Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

– on one hangs a languid serpent, on the other, a wrinkled apple – as if the Garden of Eden had fallen into decrepitude. The egg is cracking open from the many characters it contains: bishops, nuns, simpletons, aristocrats, paupers, the elderly, the ill and infirm, even a monkey playing a pipe. Several of the characters hold a musical instrument: a flute, which was a common phallic symbol; the harp, representing the female sex organs; and the lute, associated with seduction. Fish, birds, monsters, and demons lurk around the egg, but the players seem oblivious. They continue their concert in complete absorption.

In the sixteenth century, when the scene was painted, science had not even realized that there was such a thing as a human egg. And if there was the idea that women might, like hens, have eggs of their own, then it was not much more than wild speculation. But speculation set the wheels in motion, and by 1651, William Harvey, ‘Physician Extraordinary’ to King James I, was moving away from the realms of folklore and casual observation to form a medicine based on experimentation and precise measurement. Though best known for his seminal research into the workings of the circulatory system, Harvey also devoted considerable time to investigating reproduction, tinkering with chick embryos and, in perhaps his most audacious move, the royal herd of deer.

Against the historical tide of spermists, Harvey claimed himself to be an ovist. Harvey believed that all life came from eggs: not just for birds, which was obvious, but for mammals too. He summed this up in his last work, Experiments Concerning the Generation of Animals. It was at odds with the generally accepted Aristotelian view that males contributed the lion’s share to the creation of new life through their sperm. After many years of research on the eggs of birds and deer, Harvey begged to differ. He was not able to provide a sound explanation for his ideas about reproduction, as he had done for the circulation of blood. Compared to the circulatory system, mammalian eggs were tiny and posed no small challenge to a scientist using seventeenth-century experimental tools. Only very cautiously, and after great persuasion, did Harvey publish his revolutionary book on sexual generation.

The book begins with a frontispiece, reminiscent of The Concert in the Egg, in which Jove sits on a plinth while balancing an egg as large as an ostrich’s in his hands. The egg has split in two, and from it escapes an insect, a spider, a deer, a snake, a bird, a lizard, and various other creatures. Leaping out of the egg among them all is a cherubic human baby. Across the egg’s shell is scrawled Harvey’s hypothesis, ex ovo omnia – ‘out of the egg, all things’.

Perhaps everything is contained in the egg, just waiting to be sprung into life. But although we now appreciate many of the egg’s complexities, there is a surprising amount that we still do not understand. What we do understand is that if the beautiful orchestration of genes, proteins, and hormones is disrupted, the egg can give rise to chaos. But although a rogue gene may be enough to kick an egg into forming an embryo, for humans, this is not enough to create a healthy child. However many human features there may be, the tertatomas born of eggs alone are still grotesque caricatures, with no hope of breathing life. There is a switch encoded in the genes of mammals that means that the healthy development of a bona fide virgin birth can happen only in truly exceptional circumstances.

Quite on their own, our eggs can give rise to monsters and to mutants. But mostly what we observe are the success stories – the eggs that are fertilized and grow enough to be born into the world.

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SECRETS OF THE WOMB

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; For then both parties nobly are subdued, And neither party loser.

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, c. 1600

In the early 1980s, a group of scientists were finding it very hard to convince themselves of something. They knew that a person needs two sets of chromosomes to come together in order to create the amount of DNA that a normal human, or for that matter, any mammal, has. So why couldn’t they make a healthy mouse in the laboratory that had two mothers or two fathers – the two necessary sets of chromosomes, though not from the usual two suspects? They had taken some early-stage embryos, removed the DNA that had come from the father, and replaced it with an equivalent set of maternal DNA from another egg. They also tried replacing the DNA from the mother with another set taken from sperm. None of these embryos survived.

We humans could manage to concoct teratomas naturally with their monstrous lumps of skin, hair, and teeth, but that seemed to be the limit of what we could achieve without sex. Mammalian teratomas certainly jump developmental hurdles to develop incredibly sophisticated, if deformed, body parts. Why couldn’t a woman be more like a turkey? Why couldn’t we just clone ourselves? What was really standing in the way of a virgin birth?

The answer may lie with a feature that no teratoma, in a woman or any other animal, has ever been found to grow: a placenta.

On the simplest level, the placenta allows oxygen and carbon dioxide to be exchanged between two organisms: mother and foetus. It is also the medium through which vitamins, glucose, fatty acids, and other sources of nutrition are transmitted to the developing embryo. Yet, despite its essential function in reproduction, the placenta does not develop until adulthood; it is also the only organ to be discarded after it has served its purpose, only to be