We are pleased to invite you to a lecture in the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2023/2024 Spring semester
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn
(Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
The Invisible Designer: Meg Crane and the Invention of Home Pregnancy Testing in 1960s New York
Thursday, March 14, 2024
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 3.014
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
Who?
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is Head of the Laboratory for Oral History and Experimental Media at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is the author of A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain (MIT Press, 2023), as well as articles and chapters on time lapse cinematography, science fiction cinema, feminist health activism, and contraceptive technologies.
What?
Following the advent of “the pill” and Roe v. Wade, the commercialisation of pregnancy testing contributed to a realignment of power dynamics between women and physicians in a tumultuous (and frequently mythologized) period of protest and revolution. Predictor, the pioneering home pregnancy test, was developed in New York in the late 1960s by Margaret “Meg” Crane, a young graphic designer working for the multinational pharmaceutical company Organon. Advertised as a “private little revolution”, Predictor was launched in Canada and Western Europe in 1971, but did not come to market in the US until 1978. Crane remained invisible until her decision to put the original prototype up for auction in 2016 garnered media attention. This talk historically contextualises Crane’s place in the design history and re-examines her invention story to reflect on a general question about “revolution” in American histories of science, technology, and medicine.
