The Green Room

The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women

I've been fascinated as I've learned more and more about the effects of synthetic estrogen, and so you can imagine my excitement to find that my library had a copy of The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth by Barbara Seaman. Seaman details the history of estrogen, from its initial discovery to its present* uses.

Seaman passed away in 2008 after a long career as feminist writer. Her first book, The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, launched the congressional hearings on the safety of the pill back in 1970 (at the time, it had 10x more estrogen than necessary). It's really important to note that Seaman was not ever against contraception at all, nor against estrogen itself - she was just against uninformed women and unsupported claims made by Big Pharma. She wrote a short and informative NYT article about the Pill back in 2000.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction about "The Greatest Experiment" which really kind of summarizes the story. It's a bit long, but definitely worth a read, especially if you won't have a chance read the book! (I don't think I'm breaking any copyright laws by including it, since you could read it on Amazon as well.)


The experiment began in England in 1938, and it has continued for sixty-five years. A British biochemist, desperate to prevent Nazi Germany from cornering the world market on synthetic sex hormones, published his formula for cheap and powerful oral estrogen. Within months, thousands of doctors and scores of drug companies around the world were working with this formula.

That opened the Greatest Experiment. Products made from chemicals that mimicked the feminizing effects of a woman's natural secretions were marketed fresh out of the lab. They were prescribed and sold for a host of concerns - to slow and prevent aging, to stop hot flashes, to avoid pregnancy or miscarriage, and as a morning-after contraceptive.

I call the marketing, prescribing, and sale of these drugs an experiment because, for all these years, they have been used, in the main, for what doctors and scientists hope or believe they can do, not for what they know the products can do. Medical policy on estrogens has been to "shoot first and apologize later" - to prescribe the drugs for a certain health problem and then see if there is a positive result. Over the years, hundreds of millions, possibly billions of women, have been lab animals in this unofficial trial. They were not volunteers. They were given no consent forms. And they were put at serious, often devastating risk.

The risks of these drugs have been known and documented from the start. The British doctor who published his estrogen formula in 1938 spent many years thereafter warning the world that these drugs, although containing great promise, put women at serious peril for endometrial and breast cancer. Since the halting of the Prempro trial in July [2002], despite the ignorance or hypocrisy of many doctors who said "Who knew?", there is nothing surprising in the recent findings. We have known since day one that these drugs posed threats. And since then science has added to, not subtracted from, the list of estrogen's problems.

If doctors and scientists have known these dirty secrets for so long, why is the bad press so recent? That is an essential question right now, and this book seeks to present the answer. Part of the answer lies in the vigorous efforts by drug companies to protect an invaluable market. These efforts have included underwriting studies and subsidizing doctors, participating in medical-school curriculums, advertising heavily in medical journals, and seeing that continuing medical education is directed by doctors on the drug industry's payroll. They have also entailed one of the most elaborate promotion and advertising campaigns in the history of the media not only in America but worldwide.

This is not the first time estrogen sales have felt the cold wind of consumer anger. In 1975, the magnitude of estrogen-related endometrial cancer was established; drug sales sank by half in subsequent years. In that instance, as in every other that has cast suspicion on estrogen, the drug companies managed to revitalize sales through new claims, which is why I say that only through learning how these companies buy and influence medical opinion can women protect themselves from any new spin, any new claim that will inevitably emerge about these drugs and countless others.

Estrogen products won't go away, and they shouldn't. One can only wish, as I do, that they will be used now with caution, based on evidence and facts, not illusion. My aim is to consider whether hormone supplements are necessary and for whom. Specifically, I hope this book will help women navigate the estrogen issue and keep anything similar from happening again. But the larger hope is that we can make informed decisions about other drugs as well.

Really intriguing, huh?

There were only a couple downsides to this book. The thing that bothered me most was that it doesn't really tell the story in chronological order, but really jumps back and forth quite a bit. It made me wish there was an overall timeline in the appendix or something! She is very detailed and introduces tons of specific people, which wouldn't work for a novel but seeing as this is a true story, it just made you realize how much she had researched. Finally, a large part of the book focused on menopause and hormone replacement therapy, though you can skip a couple chapters at the end that are specifically about that if you're not interested in them. Overall, though, it was a riveting read that anyone interested in history, women's health, feminism, or just good non-fiction should check out!

*Actually, she went through 2002 and the hormone replacement therapy debacle in this 2003 book. There's now a second edition (with a racier cover) which came out in 2009 that I'd like to look over, in the hopes that she continued to incorporate the most up-to-date research that was available at the time of publication.

I was not compensated or anything for this review. I just read it and wanted to share!