EXPERIMENTING
Let us now take a closer look at how Zhang and Lu were able to lead their respective teams to achieve China’s first IVF births in 1988. Lu and her team had already secured the birth of the first baby using frozen donor sperm, but Lu and her father continued to pursue IVF research with the hopes of securing yet another first. Both Zhang and Lu were working under incredibly crude conditions and with meager resources, just as both had to negotiate the disapproval they were met with by some colleagues and officials, whether for moral or demographic reasons. Not surprisingly, both would enlist the help of others, nationally and internationally. And it was in partnership (together with He Cuihua from the Peking Union Medical College) that they would secure funding for their research from the National Natural Science Foundation in 1986.
When it came to both sperm and eggs, much of the first half of the 1980s was spent not just experimenting with cryopreservation and retrieval techniques, but also grappling with the harsh aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. This was a motif that ran through many of the interviews and discussions I had with those researchers who had been active in reproductive science during the 1980s and 1990s. Visiting China’s gridlocked metropolises today it can be easy to forget just how much cities like Beijing and Changsha have transformed over the last twenty-five years. Following the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976, many laboratories had become almost derelict and there were no reliable suppliers of laboratory equipment or chemical agents. The bicycle was still the most common form of urban transportation.
In recollections of the many difficulties they had faced, both Zhang and Lu convey a sense of pride and perhaps also nostalgia for the excitement of the times. When it came to freezing sperm for the first time in Changsha, Lu recalls:
We did not have any equipment to do this research. I also needed a protective agent for freezing the sperm and we knew that we could use egg to do that, but you have to pasteurize the egg at a temperature of about 56 degrees Celsius. But without any equipment—we only had an oven, which was in poor condition [laughter], so when I put the egg inside the oven to pasteurize it, after half an hour, the egg became a cake [laughter]. All the people laughed! And there was no freezing agent or liquid nitrogen either. During that time, we didn’t have any equipment; we hadn’t even seen a fridge before. But at the Dermatology Department in our hospital, they had a new laboratory and certain equipment to freeze the skin from the pig. The director was also very kind and offered that I could use his laboratory to do this research, so we went to the laboratory, myself and a male colleague. . . . They brought some liquid nitrogen into the laboratory to have the sperm frozen. But it was the first time for them to see the steam, they were afraid that maybe it will explode! [laughter]. . . . So they measured the temperature through the whole night, they just observed the temperature and they dared not to cover the tank with a lid, because they were afraid that if you cover it with the lid, it will explode. So for the whole night, they were just sitting there and observing all the things, also through the next day until the evening. They succeeded in freezing the sperm and were very happy at that time!
Figure 4. China’s first frozen sperm bank for humans, 1983. (Photo courtesy of Lu Guangxiu.)
Similarly, Zhang recalled how equipment shortages were a constant problem when she and her colleagues were trying to develop egg retrieval techniques:
We described the difficulties we faced as “poor and blank” (yiqiong erbai). Conditions were really poor. All equipment had to be used repeatedly. For example, there were only a few ova-retrieving needles, which were brought back from overseas. They had to be washed and high-pressure sanitized. Vessels had to be used again and again too, and then washed and high-pressure sanitized. At that time we had a lot of cases but there were no infections. This was very impressive and staff in our laboratory worked really hard. There were whorls at the very top of the needles . . . which made it easy to know where to penetrate. The whorls got worn down. We took the needles to watchmaker shops to sharpen them. After being sharpened and reused so many times, we had to throw them away, since the whorls could barely be seen anymore. The conditions really were poor at the time. (Zhang, Interview 3)
Since Zhang had not had experience with identifying oocytes, she allied herself with embryologist Liu Bin who had studied mammalian developmental biology in the 1970s in Belgium. It was in collaboration with Liu that Zhang would learn how to identify human eggs by watching and discussing one of the films Liu had brought back from Belgium showing how animal embryos developed, as well as by studying images of human oocytes published in international scientific journals, which were slowly becoming available in Beijing (Jiang, 2015, p. 15).
YOUSHENG—SUPERIOR BIRTHS
By 1984, Zhang had developed her own technique of egg retrieval, just as Lu had established China’s first sperm bank. Up to that point, the two had worked without much knowledge of each other’s work. That would change in late 1983 when an exhibition on “superior births” (yousheng)7 was organized by the Family Planning Department of the provincial government in Hunan Province. Participants at the exhibition discussed prenatal screening and both “negative” (abortion) and “positive” ways of improving population quality. Since preimplantation genetic diagnosis was a long way off at that stage, sperm banking was discussed as one possible method of improving population quality. A group of journalists who were attending the exhibition got wind that a sperm bank had in fact been established in Changsha:
They came here for an interview and then they sent out a report saying that in Hunan there is a sperm bank. This was kind of explosive news in China, because every newspaper carried this information and they kept reporting it. And suddenly we got very famous around China! [laughter] And we got hundreds of letters from patients and from other institutes. Although many people praised us, some people criticized us[;] . . . they thought we were treating people like animals, since we are just collecting sperm.
Shortly after news of Changsha’s sperm bank had broken nationally, Zhang Lizhu and Lu Guangxiu began communicating. Together with one of Zhang’s peers in Beijing, He Cuihua from the Peking Union Medical College (who had been introduced to assisted reproduction during a study trip to Singapore), the trio agreed to prepare an application for research funding, which would be sent to the Ministry of Health. After some discussion between them, they agreed to title their application “Yousheng: The Protection, Preservation, and Development of Early Embryos,” a decision that cannot be detached from the restrictive family planning measures that were being rolled out across China in this exact same period, as well as the growing interest in population quality on the part of family planning officials. As Zhang put it: “There were other voices at the time. Some people said: China already has such a huge population, why do you still want to work on test tube babies? They said this went against the national family planning policy” (Interview 3). Similarly, when I asked Lu about the apparent contradictions of carrying out IVF research in China in the 1980s, she replied, “There were many doctors and researchers who asked the same question as you did just now. Under this population policy we are doing this kind of technology, something that is contradictory.” As we saw earlier, Lu Guangxiu’s route to reproductive science had been through medical genetics. Her team at the Human Reproductive Engineering Research Department was as engaged in prenatal genetic testing as it was in IVF research. The medical genetic potentials of reproductive technologies had been at the very core of Lu Huilin’s and Lu Guangxiu’s early engagements with reproductive science. In the way that their research application was framed, reproductive technologies emerged as techniques that could contribute to the improvement of population quality in China (rather than infertility treatment as such), a demographic aim that was beginning to emerge alongside the controlling of population growth as a primary family planning objective (see Greenhalgh, 2008; Jiang, 2015).
Having witnessed the great difficulties that his daughter was facing in trying to get gametes and equipment for fertilization research, Lu Huilin decided in 1984 that she needed to travel outside China for more training. She recalls, “My father said that we can’t go on like this, so he told the university that I need to have some training