American Experience

Test Tube Babies (19x16)

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For ages, the prospect of conceiving a human being in a laboratory seemed ripped from the pages of science fiction. Then, in 1978, everything changed. Test Tube Babies, from filmmakers Chana Gazit and Hilary Klotz Steinman. This one-hour documentary tells the story of doctors, researchers, and hopeful couples who pushed the limits of science and triggered a technological revolution in human reproduction. In so doing, they landed at the center of a controversy whose reverberations continue to this day. When the first human egg was fertilized in a lab in 1944, the news spread like wildfire; the press quickly coined the term “test tube baby.” Many Americans were horrified. But for decades after the early scientific advance there was little real progress; researchers could not keep the fertilized eggs alive. Moreover, their efforts were entangled in a national moral debate. Despite the controversy, one maverick scientist at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital refused to give up his pursuit. The determined researcher, Dr. Landrum Shettles, was relentless in his experimentation, and in 1973 agreed to help a couple from Florida who had exhausted all other fertility treatments. John and Doris Del-Zio arrived in New York ready and willing to be the first couple to conceive a baby outside the mother’s body. But what the Del-Zios considered a private decision placed them squarely in the middle of an emotionally charged debate and a very public lawsuit against Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Under intense scrutiny and tremendous pressure not to cross the line into human experimentation, hospital administrators stopped the Del-Zios’ procedure and fired Shettles. The issue was further complicated in 1973 by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which inextricably tied IVF research to the question of when life begins. In Washington, lawmakers placed a moratorium on federal funding for IVF research, bringing progress in America to a standstill. Meanw