cavity disease. Manually reaching the ovary follicle and judging by instinct where to insert the needle, sucking the ovarian follicular fluid out, and then finding the ova in the ovarian follicular fluid. Therefore we used a different strategy by finding ova in the ovarian follicular fluid we retrieved, and learned more about the ova. (Zhang, Interview 2)
Jiang has argued that we should take this account of an “indigenous method” with a grain of salt, since the fact was that laparoscopy was a difficult technique for anyone to learn, let alone in China where clinical and laboratory conditions were so poor in the early 1980s (Jiang, 2015, pp. 46-47). There were not many patients who were willing to undergo experimental procedures solely for egg retrieval.6 Instead, patients were asked if they would agree to egg retrieval for research purposes once open pelvic surgery for a medical indication had been safely completed.
Lu Guangxiu’s initial attempts to secure oocytes during this time were also through surgery, because as she told me “we didn’t know how to do laparoscopy.” Zhang has recounted how in these early years “we [started] from not being able to identify ova” just as Lu has recalled, “I didn’t know what the eggs looked like at that time.” As a result, there was a lot of trial and error involved. For Lu, this involved countless trips throughout Changsha to hospitals that carried out surgery for the treatment of gynecological disease to ask for assistance in getting oocytes:
Egg retrieval had been done in Xiangya hospital; however, as they didn’t support our work, and I was refused permission to go into the surgery room I had to go to other hospitals for eggs. I sometimes rode a bicycle and carried a bucket as I visited many hospitals in Changsha. But I had little chance to get eggs, since sometimes we couldn’t find follicles in ovarian tissues. Besides, it was also very hard for me to recognize eggs, as human eggs were different from mouse eggs. That’s why I set up a sperm bank at that time, because I couldn’t tell whether the eggs were mature or immature when I got eggs, so I had to fertilize all the eggs [and see which were mature enough]. So I set up a sperm bank in order to fertilize the eggs once I got them. Without ovulation induction, it was very difficult at that time.
Zhang, on the other hand, was familiar with and had direct access to the departments at the Third Hospital that carried out routine open pelvic surgery for a variety of conditions. Yet, she would also have trouble finding willing patients, and when she did there were numerous practical challenges related to timing operations such that they coincided with ovulation. Without a sperm bank of her own in Beijing, Zhang relied on the husbands of her infertile patients to provide sperm samples, not all of whom agreed to do so. Moreover, Zhang was initially hampered by not having seen a human egg before, having only microscopically observed pig and mouse eggs.
The early 1980s were truly experimental years for assisted reproduction in China. Those scientists who became interested in reproductive technologies had to devise ways of getting gametes in China, and were faced with at least as many (if not more) challenges in this as their colleagues anywhere else in the world.
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
