Biography of the inventor of the birth control pill.

Was treibt Wissenschaftler an? Der Konkurrenzkampf, das Bestreben etwas Neues als erster zu entdecken, ist eine wichtige Motivation. Die moralischen Konsequenzen werden in dem Stück "Oxygen" behandelt, in dem es um die Entdeckung von Sauerstoff geht, dem für das Leben auf der Erde wichtigsten Element. Im Zentrum des Stückes stehen chemische und politische Revolutionen sowie der Nobel-Preis, der 2001 zum 100. Mal vergeben wird. Das Stück spielt 1777 und 2001; zur Aufführung werden drei Schauspieler und drei Schauspielerinnen benötigt, die elf Personen darstellen. Die Urauffühung wird im Frühjahr 2001 in San Diego stattfinden, die deutsche Premiere im September. Die weltberühmten Autoren Carl Djerassi und Roald Hoffmann bürgen aufgrund ihrer Erfahrungen als Wissenschaftler - Carl Djerassi ist bekannt als "Vater der Pille" und Roald Hoffmann erhielt 1982 den Nobelpreis für Chemie - und als Schriftsteller - Djerassi schrieb mehrere erfolgreiche Romane, Hoffmann viel beachtete Lyrik - für Kompetenz und Spannung.

October 15, 1951 marks the birthday of one of the key episodes in 20th century social history: the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive in a small laboratory in Mexico City - an event that triggered the development of the Pill. Carl Djerassi has been honoured worldwide for that accomplishment, which ultimately changed the life of women and the nature of human reproduction in ways that were not foreseeable. On the 50th anniversary of this pivotal event, Djerassi weaves a compelling personal narrative full of self-reflection and occasional humour on the impact this invention has had on the world at large and on him personally. He credits the Pill with radically altering his academic career at Stanford University to become one of the few American chemists writing novels and plays. This Man's Pill presents a forcefully revisionist account of the early history of the Pill, debunking many of the journalistic and romantic accounts of its scientific origin. Djerassi does not shrink from exploring why we have no Pill for men or why Japan only approved the Pill in 1999 (together with Viagra). Emphasizing that development of the Pill occurred during the post-War period of technological euphoria, he believes that it could not be repeated in today's climate. Would the sexual revolution of the 1960s or the impending separation of sex ("in bed") and fertilization ("under the microscope") still have happened? This Man's Pill answers such questions while providing a uniquely authoritative account of a discovery that changed the world.

”What purpose is served by showing that England's greatest natural philosopher is flawed … like other mortals?” asks one of the characters in Newton's Darkness. “We need unsullied heroes ” But what if the hero is sullied? At stake is an issue that is as germane today as it was 300 years ago: a scientist's ethics must not be divorced from scientific accomplishments. There is probably no other scientist of whom so many biographies and other historical analyses have been published than Isaac Newton — all of them in the standard format of documentary prose because of their didactic purpose to transmit historical information. Newton's Darkness, however, illuminates the darker aspects of Newton's persona through two historically grounded plays dealing with two of the bitterest struggles in the history of science.The name of Isaac Newton appears in virtually every survey of the public's choice for the most important persons of the second millennium. Yet the term “darkness” can be applied to much of Newton's personality. Adjectives that have been used to describe facets of his personality include “remote”, “lonely”, “secretive”, “introverted”, “melancholic”, “humorless”, “puritanical”, “cruel”, “vindictive” and, perhaps worst of all, “unforgiving”. The trait most relevant to the present book is Newton's obsessively competitive nature, which was often out of proportion to the warranted facts, as demonstrated in three of Newton's best-known bitter conflicts: with the physicist Robert Hooke, the astronomer royal John Flamsteed, and a German contemporary of almost equal intellectual prowess, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the last fight eventually turning into an England vs Continental Europe competition. It is two of these three relentless drawn-out battles that are illuminated in Newton's Darkness in the form of historically grounded drama.After a summary of the historical evidence, the book starts with the Newton-Hooke struggle (Chapter 2), which was conducted mano a mano, and is then followed by little-known aspects of the Newton-Leibniz confrontation (Chapter 3), which was fought largely through surrogates — notably the infamous, anonymous committee of 11 Fellows of the Royal Society.