The Mansion of Happiness (7 page)

In
The Eggs of Mammals
, in 1936, the Harvard-trained physiologist
Gregory Pincus (who started out studying rats) offered a history of what happened next in the matter of hunting eggs: “Pfuger, 1863—cat; Schron, 1863—cat and rabbit; Koster, 1868—man; Slawinsky, 1873—man; Wagener, 1879—dog; Van Beneden, 1880—bat; Harz, 1883—mouse, guinea pig, cat; Lange, 1896—mouse; Coert,
1898—rabbit and cat; Amann, 1899—man; Palladino, 1894, 1898—man, bear, dog; Lane-Claypon, 1905, 1907—rabbit; Fellner, 1909—man.”
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The year 1909 is also when the word “ectogenesis” was coined.

By then, chicken and deer and dogs and cats and bats and rats were giving way to mice, largely through the pioneering research and promotional work of a single man,
C. C. Little. Mice are small and cheap and quiet and easy to care for, and they reproduce very quickly; gestation takes only three weeks.
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The first study of the egg of a
mouse was published in 1883. A landmark account of conception, based on the study of mice, was published ten years later.
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Little, born in 1888, began breeding mice as a student at Harvard, just after the rediscovery of the work of
Gregor Mendel, who had deduced what became known as Mendel’s laws of inheritance in the 1850s and ’60s in
an Augustinian monastery in Czechoslovakia.

At Harvard, Little worked under
W. E. Castle at the dawn of the field
called, beginning in 1906, “genetics”; it was Castle who popularized Mendel’s long-forgotten work in the United States. Castle trained Pincus, as well.
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J. A. Long and
E. L. Mark, who also
worked in Castle’s lab and who, in 1911, published
The Maturation of the Egg of the Mouse
, bought their stock of mostly white and brown mice from dealers and fanciers.
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Little wanted to breed his own mice, to save money and to standardize the stock, allowing for more controlled research. In 1920, he launched the
Mouse Club of America;
three years later, he started holding meetings in Maine. In 1929, the year after
Mickey Mouse was first seen in theaters, Little founded the
Jackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, and appeared on the cover of
Time.
(Because of Little’s work, the mouse became the standard laboratory animal and Jackson Laboratory the leading supplier of mice for biomedical research, shipping, by the end of the twentieth century, more than two
million mice annually. A mouse gene was the first gene ever cloned; the mouse genome was the first genome decoded.)
⁴⁷

Still, mice aren’t men. There’s a limit to arguing by homology. Until 1840, no one knew that human females ovulate monthly, the menstrual cycle remained a mystery, and the question of what determines the sex of a human embryo was uncertain. Anatomists in
Germany began collecting the products of miscarriages and
abortions in order to study ovarian, embryonic, and fetal development in humans. In 1890, an American named
Franklin Paine Mall, who had studied in Germany, began teaching at a new university in Worcester, Massachusetts, from which he sent a circular letter to more than half the physicians in the United States:

Mall soon moved from Clark to Johns Hopkins, where he collected specimens from hospitals in Baltimore, a city filled with poor women and in which one out of every three children born out of wedlock died
in infancy. He rarely kept records about the women from whose bodies his specimens came, but his scant notes include stories like this: a twenty-five-year-old woman, childless after four years of marriage, in whose uterus, examined after a
hysterectomy, was found an embryo; a domestic servant who “fell into the hands of an abortionist”; a woman, one month pregnant, who committed suicide by swallowing lye. By 1917, Mall had gathered, into what had become the
Carnegie Human Embryo Collection, more than two thousand embryos.
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Similar collections were made in Europe. All those embryos and fetuses stored in jars made an impression on
J.B.S. Haldane, a Scottish biologist credited with uniting Mendelian genetics with Darwinian
evolution and who happened to be a close friend of
Aldous Huxley’s. It was Haldane who gave Huxley the idea for the Hatchery. In 1923, Haldane delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, a meditation on
“the influence of biology on history.” He imagined a future in which a third of all children would be conceived and incubated in glass jars. Haldane’s lecture, published as
Daedalus; Or, Science and the Future
, contains a fictional history—a very early
science fiction fantasy, a founder of the genre—of the experimental work (including his own) that had led to
ectogenesis:

What actually happened was different. In 1934,
Gregory Pincus claimed to have fertilized a rabbit egg in vitro. “Rabbits Born in Glass: Haldane-Huxley Fantasy Made Real by Harvard Biologists,” the
New York Times
reported. Three years later, Pincus was denied tenure at Harvard; his rabbit experiments had caused something of a scandal. In 1944, Pincus cofounded the
Worcester Foundation
for Experimental Biology, where, in the 1950s, he and his colleagues
Min Chueh Chang and
John Rock developed the oral contraceptive known as the Pill.
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No ectogenetic child was produced in 1951. But in 1952 a young photographer named
Lennart Nilsson did come across three jars containing human embryos, each only
half an inch long, in an anatomy laboratory in the
Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm.

Nilsson, born outside Stockholm in 1923, had always been interested in the mystery of life. “From the time he could toddle about Swedish countryside showed single-minded drive to explore secrets of nature,” one
Life
press release put it. When he was five years old, he fell through the ice on a lake near his home and, when he was pulled out, reported calmly, “There were some very interesting things to see down
there.” When he was twelve, his father gave him a camera. By the time he was fifteen, he was selling his photographs to Swedish magazines. In that lab at the Karolinska, he took pictures of what was in those jars, and in 1953 he brought those pictures to New York, to show them to the editors at
Life.
Encouraged to pursue the work, Nilsson spent seven years in Swedish hospitals and gynecological clinics, taking pictures of dead embryos and fetuses, attempting to
chronicle “the
stages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth,” a project that helped invent the idea of being unborn as a stage of human life, a stage that was never on any board game.
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Pincus’s contraceptive pill was sold beginning in 1960; it went a long
way toward separating sex from reproduction. But separating reproduction from women hadn’t come nearly as far. Haldane had predicted that by 1968 sixty thousand children would be born
ectogenetically in France alone. That prediction was wrong. Nevertheless, a great many people, including the millions of people who saw
Stanley
Kubrick’s 1968 film,
2001
, were thinking about
ectogenesis.

Kubrick was born in New York in 1928. His father, a physician, gave him a camera, and Kubrick, as a very young man, became a photographer for
Look
magazine. He made a series of
films in the 1950s and found box office success in 1960 with
Spartacus
, followed by
Lolita
(1962) and
Dr. Strangelove
(1964).
Strangelove
ends with a nuclear Armageddon: the extinction of all life on earth. The
year
Strangelove
came out, Kubrick decided he wanted to make a science fiction film about outer space, where life might last forever, in another kind of mansion of happiness.

He enlisted the help of science fiction writer
Arthur C. Clarke. The film, Clarke suggested, ought to be based on his 1948 story “The Sentinel,” which is set in 1996, although Kubrick was, for a time, much more interested in a novel of Clarke’s from 1953, called
Childhood’s End.
Clarke liked to imagine men without women, worlds in which generation, if it takes place at all, is the work of men of science, or men of
the future, or aliens who, however inhuman, are, somehow, male. He had the idea that he and Kubrick ought to write a novel together, then write a screenplay from the novel. They began collaborating on the novel, which was to be called
Journey Beyond the Stars
, in April 1964. Clarke was also working at the offices of Time-Life, finishing a book called
Man and Space
for Time-Life Books.
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Kubrick and Clarke consulted with
NASA. They met with
Marvin Minsky at MIT. They talked to
Carl Sagan at Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. They worked with
IBM on HAL, the computer on board their fictional spaceship,
Discovery.
At the time, Kubrick was obsessed with sex, aging, death, and
laboratory mice. He told
Playboy
,
“I understand that at Yale they’ve been engaging in experiments in which the pleasure center of a mouse’s brain has been localized and stimulated by electrodes; the result is that the mouse undergoes an eight-hour orgasm.”
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He met with Robert Ettinger, a physics teacher from Michigan who was interested in freezing the dead. He decided that the
crew on board the
Discovery
would have to travel in cryogenic suspension.

In April 1965, when Nilsson’s photographs of the “Drama of Life Before
Birth” were published in
Life
, Kubrick decided to call his film
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Two months later, an unmanned probe,
Mariner IV
, came within six thousand miles of Mars and sent twenty-two photographs of the planet back to earth. Kubrick contacted
Lloyd’s of London, “to price an insurance
policy against Martians being discovered before the release of his film.” In September,
A Child Is Born
, the book version of Nilsson’s photographs, was published. On October 3, Kubrick decided how
2001
would end: its main character, David Bowman, a crew member on board the
Discovery
, would turn into an infant. Clarke wrote in his diary: “Stanley on phone, worried about ending … gave him my latest ideas, and one of
them suddenly clicked—Bowman will regress to infancy, and we’ll see him at the end as a baby in orbit.” Shooting began in December. An unmanned Russian spacecraft landed on the moon in February 1966. On March 29, 1968, a special screening of
2001
was held for
Life.
The film was released in April and Clarke’s novel in July. Within the year,
Neil Armstrong and
Edwin Aldrin walked on the moon.
⁵⁵

In
2001
, Kubrick and Clarke tell the story of human history; the film is
Pilgrim’s Progress
as told by MIT and
IBM, with extraterrestrials playing the part of
God. It begins with the dawn of man. Apes on an African plain become men not by evolution but by way of aliens, who send to earth a stone slab, a rectangular monolith (“the New Rock,” Clarke calls it in the novel), which makes possible
conceptual leaps, including the use, by primates, of tools—the first
machines. The discovery of a monolith on the moon in the year 1994 leads to another conceptual leap, interstellar travel, resulting in the voyage of the
Discovery
in 2001. Bowman serves as the ship’s captain on a voyage intended to take a hibernating crew past Saturn. After HAL kills the crew, Bowman disconnects the computer and is left alone on the
Discovery.
Orbiting a satellite of Jupiter, he finds another monolith and rides in a space pod to get a closer look. He passes through some sort of star gate, which takes him on a journey past the stars and into a room in an eighteenth-century mansion—it has the look of Versailles—where he eats some blue goo, falls asleep, ages into a very old man, and regresses into a baby and then a fetus.
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As with the rest of the film, which contains very little dialogue, this regression is not explained, but in the novel, Clarke refers to the unborn Bowman as the Star-Child.
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Both the novel and the film close with the Star-Child approaching a blue-green earth. “Down there on that crowded
globe,” Clarke writes, “history
as men knew it would be drawing to a close.”
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The final scene of
2001
is that cover of
Life
magazine: a
Lennart Nilsson–style shot of a fetus, cut out of a woman’s body, floating through space, in an egg.