Mary Manken: The Female Scientist Who Changed Human Reproductive Fertility

In scientific discovery textbooks, the researcher spends the night alone in his laboratory doing research. Suddenly there is a window of the mind, an apple falls on the head, a lightning strikes, a poisonous petri dish appears. And then there's Eureka! But Mary Mencon's story is slightly different. One Tuesday night in February 1944, a 43-year-old lab technician stayed up all night for his eight-month-old daughter. She calls it a "living tissue sample" because her daughter's teeth were just starting to come out.
The next morning, like every week for the past six years, Mankin went to his lab. It was Wednesday when he poured a freshly washed egg into a solution of sperm in a glass and prayed that the two would become one.  As a technician for John Rock, a fertility expert at Harvard, Mankin's goal was to make the egg fertile outside the human body. This was the first step in Rock's project to treat infertility.
Infertility has always been a mystery to doctors. John Rock especially wanted to help women whose uterus was healthy but had an ovarian defect because he had seen in clinical infertility cases that one in five women had this defect. was present.  Mankins usually kept sperm and eggs together for 30 minutes. But that did not happen that day. Years later, he told a reporter what had happened. He said: "I was so tired and sleepy watching the game of sperm with the egg under the microscope that I forgot to look at the clock and when I suddenly looked at the clock, an hour had passed. In other words, I can say that my success after almost six years of failure is due to a nap at work rather than a mental window opening.
When she arrived at the lab on Friday, she saw a miracle. The cells had melted and were dividing and they saw the first glimpse of the fertilization of human sperm in a glass.  Menken's achievements ushered in a new era for reproductive technology. The beginning of an era in which infertile women began to conceive, babies began to be placed in test tubes, and scientists began to look at the very early stages of human life. In 1978, the world saw the first tube-born baby named Louis Brown, who was born with IVF, meaning in vitro fertilization. IVF soon became a big business. In 2017, there were 284,385 attempts to have children through IVF in the United States, which resulted in 78,052 children like Brown.
However, the way he told his story, Manken's success was not a coincidence. Like the other great moments of discovery, there was years of research, hard work, and the perseverance of repeating the same experience over and over again.  He then co-authored 18 research papers, including two historical reports in the journal Science on his first success. But unlike his co-author Rock, his name did not go unnoticed. History does not agree with Manken's role. They have been described in many ways. Sometimes she was called a technician, sometimes a research assistant, sometimes a biologist, sometimes Dr. Mankin, sometimes Miss. In a way, they are all right. Theresa Woodruff, head of reproductive science at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and a professor of maternal and child health, said she was more than just a rock assistant. "I think they should be considered John Rock partners and peers," Woodruff said. She was not just a helping hand or a technician, as people say, but an intellectual who did her job. Rutgers University historian Margaret Marsh agrees. "Rock was basically a clinicist," she says of Mankin, "she was a scientist with a scientific mind and a true scientist who believed in the importance of scientific protocol." 
While writing Rock's autobiography, published in 2008, Marsh found the story of Manken. He co-authored a book, Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution, with Wanda Runner.
But looking back, she regrets that she only described Mankin as a research assistant (much credit goes to Mankin in Marsh and Runner's latest book, The Pursuit of Parenthood). Is). "If I were to reconsider, I would say she was scientifically minded," she says. She was not the only one who obeyed.
One day in 1900, an egg met a sperm and they met. These two countries were divided into two cells, then into four and then into eight cells. And nine months later, on August 8, 1901, Mary Friedman was born in Riga, Latvia. While she was still walking, her family emigrated to the United States, where her father earned so much money as a doctor that he spent his childhood in comfort, where he worked as a housemaid. She later recalls how she was amazed to hear stories that science would soon find a cure for diabetes. He made a promising start to his scientific career, graduating from Cornell University in 1922 with a degree in histology and comparative genetics, and the following year with a master's degree in genetics from Columbia University, while teaching biology and physiology for a short time in New York. ۔

But when he decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enter medical school, he encountered the first obstacle. He was rejected by two of the country's top medical schools. "I don't know why," she recalls. I think the main reason was my personality.  In fact, it was because of their gender. At that time no medical school accepted women and what they did was strictly enforced quotas. In 1917, a dean said that Cornell called for a ban on girls so that his school would not have too many female candidates.

To protect it, she kept dripping liquid into the container. For hours late at night, she ate sandwiches with one hand, worked with eggs, and dripped liquids with the other.  She sadly recalls that the first egg slipped out of her hands, which was "the first abortion in a test tube." But they did it three more times and developed a two-stemmed zygote with a two-celled zygote. They tied him to a glass with red and blue tape and sent him to the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore. Mencan said he was "a model of our pride and our joy" because he "proved without a doubt that we had eggs." By the time they got there, Rock and Mankin had received letters from hundreds of infertile women who had asked them if science could cure them.  Menkin was now ready to become a reproductive scientist who would take fertility further. Then they planned to fertilize an egg with four cells, then eight and then who knows how many?    But then something happened that neither he nor Rock had thought of. Her husband lost his job. As a wife and mother of a child, she moved with him to Duke University in North Carolina, where IVF was seen as a scandal, and a doctor called it a "rape in vitro" test tube. Said to rap.

Without Mancin's expertise, IVF research in Boston stalled. Since then, no rock assistant has been able to fertilize a single egg in the tube.  Talking to school children, he expressed surprise at the process of mixing sperm and ovum in the tube: 'When you think about how small this ovum is and when it is free from its follicle Happens and then falls into relatively turbulent physical activity so don't you wonder if he doesn't lose? How does this little thing find a place to go?   In the case of the ovum, the body of the female undergoes remarkable changes and carries it forward. The part of the web of fingers that joins at the end of the fallopian tube hardens, fills with blood, and pulls the egg into the tube, where the tiny fur called the cilia pull the egg further in. They even take it to the ovary.  In Mankin's case, two things led him to research fertility. One is their constant devotion and then a little bit of luck.  Her husband's job took her from place to place, but she continued to look for opportunities to pursue eggs and labs. He knocked on the doors of well-known researchers working on reproduction and asked to write his introduction to Rock.  A professor of history at Northeastern University who has written about Mancin's services in reproductive science says: "It could have been done by someone who was so passionate about going into a lab and saying, 'Oh, John Rock Worked with. Will I have a chance in the lab? It requires a lot of confidence and a strong desire to work, if not boldness.  But in 1945, Mankin wrote to Rock from North Carolina that "opportunities to work on the egg here are still discouraging." Even without the lab, however, she continued to collaborate with Rock from afar. In 1948, the two wrote a joint research paper on their first success in IVF, which was published in the journal Science, with Mencon as the first author.

But she soon encountered some difficulties with her research in the field of IVF. She prevented a divorce from Valley, who tortured her in front of her children, Lucy and Gabriel, and stopped paying her Had done In a September 1948 letter, he wrote: "I think it will be very traumatic, and it will be very difficult for Gabriel in particular to bear the stigma of divorce."  But when her husband's behavior worsened, she decided to divorce. "I don't want to commit suicide so slowly," he wrote the following month. He approached a lawyer, filed for divorce and obtained permission to keep Lucy in his custody.  As a single mother, she had difficulty meeting all her needs. Lucy, who had epilepsy and was always ill, had to be taken to a psychiatrist and doctors. When Mankin was allowed to use the lab for free on holiday nights, it became impossible for him to do so.  In the early 1950's, Mankin returned to Boston to enroll Lucy in a special children's school. After that she started working in the lab with Rock again but a lot has changed in this decade. At that time, reproductive work was not to produce more babies in the tube, but to prevent more babies from being born.  Rock and his lab's main mission now was to promote easy contraception. This was the work that led to the historic approval of birth control pills in 1960.

Other institutions, including Harvard, only accept female students during wartime. The first women's class at Harvard began in 1945.  Marie Walsh writes in her book, Doctors Wanted: No Woman's Need to Apply, that in a college debate on the 'women's question', a faculty member said that letting female students come means that women's primary job is to have children and their It would be a violation of the basic biological law of Prosh.  Instead, she married Willie Manken, a medical student at Harvard. Mary Manken worked as an assistant to her husband during his education until she received another degree in Secretarial Studies from Simmons College.  Taking advantage of her closeness to education, she completed courses in bacteriology and embryology and also helped her husband in the lab. There he met Harvard biologist Gregory Punks, who later worked with Rock to develop contraceptive pills.

Pincus became infamous as a Frankenstein scientist because he made a fatherless rabbit that was fertilized in a cage and grew up healthy and jumping. They assigned the mankin to extract two key hormones from the pituitary gland, which he had to insert into the female rabbit's uterus to produce extra eggs.  Manken did it skillfully, but he had to stay in the lab for a short time. In 1937, Pincus' tenure was not extended and he returned to England, possibly leading to Mankin's job.  John Rock soon emerged on the horizon as a fertility specialist who wanted to take research into the animal of the pincus into clinical research. In an unsigned editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, she wrote: "What a blessing a closed tube can be for a barren woman."  Mankin applied for a job in his lab, which was approved. "She was smart, strong and hardworking and fit for rock work," Marsh said. "He was an intelligent, shrewd, answer-seeker, but he had no patience for the lab's endeavors," Rock wrote.

Luckily, her frustration with the rock lab led to Mary's success.

Every Tuesday morning at eight o'clock, Mankin would gather outside the operating room in the basement of a free charity hospital for low-income women in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. She recalls that luckily one day Rock would give her a small piece of an ovary that would be the equivalent of a small hazel nut or a gun. She would take him up the stairs to the fourth floor and run to her lab. There she would open it and look for the precious eggs in it.  This was not an easy task. Although it is the largest cell in the body, the human egg is still smaller than the one point we apply to a letter. Most people need a microscope or magnifying glass to see them and yet they only have a deeper perspective.  For Mankin, it was a universe. She would identify the egg with her own eyes and tell him just by looking at it that it was bad or normal. She proudly calls herself Rock's 'egg chaser'.

One after the other, that is, every week, Mankin continued to follow the same routine. Go for ovulation on Tuesdays, mix them with sperm on Wednesdays, pray on Thursdays and look into a microscope on Fridays. Every Friday, when they look in the incubator, they find a single-celled non-fertilized egg, along with clusters of dead sperm. He repeated this process 138 times in six years.  Even on this lucky day in 1944, when they opened the door of the incubator, they cried out for rock. Talking to the school children, he later said, "Even that day, as usual, they were trying to get a real baby for a mother at a hospital on the other side of town." "We called them ... When they saw what was in the box, they turned white like a ghost.  The lab was full of spectators because 'everyone ran to see the youngest human child. Manken did not let the egg disappear from his sight. She wrote in a draft for one of her talks that she was "afraid to let go of this precious thing that was the interpretation of a six-year-old unfulfilled dream."   To protect it, she kept dripping liquid into the container. For hours late at night, she ate sandwiches with one hand, worked with eggs, and dripped liquids with the other.  She sadly recalls that the first egg slipped out of her hands, which was "the first abortion in a test tube." But they did it three more times and developed a two-stemmed zygote with a two-celled zygote. They tied him to a glass with red and blue tape and sent him to the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore. Mencan said he was "a model of our pride and our joy" because he "proved without a doubt that we had eggs." By the time they got there, Rock and Mankin had received letters from hundreds of infertile women who had asked them if science could cure them.  Menkin was now ready to become a reproductive scientist who would take fertility further. Then they planned to fertilize an egg with four cells, then eight and then who knows how many?   But then something happened that neither he nor Rock had thought of. Her husband lost his job. As a wife and mother of a child, she moved with him to Duke University in North Carolina, where IVF was seen as a scandal, and a doctor called it a "rape in vitro" test tube. Said to rap.   Without Mancin's expertise, IVF research in Boston stalled. Since then, no rock assistant has been able to fertilize a single egg in the tube.  Talking to school children, he expressed surprise at the process of mixing sperm and ovum in the tube: 'When you think about how small this ovum is and when it is free from its follicle Happens and then falls into relatively turbulent physical activity so don't you wonder if he doesn't lose? How does this little thing find a place to go? '

In the case of the ovum, the body of the female undergoes remarkable changes and carries it forward. The part of the web of fingers that joins at the end of the fallopian tube hardens, fills with blood, and pulls the egg into the tube, where the tiny fur called the cilia pull the egg further in. They even take it to the ovary.  In Mankin's case, two things led him to research fertility. One is their constant devotion and then a little bit of luck.  Her husband's job took her from place to place, but she continued to look for opportunities to pursue eggs and labs. He knocked on the doors of well-known researchers working on reproduction and asked to write his introduction to Rock.  A professor of history at Northeastern University who has written about Mancin's services in reproductive science says: "It could have been done by someone who was so passionate about going into a lab and saying, 'Oh, John Rock Worked with. Will I have a chance in the lab? It requires a lot of confidence and a strong desire to work, if not boldness.  But in 1945, Mankin wrote to Rock from North Carolina that "opportunities to work on the egg here are still discouraging." Even without the lab, however, she continued to collaborate with Rock from afar. In 1948, the two wrote a joint research paper on their first success in IVF, which was published in the journal Science, with Mencon as the first author.  But she soon encountered some difficulties with her research in the field of IVF. She prevented a divorce from Valley, who tortured her in front of her children, Lucy and Gabriel, and stopped paying her had done In a September 1948 letter, he wrote: "I think it will be very traumatic, and it will be very difficult for Gabriel in particular to bear the stigma of divorce."  But when her husband's behavior worsened, she decided to divorce. "I don't want to commit suicide so slowly," he wrote the following month. He approached a lawyer, filed for divorce and obtained permission to keep Lucy in his custody.  As a single mother, she had difficulty meeting all her needs. Lucy, who had epilepsy and was always ill, had to be taken to a psychiatrist and doctors. When Mankin was allowed to use the lab for free on holiday nights, it became impossible for him to do so.

In the early 1950's, Mankin returned to Boston to enroll Lucy in a special children's school. After that she started working in the lab with Rock again but a lot has changed in this decade. At that time, reproductive work was not to produce more babies in the tube, but to prevent more babies from being born.  Rock and his lab's main mission now was to promote easy contraception. This was the work that led to the historic approval of birth control pills in 1960.  As the Rocks approached their ultimate goal, Mary was working behind the scenes as their 'Literary Assistant'. She explored research topics ranging from the freezing of Japanese sperm to infertility in horses. (In response to one of his questions, he wrote: 'Dear fun, in the midst of the world's troubles, I'm glad you're interested in the infertility of horses!') The research paper was written on the topic of whether women's menstruation can be stabilized by light and whether a warming jackstrap can temporarily keep men infertile.

Although his subsequent dissertations were far from his original goal, Mankin was ultimately collaborating for him. Like rock, they explored the mysteries of reproduction and added to the knowledge of science. She also cared about 'infertile women' and was proud of her contribution to the technology that would one day help such women become mothers.  But he was not personally interested in using IVF. "I never do it because I don't think its right to do that," he told reporters. You risk too much ... You can make a monster.  More than that, he was interested in solving the riddles of fertilization outside the womb. In vitro work was an opportunity for him to be represented in a wide range of scientific projects, but the completion of this career derailed.  It's hard to imagine what Mary Manken would have done if her life had been different, if she hadn't married Wally or if she had a doctorate. It can only be said that their commitment and circumstances forced them into a special box.

Even at the height of her scientific career, she was described as a new mother with a missing mind who found success. But to see him as a scientist of his own, one must look at his careful notes, strict protocols, and his well-researched bibliography.  Of course, she was not just a slave to anyone's orders.

With thanks BBC Urdu