Transcription of audio file:
My first thought moving into the contraceptive exhibit at your museum is a mixture of pride and pleasure, and disappointment. Pride, of course, for having been involved in an invention which affected hundreds of millions of women - right now there are roughly a hundred million taking it all over the world. Eighty per cent of all women in the United States have at one time or another taken oral contraceptive, and I suspect it will be something like that, maybe not quite as high, here in the UK, and in many other countries.

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So that's the pride part - if I could do it over again there would be few things I would fundamentally change. I think most of the changes, not all, but most of the changes associated with the pill have been very beneficial ones.

The regret, however, is not the one you might expect, which would be that it has side effects. I'm a realist; everything has side effects. You'll never have any contraceptive or for that matter any drug that is devoid of side effects.

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It's the fact that there's been nothing fundamentally new in the area of contraception since that time. There have been minor and in part significant improvements - significant in terms of lowering the dosage. Even though there are hundreds and hundreds of different pills all over the world, they really only contain one of six or seven active ingredients. They're only variations on the same theme. And every one of these active ingredients is a very minor modification of that first compound, norethindrone, that we synthesised in 1951.

So I'm disappointed nothing new has happened. If you'd asked me in the 1960s I would have been a wild optimist, I would have said lots of things would happen, and the pill was only the beginning of a quantum jump. What we need is a contraceptive supermarket. The pill is only one important material available in that supermarket, but you want to have lots of different choices - choices for women and, perhaps even more importantly, for men, because you haven't got anything for men. You've still got the same thing: condoms, coitus interruptus or sterilisation.

I really think the social benefits of the pill are more or less the same now as they were then. Except that you had to overcome absurd social attitudes, and the people who overcame them were the women. Because I think no one, no pharmaceutical company and really none of the researchers, expected that the pill would be accepted so rapidly by so many women. It was really quite extraordinary: within a couple of years there were a couple of million women already in the United States alone who did that.

And that coincided with the time of the feminist movement, particularly in the States, where it certainly facilitated that. A liberated, independent woman - well, there are various definitions of it, but two clear-cut ones are that she should be in charge of her own fertility, and she should be either potentially or actually economically independent, which incidentally is another reason why so many women work now.

A hundred years ago in the States, six per cent of married women were working, now it's over sixty per cent. So that's a fundamental difference, and many of them have broken into really male-dominated disciplines where long training is indispensable and unexpected early pregnancy could be a professional and personal disaster. And that again was eliminated.

This did not mean at all that all the feminists were in favour of it, on the contrary. There was a minority, but a very vocal, politically astute and intellectually committed minority, that objected to the pill violently as another male intrusion into the woman's body. A more subtle one, a chemical intrusion, but nevertheless one that in some respects you might say is even more significant.

And these are the great problems in a situation which clearly is not a black-and-white one and never will be.

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