Min Chueh Chang did not become famous like Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus, John Rock, or Robert Edwards. But his quiet experiments helped make possible two of the most intimate revolutions of the twentieth century: the birth control pill and modern in vitro fertilization.
Born in Shanxi, China, educated at Tsinghua, Cambridge, and later based at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, Chang spent his life studying the hidden mechanics of reproduction. Sperm, eggs, hormones, ovulation, capacitation, embryo transfer, and fertilization became the materials of a scientific career that would reshape sex, marriage, medicine, religion, family planning, infertility, and private freedom.
This biography tells the story of Chang not as a public crusader, but as the meticulous experimentalist behind world-changing consequences. His work helped prove that orally administered hormones could suppress ovulation in mammals, laying crucial biological groundwork for the contraceptive pill. His 1959 rabbit experiment, in which eggs fertilized outside the body produced live offspring after transfer to a surrogate mother, helped establish a foundation for modern IVF.
The Secret Life of Reproduction follows Chang from China to Britain to America, from animal-breeding science to reproductive medicine, from quiet laboratory work to the loud public battles over contraception, fertility, ethics, religion, and reproductive rights.
Chang helped build one technology that made sex less tied to pregnancy and another that made pregnancy possible outside the body. He changed the world by studying the threshold where life begins, fails, pauses, or becomes possible.