User:LudaDzyuba/Miriam Menkin

Miriam Friedman Menkin (August 8, 1901- June 8, 1992), was an American scientist and researcher who was most famous for her in vitro fertilization research with John Rock.

Early life and Career
Miriam Menkin was born on August 8th, 1901 in Riga, Latvia. When she was two her family relocated to the United States. Her father was a successful doctor in New York City, allowing her family to live securely and comfortably. In 1922, Menkin graduated from Cornell University with an undergraduate degree in histology and comparative anatomy. She attended Columbia University for her graduate program and earned a master's degree in genetics only one year after she graduated from Cornell. She taught biology and physiology for a short period while setting her sights on medical school. However, women were rarely admitted to medical school at the time and she was not accepted. Miriam married Valy Menkin, a Harvard medical student in 1924. She intended to earn a Ph.D. in biology, but she needed to provide financial support while her husband finished medical school and completed his residency. Thus, she obtained a second undergraduate degree in secretarial studies from Simmons College. Menkin ended up finishing the Harvard Ph.D. requirements two separate times, but did not receive a degree because she could not afford the course fees. Miriam and Valy Menkin had to children: a son named Gabriel and a daughter named Lucy.

After working a few years as a secretary and technician, Menkin served as a pathology research fellow at Harvard Medical School from 1930 to 1935. She was then offered a job as a laboratory technician for Gregory Pincus at Harvard. While working for Pincus, Menkin was tasked with preparing extracts designed to superovulate rabbits in Pincus' quest to create "fatherless" rabbits. The results of this experiment were viewed negatvely by the public so Pincus lost his tenure at Harvard in 1937, leaving Menkin without a job. She worked in the state laboratories of Massachusetts for a year and then in 1938, applied for a research position with John Rock, a well known fertility doctor at the Free Hospital for Women (now part of Brigham and Women's Hospital) in Boston. Pincus' rabbit experiments had been a factor in Rock's decision to start IVF research, and Menkin's vital role in those experiments caught Rock's eye. Rock soon hired Menkin and they set out to determine the exact time ovulation would occur. Rock had come up with the idea but had not made any meaningful progress in laboratory research before hiring Menkin. Since Menkin was extremely skilled and comfortable in the laboratory, and Rock did not have an advanced understanding of the technical aspects of egg fertilization, she oversaw all the laboratory work.

IVF research and discovery (1938-1944)
Menkin began the in vitro fertilization experiments in March of 1938. The research took place at the Free Hospital for Women. Rock and Menkin requested that the women participating in the study, who were scheduled to undergo hysterectomies, have unprotected sex prior to the surgery. They elected to carry out the surgical procedures just before the patient would ovulate, which gave them many suitable ova for the study. Over the course of the study, Menkin followed a fairly steady weekly schedule: find eggs on Tuesday, add sperm on Wednesday, pray on Thursday, and observe the outcome using a microscope on Friday. Menkin called herself the 'egg chaser' because she would take the ovarian tissue from an surgical operation in the basement and run up three flights of stairs to the lab to look for eggs. When she found eggs, she would try to fertilize them with the 'left over' sperm from husbands of couples that had tried using artificial insemination hoping to conceive. This same process went on for 6 years. Menkin never stopped working, only taking a break after she had her second child. She made variations to the procedure every so often, altering the conditions the eggs were kept in and the length and concentration of the sperm samples. Menkin would find the unfertilized eggs in the ovaries that Rock removed from patients, put the eggs in the solution, and then culture them before adding sperm. In the first 6 years of the study, Menkin tried many different strategies but did not achieve IVF. On February 3, 1944, she obtained an egg from a woman whose cervix and uterus prolapsed following the birth of four children. Menkin's standard protocol was to wash the sperm sample 3 times in solution and let the egg and sperm interact for 30 minutes. However, she had stayed up with her newborn daughter the night before, and on that day she mistakenly washed the sperm sample only once, used a more concentrated sample, and allowed one hour of interaction. The following Friday morning (February 6, 1944), Menkin found that cell cleavage had begun, which indicated that a fertilized egg had formed. After letting the sperm and the egg interact for a longer amount of time in the petri dish, longer than previously, she witnessed astonishing results of fertilization outside the body. She had finally achieved her goal and she was ecstatic. She reached out to other offices and laboratories to share the good news, and soon thereafter, everyone was in her lab arguing about how to best preserve the egg. Menkin neglected to take an immediate photograph of the discovery, so when the group finally decided on a preservation procedure developed by Chester Heuser of the Carnegie Institution and Menkin looked through the microscope, the egg was not there. Initially, she was distraught, but John Rock assured her she could do it again. Not long after, she was able to fertilize and photograph three more eggs, involving all three factors that she had altered before the original discovery. Rock and Menkin achieved two and three cell development in their successful fertilizations. After the additional eggs were fertilized successfully, Rock and Menkin elected to publish their work in a brief report. Rock insisted her name be published as lead author on their report so she could get the credit she deserved. Science magazine published their findings in the article “In Vitro Fertilization and Cleavage of Human Ovarian Eggs" on August 4, 1944. The Associated Press, The New York Times, and Time magazine ran accounts of the discovery in the following days.

Public reaction to the discovery
In contrast to the public reactions to Gregory Pincus' rabbit experiments, Rock and Menkin's discovery was largely viewed by the public as a positive breakthrough that would help infertile couples have children. However, some critics saw it as playing God and interfering with the laws of nature, and because Rock and Menkin did not create a physical baby, others questioned if they had even achieved in vitro fertilization at all. One notable critic who believed Menkin and Rock never got in vitro fertilization was zoologist Carl Hartman. For years, fellow scientists and researchers doubted Rock and Menkin's research.

Rock and Menkin did not attempt to transfer their fertilized eggs into a woman's body because it was not the goal of their study. The difficult task of transforming a multi-cell fertilized egg, like the one Menkin and Rock created, into an embryo that could grow inside a woman's uterus was not successful until the birth of Louise Brown in 1978.

Later Years
At the time Science ran the article, Valy had recently been fired by Harvard and the Menkins were forced to relocate to North Carolina. Menkin was able to stay in touch with Rock and work on additional publications. The full report of the discovery, in which Menkin was listed as the lead author, was finally published in 1948 with the title, "In Vitro Fertilization and Cleavage of Human Ovarian Eggs," in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. In the years before this, Menkin sought to continue IVF research on her own, but her opportunities were limited since she was unpaid.

Menkin divorced her husband in 1949. Supporting and caring for her daughter, Lucy, who had epilepsy, further limited her opportunities to do laboratory research. In 1950, she returned to Boston to enroll Lucy in a special school and accepted an offer to return to Rock's laboratory. IVF research had ceased in Rock's lab after Menkin departed, as he had been unable to find another scientist with the technical skills to continue Menkin's work. She attempted to revitalize it when she returned, but by that time Rock had shifted his primary focus to research on the birth control pill and Menkin was only able to work on IVF for a short time. She was initially upset and placed blame on the Catholic Church and Harvard. However, she continued to work in Rock's lab, assisting him with his research and publications on contraception, but never received another opportunity to pursue IVF. Menkin died on June 8, 1992 in Boston, Massachusetts.