She changed the course of human fertility.
In March of 1944, this Latvian-born scientist was the first person to successfully fertilize an egg in vitro – the first to conceive human life outside the body. Miriam Friedman Menkin went on to author or co-author 18 scientific papers, and yet few today know her name nor of her legacy.
At the time of her achievement, Menkin was a technician/assistant for Harvard fertility expert John Rock. Fertilizing an egg outside the human body was the first step in Rock’s plan to cure infertility, in particular women who had healthy ovaries but damaged Fallopian tubes. In one night at the Free Hospital for Women in Brookline, Mass – where Menkin inadvertently gave a flock of sperm more time to fertilize an egg –she ushered in a whole new era of reproductive technology, known around the world as IVF.
Menkin emigrated as a toddler to the United States, where her father became a successful doctor. She graduated from Cornell University with an undergraduate degree in histology and comparative anatomy, then did graduate work at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in genetics only one year after graduating from Cornell. She taught biology and physiology for a while and aspired to medical school, but was not accepted, largely due to her gender. Her marriage to Valy Menkin (and the birth of two children) took her way off track – she even obtained a secretarial studies degree to help him through medical school. She eventually completed the requirements for a Harvard PhD in biology (twice) but failed to obtain the degree because the course fees were too high.
In the 1930s, while assisting her husband in his own lab, Menkin met Gregory Pinkus, the Harvard biologist who with Rock would later co-develop the contraceptive pill. Pinkus was known for creating “fatherless rabbits” in a petri dish. She assisted him for a while before he was denied tenure, lost his position and returned to England. Shortly afterwards Menkin joined Rock in his IVF research. Rock didn’t really understand egg fertilization, so she was hired to oversee all of the laboratory work. It was a perfect match; she was smart and tenacious and he was brilliant and intuitive. She began her IVF experiments in March of 1938.
Following her initial success of 1944 and several more that followed, Menkin was poised to continue the work with ever-increasing cell development. But then her husband lost his job and she followed him to Duke University in North Carolina, where fertilizing an egg outside the human body was considered not just scandalous, but sacrilegious. Without Menkin’s skills, IVF research in Boston stopped, although she and Rock continued to collaborate and publish remotely.
A divorce in 1949 posed further challenges. A single mother of a daughter with epilepsy, she returned to Boston the following year to enroll Lucy in a special school and accepted an offer to return to Rock’s laboratory, where his focus had shifted to the birth control pill. She assisted him with his research and publications on contraception, but never received another opportunity to pursue IVF.
