Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross

Author:Rachel E. Gross [Gross, Rachel E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Life Sciences, History, Epub3, Women, Anatomy & Physiology, Science
ISBN: 9781324006329
Google: kWA3EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2022-03-29T20:34:01+00:00

Tilly wasn’t exactly destined to bring about an ovarian revolution. His path into science had started a decade earlier, with him standing chest-deep in a brackish, frozen river in the dead of winter. It was 1984, and he had just completed his undergrad degree, making him the first in his working-class family to finish college. Afterward, he returned to his hometown on the Jersey Shore and started building docks along the river as a construction worker, just like his two older brothers. That winter the ice had pulled the wooden pilings up from the docks, and his task was to cut a hole in the ice with a chainsaw, wade in, and put them back in place.

Standing there in subzero wind-chill temperatures, snow whipping around his face, he realized: This was miserable. “You know what? I just don’t want to do this when I’m fifty, sixty years old,” he recalls thinking. He had to go back to school.

That was easier said than done. Tilly was more than a year out of undergrad and had never been in a lab. He didn’t look like your typical academic: he was big and burly, with unruly brown hair past his shoulders and a diamond stud in one ear. When he went back to his alma mater, Rutgers University, and begged every adviser possible to take him as a master’s student, only one agreed. He was a reproductive biologist named Dr. Alan Johnson, who happened to work on chicken ovaries.† “I didn’t pick him because of my interest in reproduction,” Tilly says. “I picked him because he was the only faculty member who would take me.”

That serendipitous pairing would set the arc of his career. Within a year he had published his first academic paper, a technical description of an enzyme in the chicken ovary that contributed to both ovulation and egg-cell death. When he saw his name in the journal, the hair on his arms stood up. “That rush, the rush of knowledge, hit me like running into a brick wall,” he recalls. For the first time, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. But he didn’t know how to keep doing it. When his adviser told him that the next step was to get his doctoral degree, Tilly was stunned. He’d never even heard of a PhD. He thought doctoral degrees only meant MDs. Here, he realized, was another way: “Boom: everything fell into place.”

Ten years later, Tilly was in Boston directing the women’s health center at Mass Gen, where he worked with cancer patients and infertility patients, reproductive biologists and IVF doctors. He had recently found that cancer therapies accelerated the death of egg cells, often leading to early menopause and the end of fertility. The drugs and radiation didn’t just kill ovarian tissue—they hijacked the existing genetic program of cell death, speeding up the process. If you could identify that program, you could potentially protect those egg cells. He switched tack, devoting his lab to figuring out how to slow down cell death in the ovary.

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