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    An Immaculate Misconception
    An Immaculate Misconception
    An Immaculate Misconception
    Audiobook1 hour

    An Immaculate Misconception

    Written by Carl Djerassi

    Narrated by JoBeth Williams and Full Cast

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Dr. Melanie Laidlaw is a scientist developing the first use of ICSI, short for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Her collaborator, Dr. Felix Frankenthaler, turns out to have his own ideas about how to implement their new procedure. The wild card is Melanie’s new lover, Menachem Dvir, a fellow scientist. This darkly comic menage-a-tois plays out not only in bedrooms and labs, but also in test tubes and under the microscope. A Brave New World indeed!

    Includes an interview with Liza Mundy, a staff writer at the Washington Post and the author of "Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World".

    An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
    Philip Casnoff as Menachem Dvir
    Kevin Kilner as Dr. Felix Frankenthaler
    Kendall Schmidt as Adam
    Jobeth Williams as Dr. Melanie Laidlaw

    Directed by Jenny Sullivan. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.

    An Immaculate Misconception is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. Major funding for the Relativity Series is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherL.A. Theatre Works
    Release dateJan 1, 2004
    ISBN9781580814614
    An Immaculate Misconception

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    • 3/5
      Another in the line of plays about science. This one is one of the few books that is about biology, and not about cancer. In this case, the author, a Nobel Prize winner for his invention of oral contraception, decides to take a look at the process known as ICSI - a method of fertility treatment that can use a single sperm injected directly into an egg. It is written without dumbing down, but the science should still be comprehensible to most people, though there may be a couple of points where there is a bit of jargon. It's an easy, quick read, and raises some interesting questions about the future of reproductive science, though it never raises the most important one, the obsession that drives us to reproduce our own genetics when there are already so many people the world is bursting at the seams. It never questions the need some people have for their own genetics to continue. In spite of that, it could raise those questions in the mind of the savvy reader. A decent entry.
    • 3/5
      Another in the line of plays about science. This one is one of the few books that is about biology, and not about cancer. In this case, the author, a Nobel Prize winner for his invention of oral contraception, decides to take a look at the process known as ICSI - a method of fertility treatment that can use a single sperm injected directly into an egg. It is written without dumbing down, but the science should still be comprehensible to most people, though there may be a couple of points where there is a bit of jargon. It's an easy, quick read, and raises some interesting questions about the future of reproductive science, though it never raises the most important one, the obsession that drives us to reproduce our own genetics when there are already so many people the world is bursting at the seams. It never questions the need some people have for their own genetics to continue. In spite of that, it could raise those questions in the mind of the savvy reader. A decent entry.