from The New York Times Magazine, 28 December 2003
(part of the year-end "The Lives They Lived" annual issue)
Second Best
by Robin Marantz Henig
Landrum Shettles wanted to create the world’s first test tube baby, because he knew there was no glory in being second.
For most of his career as a gynecologist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, he worked out the details of in vitro fertilization (IVF), tirelessly mixing egg and sperm in Petri dishes and growing them into eight- or sixteen-celled embryos. IVF has led to the birth of more than one million babies worldwide, but back in mid-century only scientific cowboys were working on it – and for a time it looked like Landrum Shettles was the star of the posse.
In the 1950s, while most of his colleagues were still studying animals, Shettles moved on to human eggs, successfully fertilizing them in his lab again and again. In the 1960s, a decade before anyone else, he claimed to have transferred one of those fertilized eggs into the uterus of a woman who was scheduled to have a hysterectomy. When the uterus was removed two days later, Shettles said, the embryo had implanted, demonstrating that human IVF was possible.
In 1973, he got even bolder. In a cross-town collaboration with William Sweeney of New York Hospital, Shettles tried to perform IVF on an infertile couple from Florida. The wife, Doris Del-Zio, was a patient of Sweeney’s, and desperate to have a baby with her second husband, John. “They can put a man on the moon,” she complained; “isn’t there some way scientists can figure out how to help me have a child?”
Shettles was probably the only man in New York with the passion, the experience, and the nerve to make a test tube baby for Doris. Others might have thought twice about trying an unproven tecnique that at the time was thought capable of causing bizarre genetic mutations. But second thoughts had no place in Shettles’ vision, which was always focused on a clear, unambiguous goal.
He was already famous for the “Shettles method” of sex selection, which he described in Your Baby’s Sex: Now You Can Choose (still in print after 33 years). Shettles wrote that couples could increase their odds of having either a boy or a girl by taking a few simple steps. If they wanted a boy, for instance, he told them to abstain until the day of ovulation, douche with baking powder, use a rear-entry position for intercourse, and stop wearing jockey shorts.
“Actually, this is not even a new idea,” Shettles told a colleague. “A check of the Talmud shows awareness of the influence of timing and female orgasm on the sex of the offspring.”
Such pop advice disturbed many of Shettles’ colleagues. His personal life disturbed them, too. A bald man with a thick Mississippi accent and the skittish manner of a shore bird, Shettles had a wife and seven children living on Claremont Avenue on the Upper West Side. But he almost never went home; he told his children that he needed to be closer to his work, living and breathing it, enveloped by it. A fold-out cot in his office in Washington Heights shared space with a collection of wall clocks all set to different times, a teetering mountain of papers, and a huge fish tank that glowed a perpetual blue. Shettles was so often seen scurrying down the hallways of Presbyterian Hospital in the middle of the night, his moonish face almost as pale as the white coat that flapped about him, that he became known as The Ghost of the Harkness Pavilion.
Shettles and Sweeney told no one about their planned IVF – possibly because they knew it would never get through their respective human experimentation committees. On September 12, 1973, Sweeney extracted some eggs from Doris at New York Hospital on East 68th Street, and sent them across town in a taxi with John. Once at Presbyterian, John provided a sperm sample (using a collection technique decorously known as “manual”) and handed it, along with Doris’ eggs, to Shettles, who was waiting in the lobby. Shettles took the elevator to a borrowed lab, where he mixed the sex cells in a clean test tube and placed the specimen in an incubator. Then, in his rapid, excited twitter, he proceeded to tell everyone he met that he was brewing a test tube baby up on the sixteenth floor, and that in four days it would be transferred back into Doris Del-Zio, recovering on the Upper East Side.
With all the bragging, the news soon got back to Shettles’ boss, Raymond Vande Wiele, who had never really gotten along with the quirky gynecologist. (The year before, Vande Wiele had taken the unusual step of issuing a press release that disavowed in advance anything Shettles might have to say on the subject of sex selection.) Vande Wiele was furious. In his view, the experiment was grossly premature: IVF was difficult enough to do in mice and rabbits, he thought, and it was dangerous to try it yet in humans, even though a research team in England was already doing so. The chairman ordered the test tube, which contained what looked like a chocolate milkshake, brought to his office. He removed the stopper and contaminated it , effectively killing the experiment.
The Del-Zios sued. Because of the vagaries of the court system, the case did not come to trial until the summer of 1978 – the same week, providentially, that Louise Brown was born in England, ending the race for the world’s first test tube baby. If Shettles and Sweeney had been allowed to proceed, the plaintiffs said, the “baby of the century” could have been American, and could have been living happily in Ft. Lauderdale, getting ready for kindergarten.
Shettles was not named in the lawsuit, but everything about him – his competence, his ethics, his record-keeping, his kookiness – became the focus of the trial. The Del-Zios won, though the verdict sent an oddly mixed message. The couple had sued for $1.5 million, but the jury awarded only $50,000 to Doris for her pain and suffering – and to John, for loss of his wife’s companionship, $3.
The IVF fiasco cost Shettles his job, his reputation, and above all his dream of being first. He spent the next 30 years trying to undo the damage. After he was fired from Columbia, he accepted a job at a small hospital, Gifford Memorial in Vermont, so he could continue his research. But while there, he engaged in some passionate letter-writing on a quest for a more congenial setting for his experiments, which the administrators at Gifford didn’t like any more than Vande Wiele had. In 1981, he was hired by an obscure foundation to open a clinic in Las Vegas to conduct human cloning. But the timing was wrong: by now Shettles was in his mid-70s and too far out of the scientific loop. He told his children he always regretted the missed opportunity; he would have liked, he said, to have been able to clone Muhammad Ali.
Even in old age, Shettles could usually be counted on for a colorful quote. In 1995, the movie “Junior” was released, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a man who gave birth to a baby, and Shettles was called for a comment. “I think a male pregnancy is not inconceivable,” he told a reporter from the Tampa Tribune, “and I don’t see why it wouldn’t suceed.” He said he had already picked out the abdominal tissue, a fatty sac hanging just in front of the intestines, as the best place fo a male pregnancy to proceed.
From his office in Nevada, and later from a nursing home in Florida, Shettles wrote letters to all the prominent scientists he had ever run across, revisiting the events of September 1973 and staking a claim on many of the early developments in the field. Copies of his correspondence, which he kept in overstuffed scrapbooks until the day he died at the age of 93, were peppered with Shettles’ scrawled complaints about Vande Wiele and others he thought had done him wrong. Along with the letters, he kept dozens of xeroxes of his favorite quote, which he handed out to acquaintances like slips from a fortune cookie. It was from the Spanish neuropathologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906. “To be right before the right time is heresy,” Cajal wrote, “sometimes to be paid for with martyrdom.”