Good Quality. Ayo Wahlberg

received training in clinical procedures such as control ovarian hyperstimulation and egg retrieval. Six months later, the pair returned to Changsha, bringing back with them as much equipment as they could carry, including electronic scales, an osmotic pressure tester, and even a bottle of ultrapure water. “I came back in 1986 and established a laboratory immediately with all the equipment. . . . Doctor Xu did egg retrieval here in Changsha. I had learned how to recognize eggs, but Doctor Xu was responsible for the surgery on egg retrieval while another group who were at the Xiangya Hospital did laparoscopy for egg retrieval, so we began the work in 1986.”

      Now, one might be tempted to argue that clearly Lu Guangxiu, Zhang Lizhu, and He Cuihua received training and inspiration outside of China; hence perhaps this is after all a story of importing Western technologies into China. However, we know that, for example, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe interacted with numerous international colleagues, and Steptoe traveled to France to learn laparoscopy from Raoul Palmer (Litynski, 1998), yet it is the United Kingdom that is most often credited as the “birthplace” of IVF. My point is that regardless of where they received training and where IVF was invented, Lu and Zhang had to experiment in order to develop it in China; they were not able to “skip” experimentation and merely set about routinizing IVF. Moreover, in setting out to develop reproductive technologies in China they were responding to local concerns arising out of the clinic (in Zhang’s case) as well as out of a growing interest in population quality on the part of government officials (in Lu’s case). As was the case with Edwards and Steptoe, Zhang and Lu built upon a range of already established procedures, technologies, and lab equipment that were circulating through global flows of technology and knowledge as they developed IVF in China.

      It was also in 1986 that the “yousheng” research project received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which had been established under the auspices of the Four Modernizations program. The foundation awarded RMB 100,000 to be split between the three researchers and their laboratories. The amount was therefore hardly sufficient, although the recognition that came with being awarded such a grant was perhaps of even more importance, as theirs became a so-called key research project of the Seventh Five-Year Plan. Reproductive science had become a part of China’s overall modernization program, just as the race to produce China’s first IVF child was in effect on.

      This time, Zhang won. After thirteen attempted cycles with different women, thirty-nine-year-old Zheng Guizhen from Gansu became pregnant and gave birth to Zheng Mengzu on March 10, 1988, in Beijing. “There were three hospitals at the time working on this. . . . We were the first to produce test tube babies” (Zhang, Interview 3). In a television program called Fendou aired on China’s CCTV network in August 2011, Zhang tells of her nerves on the scheduled day of Zheng Mengzu’s birth by caesarean section with the nation’s eyes fixed on her:

      When the first test tube baby was born, there were a lot of reporters waiting outside the operating room. So when I was on the way to the operating room I didn’t really want to face them. I passed by with a blank face without even nodding at them, without a word, because I was worried. I was not worried about the operation. What I was worried about was the baby’s being born with some kind of malformation, such as a harelip. So this is what I was worrying about when I performed the surgery. Then I saw the baby and checked her whole body and she was totally fine, crying really loudly. I felt I could relax afterward. They said at this point I looked happy, with a little smile. So I really didn’t know how to cope with the media at the time. I should have talked to them a little bit, which I didn’t do at all. (Zhang, Interview 4)

      It is telling that the health of Zheng Mengzu was foremost on Zhang’s mind. Since Zhang, Lu, and He had claimed that IVF was a technique that would contribute to “superior births,” it would have been a major setback had the child not been healthy.

      Meanwhile, in Changsha, yet another race was playing out: Lu recalls, “We didn’t succeed for more than one year [after 1986], so I worried much about that. The country had spent so much money on my training and there were a lot of expectations on me from others, especially from my father. He was eighty-eight years old at that time, so I also hoped to succeed as soon as possible. However, I failed for over one year so that I felt a lot of pressure.” Changsha’s first IVF babies were finally born exactly three months after Zheng Mengzu in June of 1988. As it happened, two patients had had their eggs retrieved and fertilized around the same time in the second half of 1987. Once their eggs had been fertilized with their respective husbands’ sperm, one of the patients ended up with very poor quality embryos while the other patient ended up with leftover good-quality embryos. Since “there was no freezing equipment and technology, we usually had to abandon the spare embryos. Instead, we asked her [the woman who only had poor-quality embryos] if she would like to accept the other couple’s embryo, and she said yes. Actually she was the first one who got pregnant in our center. . . . We don’t know how we succeeded in the first one, maybe it’s because we had done this work for a certain time and had gained some experience. However, the success rate at that time was still very low and it was probably less than 5 percent.” And so, Zhang Minxing, Changsha’s first IVF baby (China’s second) was born on June 5, 1988, closely followed by Luo Youqun, China’s first embryo donation baby, on June 7, 1988. In all, a flurry of four IVF babies were born in 1988, two in Beijing and two in Changsha. Both Zhang and Lu had used open pelvic surgery to retrieve eggs in their first successful IVF cases. He Cuihua had used laparoscopic methods to try to obtain eggs and never did succeed in her quest for a “first” IVF baby at the Peking Union Medical College in the late 1980s.

      LEGALIZATION—THE BIRTH OF “ONE CHILD” ART