades of the twentieth century.

But while this book is properly situated within ongoing conversations about rationalization, social control, and biological engineering in studies of twentieth-century life sciences, the term control must be problematized. Control is complex and multiple, unstable and difficult. Where did the modernist framework for "controlling life" come from? How did it come to be applied to a model of biology in general and to heredity, evolution, and

reproduction in particular? The concept of control through knowledge in the life sciences has a long history to which I will return.

Foucault (1975, 1978) queried most earlier notions of social control by asserting that power is fluid and everywhere, with "positive" and "negative" potentialities of resistance and liberation as well as repression and domination. The title of this book plays on Foucault's use of the term disciplining to connote not only formation of a scientific discipline but also the possibilities of containment and control through knowledgefor liberatory, repressive, unanticipated, and unknown other purposes. Many individuals and groups were seeking to control life at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I would venture that even more do so at its end. Because reproduction is socially, culturally, and economically central to the very shape of individual lives, as well as a serious focus of national, corporate, and other global interests, it is a particular site where the desire to control life is vividly manifest. All of the social worlds examined in this book sought to enhance control of life in general and of reproduction in particular. They had varied goals, and power was far from equally distributed among them. But these are complicated stories of negotiations and trade-offs rather than simpler sagas of repression and denial.

In the life sciences, Pauly (1987:4) has argued that "there is a real history to the idea of scientific control of life" distinctive from more general ideas. While well into the nineteenth century, "the limits on biological manipulation were more notable than the achievements," this has been reversed by the end of the twentieth. Humans now have the capacity to create life itself through recombinant DNA biotechnologies. Indeed, what is lifenatureis now negotiated, and the boundaries between nature and culture are blurring and shifting.36 But Pauly is concerned, as I am in this book, with the beginnings of disciplinarities of biologicalincluding biomedicalcontrol over life itself. He traces a shift in biology from concern with evolution, the organization of organisms, and other "metaphysical" topics to new concerns with experimental control of organisms toward enhancing the capacity to "manipulate" themto control life itself. The utility of science and technology in achieving liberatory social engineering was an ideal often articulated romantically and idealistically by both left and right, progressives and conservatives, at the turn of and well into the twentieth century.37 Regardless of political agendas, however, the reins of control usually remain in the hands of scientists, engineers, and related elites, although the politics can be very complicated.

I will argue that the reproductive sciences provide yet another instance of such arguments for control by a variety of elites. First, for reproductive scientists, disciplined knowledge yields the power for successful intervention in life itself. In her early study of the Committee for Research in Prob-

lems of Sex, Hall (1978:14) found "implicit models of human society managed by scientists in the interests of human fulfillment." The capacity for scientific management is at the heart of rationalizing and industrializing processes. Indeed, Austin and Short (1972/1986) titled their major reproductive sciences text Manipulating Reproduction , describing in the same volume the means of such manipulation in both humans and farm animals. The human/nonhuman distinction has, in fact, become decreasingly relevant to the sciences and technologies of reproduction. However, the issues of whose control over whose reproduction, under what conditions, and so on, are especially salient to understanding twentieth-century reproductive sciences.

In some important senses, this book can also be read as a case study of elite philanthropic endowment of an emergent disciplinea discipline requisite for the sequence of core projects of twentieth-century life sciences of controlling race, population, heredity, and evolution (Haraway 1995).38 It frames Rockefeller concerns with the biochemical/endocrinological vision of life, known in the 1920s as "sex and internal secretions," which both preceded and then ran in tandem with the molecular vision of life. Kay (1993b:17) argues that the Rockefeller Foundation, influenced by Jacques Loeb's project of developing an engineering standpoint toward the control of life, sought to develop a "mechanistic biology as the central element of a new science of man whose goal was social engineering." This was very much the "new science of man" articulated by Warren Weaver with which I began the bookthe reproductive sciences, genetics, and what Weaver himself later dubbed "molecular biology."39 What Weaver managed for the Rockefeller Foundation was investment in the middle phase in a broader twentieth-century shift described by Keller (1993:56) as "a change in aim from representation to intervention (or from description to control) ... to the particular conception of intervention or control that promises mastery over the making and remaking of life. ... [T]he project of 'refashioning life,' of redirecting the future course of evolution, is recast as a manageable and doable project." The reproductive sciences are requisite for that project.

But it was not only scientific, corporate, and foundation commitments to rationalization, social control, and engineering that aided and abetted the development of the American reproductive sciences. The control of nature is also the control of self (Keller 1992a). Historically, lay people too have avidly sought enhanced control over their own reproduction.40 Lay peopleboth women and menhave applied means of (social) control of many kinds, including biomedicalized means of control over reproduction. They have constructed social movements such as the birth control movement, a key actor in the formation of the American reproductive sciences. Instrumental rationalities of control and intervention were the goals in

modernity for many peopleelites and others. In the heterogeneous materialities of ordering and controlling life, there are no simple means of controland certainly no innocent ones. Who gets to decide about the design and distribution of the means of control remains the central question.

Overview And User's Guide

This book is a prism, offering many stories of the reproductive sciences, which will be read through many lenses with varied individual's and groups' concerns and agendas in mind. It is a story of the construction of a new line of scientific research in the United States between 1910 and 1963the American reproductive sciences. My focus is on how certain scientists in specific locales came to envision a set of problems of reproductive research, how they organized themselves to work on those problems, and how they interacted among themselves and with their audiences, sponsors, and consumers to sustain this research and develop it into a recognized disciplinean enterprise. In short, I am interested in their processes of coherence. How and why did these social worlds connect and remain interactive, coherent, and viable across a fairly long time and dramatically changing circumstances, including considerable cultural hostility?

The turn-of-the-century era was one of fundamental changes in the organization of the professions, academia, and the life sciences. In chapter 2 I describe the situations in professional biology, medicine, and agriculture into which the reproductive sciences would soon enter. New approaches to the production of knowledge both in the life sciences and in the institutions in which scientific research increasingly took placeacademiaare framed. I also introduce the birth control, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian movements, all of which helped to counter the illegitimacy of pursuing problems of reproduction in science.

Chapter 3 frames the emergence of the American reproductive sciences, particularly their early emphasis on physiological problemslargely the estrus and menstrual cycles of mammals. The American reproductive sciences gained initial impetus from British initiatives such as the naming of internal secretions as blood-borne messengers paralleling the nervous system and the first monograph of the discipline, Marshall's (1910) The Physiology of Reproduction . Soon distinctively American aspects of the reproductive sciences emerged in embryological work, very much at the heart of early-twentieth-century American biology. Two key sets of experiments on which much subsequent work was based are described in detail: Lillie's freemartin research and Papanicolaou's vaginal smear.

Chapter 4 focuses on the other major social world in the reproductive arena during the formative erathe National Research Council Commit-

tee for Research in Problems of Sex. Supported by Rockefeller funds, this committee was the major funding source of the emergent discipline for several decades. Here reproductive biologists actively seized the means of studying reproduction from sexology. They redirected the mission of the committee from its initial goals of sponsoring social sciencebased human sexuality studies intended to ameliorate social problems to the investigation of biological and biomedical topics in reproduction. And they did so for over twenty years during which much of the foundational biological and medical research on reproduction was accomplished. The key strategy used by reproductive scientists here and elsewhere in their efforts to build a legitimate and autonomous discipline was arguing for basic research on reproductive phenomena.

Chapter 5 describes how between ca. 1925 and 1940 the reproductive sciences coalesced as a line of work focused on a biochemical endocrinological problem structure. I examine how reproductive endocrinology became the "model research" of the enterprise, providing it with much sought after legitimacy through direct links to nascent biochemical approaches in the life sciences and to the widely advertised scientific "promise" of general endocrinology. During this period, international preeminence in the reproductive sciences passed to investigators in the United States. The signal event of this transfer was publication by American researchers of the second "Bible" of the reproductive sciences, Sex and Internal Secretions (Allen, ed., 1932, 1939). The nature of the reproductive sciences enterprise as an active intersection of efforts in biology, medicine, and agriculture is also discussed as are the benefits provided by the new discipline to each profession.

Chapter 6 analyzes reproductive scientists' use of strategic arguments for basic research with a wide variety of birth control advocates from about 1915 to 1963. During this period, a quid pro quo was negotiated between reproductive scientists and birth control advocates. There were major shifts in the kinds of contraceptives birth control advocates sought vis--vis the kinds that reproductive scientists in the United States would actually investigate. Almost all of the key actors in the reproductive arena changed their positions on contraception dramatically during this period. Due to reproductive scientists' strategies in these negotiations, scientific means of eventually won the day. This work paved the way for reproductive scientists to become integral parts of family planning, population control, and infertility research worlds, where they remain today.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the development of the reproductive sciences enterprise was its success at garnering significant amounts of external research funding during the years prior to federal government sponsorship of basic research and despite its taint of social and scientific illegitimacy. In chapter 7 I examine the often surprisingly prestigious fund-

ing sources committed to the quite socially risky business of supporting reproductive research from ca. 1910 to 1963, along with some of the sources of research support that usually remain invisible, such as industrial sponsorship. I also note recent funding patterns.

Chapter 8 could have been titled "One Hundred Years of Illegitimacy." It examines the sustained illegitimacy of the scientific pursuit of reproductive phenomena that has confronted individual researchers and the enterprise as a whole throughout the twentieth century. Here I discuss some of the key causes and particular consequences, along with some scientists' strategies for managing their often compromised positions. Readers to whom the impropriety of the reproductive sciences seems particularly important might want to begin with this chapter.

The final chapter offers a detailed summary of the book and a concluding examination of the themes. At heart, Disciplining Reproduction is about efforts to control lifehuman and nonhumanby rationalizing reproduction. This has been partially, and only partially, accomplished through the shared commitments of multiple worlds and individuals to the production of new knowledge and the consumption of new technoscientific products and interventions.

Continues...

Excerpted from Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the Problems of Sex by Adele E. Clarke Copyright 1998 by Adele E. Clarke. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520207203
• ISBN 13: 9780520207202
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 440