This week (May 9) in 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid-10, the world’s first commercially produced birth control pill.  This is the very short story of the four very different people who made it happen.

Margaret Sanger was one of 11 children.  Her father was a radical Irishman whose sexual appetite Margaret blamed for the early death of her mother.  Thus did the idea of giving women more reproductive freedom come to Sanger early, and it was certainly reinforced when she moved to New York City and saw so many poor women, saddled with children they could not support, living hopeless, squalid lives.  Sanger became the driving force behind creating a convenient, readily available contraceptive for women.

Katherine McCormick became the financier. A wealthy WASP blue-blood who had married Stanley McCormick — his father founded International Harvester — she became involved with Planned Parenthood, where she met and befriended Sanger. McCormick promised to financially support any research designed to develop an oral contraceptive.

That research was conducted by Gregory “Goody” Pincus, the son of Russian Jews who immigrated to America.  A child genius, he majored in biology at Cornell University before teaching at Harvard, where his research won him worldwide acclaim.  Still, he was denied tenure, both because he was a maverick and because he was a Jew, so Pincus went to Clark University in Massachusetts, where he led a group of independent biochemists doing experimental work in animal reproduction.  Learning of his work, Sanger challenged him to develop an oral contraceptive and McCormick promised him funding.

Pincus believed that he could prevent conception by chemically imitating the hormonal condition that occurs during pregnancy when a woman’s body naturally blocks ovulation, and in lab experiments the work went surprisingly well — so well that Pincus realized he needed to recruit a medical doctor to join the team.  Laboratory research was one thing.  Applying it to real people was another.

Dr. John Rock of Harvard Medical School was to Goody Pincus as night was to day. Tall, charming, handsome, and devoutly Catholic, Rock’s original reproductive goals were the exact opposite of Pincus’s.  A gynecologist, he hoped to cure infertility in women.

But Rock became increasingly flexible on birth control and his real-world applications of Pincus’s laboratory achievements were the final piece of the puzzle.  In tests on poor women in Puerto Rico and Haiti, “the pill,” as it was called, was a total success.

And so, one of the most life-altering phenomenon of the 20^th century was started by two women — one a radical Irish atheist, the other a wealthy Protestant socialite — and two men — one a short, homely, Jewish lab rat, the other a tall, handsome Catholic physician.

Only in America.

Joseph Lister, who was born this week (April 5) in1827, was an amazing physician but a poor salesman.  In 1867 this unknown British doctor, having read an article on microorganisms by the French chemist Louis Pasteur, concluded that the same microorganisms — we call them germs today — caused infections in wounds.  Those infections turned otherwise non-lethal wounds into killers, and it did the same thing to supposedly lifesaving surgical procedures.  That is because, Lister believed, these infectious germs were not only in the patients’ wounds, but abounded in the unsanitary surgical procedures — the bloody gowns, dirty scalpels, unclean towels and dressings — that were part of every surgery in every hospital in Europe.

And so Lister began experimenting with surgical procedures in which his operating rooms, his surgical clothing, and especially his surgical instruments, were “sterilized” through what he called “antisepsis.”  First, if they weren’t already brand new, all surgical outfits, bed sheets, patients’ gowns, towels and washcloths were to be thoroughly washed.  Second, surgical instruments, all dressings, and even the patient’s wounds were to be swabbed with carbolic acid, which Lister had discovered destroyed germs and prevented infections.

As a result, fatalities among Lister’s patients plummeted, but the reaction among his medical colleagues in Europe ranged from skepticism to disbelief, and even though Lister authored paper after paper and gave speech after speech defending his work, he gained few converts.  It was only after many years of undeniable success that Lister’s work grudgingly gained acceptance among the European medical community.

At that point, in 1876, Lister was ready to share his findings with the American medical community, and as it happened, in 1876 the 100-year-old America was hosting its Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, in which one whole section of the exhibition, the Medical Congress, was devoted entirely to the latest medical breakthroughs and procedures.

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Lying about your age got a whole lot harder thanks to the man who was born this week (Dec. 17) in 1908. Willard Libby was a chemist who had worked on the atomic bomb during WW II, but his real claim to fame (relatively speaking) came from his pioneer work in the scientific method of “radiocarbon dating.”  Today we use radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of everything from ancient Egyptian mummies to the Dead Sea Scrolls.  It has proven to be so accurate that it can identify within a few years the ages of objects up to 70,000 years old.

Libby’s forays into radiocarbon dating began at the University of Chicago in 1947, where he conducted experiments on carbon-14, the carbon isotope on which radiocarbon dating is based.  Libby’s experiments were predicated on several known facts, beginning with the fact that carbon-14 is produced when nitrogen is bombarded by cosmic rays in the atmosphere.  It then falls to Earth where it becomes carbon dioxide, which — as we know from our high school biology days — is then absorbed by plants through “photosynthesis.”  From there, carbon spreads to the animals, such as humans, that eat the plants, and to the other animals (humans included) that eat the animals that eat the plants.

The point, as Libby surmised, is that everything containing carbon, including living organisms, also contains various levels of carbon-14. Or to put it another way, we are all slightly radioactive.  What’s more, when an organism dies it stops absorbing carbon-14, and instead starts losing it as part of the decaying process.  Because carbon-14 decays at a predictable rate — one-half of the original amount disintegrates every 5,700 years — Libby concluded that if there was a way to measure how much carbon-14 had been lost, and how much was left in an organism, then one could accurately predict how old that organism was.  Using a sophisticated Geiger counter to measure carbon-14 amounts, and a sophisticated scientific formula that is too complicated for me to understand, let alone explain, Libby then tested his radioactive carbon dating method against pieces of wood (once part of a living tree) from an Egyptian tomb whose age was already known.  They matched, and radiocarbon dating would subsequently revolutionize such fields as archeology, anthropology and geology.  It would also, not surprisingly, spark new debates over religion.

One of those unknown “Men of Science” whose work has profoundly affected modern life and human understanding, Libby received the 1960 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.  He died quietly in 1980, and ironically — or perhaps intentionally — Libby ensured that scientists from 70,000 years in the future would never be able to determine his age. He was cremated and his ashes scattered.