Anniversary of the PILL

Scientists in April marked the 50th anniversary of the first large-scale field trials of the pill by announcing they are working on a new generation of pills with potentially huge health benefits. Mr Djerassi, 82, the chemist who in 1951 led a team to create a man-made version of the natural contraceptive hormone progesterone, is not impressed. A remarkably vigorous polymath who fled Nazi Germany for America, Mr Djerassi has shaped the modern world his life spans. He has made his fortune, collected art, turned to philanthropy and written fiction and poems. He now considers himself a playwright, although he still travels the world lecturing on the philosophy of science and his current preoccupation: love and sex in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Firstly, the anniversary is wrong. The chemical birthday of the pill was in 1951 and the public birthday in 1960. He stabs a finger at the references: Tyler ET (1955), a paper first presented in 1954. The 50th anniversary refers to a study by the biologist Gregory Pincus in 1956. “I’m a chemist so I pooh-pooh this. I always say the chemist is the mother of the pill and Pincus is the father of the pill. Nothing gets born without a mother.”

What really riles Mr Djerassi is the reporting of research into the “new generation” of pills. Breathless stories suggested scientists are five years away from releasing a drug based on a compound called mifepristone, or RU486 – claimed to reduce breast cancer, thrombosis and heart disease. “It pisses me off in many different ways. I don’t know whether the guilty persons are the media or naive scientists. I don’t think they are malicious or deliberately disingenuous but they have not the vaguest idea of the realities of what it takes to introduce a pill on to the market.” To suggest it is five years away is ridiculous. “I think the leitmotif for the last 50 years of last century was contraception. The leitmotif of the next 50 years will be conception. It’s two sides of the coin: on one side is sex without reproductive consequences, which was the pill, and reproduction without sex, which was a British invention (vide Dolly).”

He created his compound more than 50 years ago. Mr Djerassi is now more interested in “the extremely complicated problem” of what happens when pills reach society. “That’s why I decided to write plays. I wanted to smuggle these ideas into the minds of people who would not read an article … or don’t even think about the problems.”

Questions:
1. Why is the celebration of the 50th anniversary said to be wrong?
2. What does Mr Djerassi, the mother of the pill, do nowadays?
3. Why has he chosen this profession?
4. What synonym can you give for the word ‘rile’, which describes the attitude of Mr Djerassi to the report mentioned?
5. Why does Mr Djerassi judge the announcement about the new generation of pills ridiculous?

Key:
1. Because it refers to a publication date of a study about the pill, instead, neither of the real date of the chemical creation, nor the date when it first entered the market.
2. He writes poems and plays, and travelling around the world gives lectures.
3. Because he considers the mass usage of the pill set up the scene of a complex social problem.
4. annoy, irritate, anger
5. According to the announcement, a new generation of pills with potentially huge health benefits will be used within 5 years. The given time is said to be not enough by him.

CNN