Science: New Contraceptive?

A Manhattan meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences heard last week about a drug that may have more effect on mankind than insulin or penicillin. The announcement dealt with work done by Dr. Eli D. Goldsmith, chairman of the academy’s biology section, on a chemical that stops pregnancy in mice without doing any apparent harm to the animals. Given to the mice in their diets after they have become pregnant, it causes the fetus to be “resorbed” without any apparent harmful effect.

Dr. Goldsmith is also trying to determine whether the drug will work as a safe contraceptive. If it does, he will try it on larger animals than mice before considering testing it on humans. The drug was carefully left unnamed by Dr. Goldsmith. But it may be the “oral contraceptive” that Dr. James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard, predicted at a meeting of the American Chemical Society last month.