The stork and the syringe: a political history of reproductive medicine

and approaching its definitive links with genetic studies, especially through studies of bacteriophage. The famous "green paper" by Timofeeff-Ressovsky, Zimmer and Delbruck was published in 1933; Schlesinger pointed to the resemblance in chemical composition of phage and of chromosomes, carriers of genetic information, three years later; the Wollmans in Paris made pioneering contributions to the study of lysogeny on the eve of their obliteration in the holocaust. On home ground, Bawden and Pirie, with Bernal and Fankuchen, published their paper on the liquid-crystalline nucleoproteins of tobacco mosaic virus in 1936. Phage work itself, which was to lead to the linking of studies on viruses with work on the genetic code and the tremendous advances of molecular biology after Twort's death, was getting under way during the war, even as the bombs fell on the Brown. Thus it seems that Twort's early and obstinate decision to work alone, not to join in "team work" of any kind, gave him an exaggeratedly blinkered outlook. He doggedly adhered to a research style which had become moribund, and refused to move beyond its turn-of-century origins with conventional microscopes and conventional culture media in Petri dishes and test tubes. Not for him electron microscopes, ultra-centrifuges, or cultures on chorio-allantoic egg membranes; and perhaps no attempts to integrate the important results of others into his own thought processes and plans for future research. Perhaps, as his son suggests, his obstinate exclusivity, his insistence on being a scientific loner, was to some extent a result of his early life and upbringing as the eldest son in a family of eleven children of a Freemason general practitioner with rigid and uncompromising views on child rearing and education. We shall never know; but the story of F. W. Twort's early promise, with notable achievements withering into a catalogue of public controversies and thwarted hopes is ultimately a sad one. His son tells it objectively, warts and all. Among a preponderance of family photographs in the illustrations, there are glimpses of the early bacteriology laboratory at the London, with Twort and his then chief, William Bulloch; and also the laboratories at the Brown, with Twort at the microscope, and he and his assistant, later wife, busily at work at the Bunsen burner. The sad photographs of the ruined Brown in 1944, and of Twort in final retirement at home, all show him with a cigarette clamped in his mouth. The …