Sex: A Horizon Guide Page #5

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fixed at birth for most people,

for others,

it's much less cut-and-dried.

If called upon,

science sometimes has a solution.

Max Toft, a software engineer, is

physically and genetically a woman.

But she wants to be a man.

I remembered having this

distinct moment where I thought

that God had made a mistake and

that I should have been a boy -

which was interesting, because

I grew up in an atheist household!

To make her body more male,

Max is going to undergo

a course of testosterone.

Dr Ruben Gur,

one of the leading scientists

on how hormones affect the brain,

is going to put Max though a series

of physical and psychological tests

before and after her treatment.

Go.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

Stop.

Max shows a fairly

typical female, erm,

profile, cognitively.

Erm, and, er, I'd be curious to see

whether there is a change in that.

After six months of

testosterone therapy,

the most obvious changes

are to Max's body -

his voice is deeper,

and he's got more body hair.

But it's the psychological

and practical tests Max underwent

before and after hormone treatment

which have been the most startling.

What we are seeing, really, is, er,

is a female brain turning into

a male brain. It was quite, er,

quite amazing to see it

on a single individual.

This is a scan of Max's brain

when he was a woman.

The red areas show

the parts of the brain he used

when trying to read emotions.

And this is a scan of Max's brain

doing the same task but as a man.

The more red in the scan picture,

the harder the brain is working.

And as you can see, it seems

that he found it much easier

to read emotions when he

was a woman than he does now.

In his case, the second time, he had

more difficulties with the task,

he had to put in more effort

in order to perform that

particular...that particular task.

So, he's... His brain

responds more like a male brain

to the task of trying

to distinguish the emotions.

But how did Max do

in the practical tests?

All the changes are in the direction

that we expected,

in terms of becoming more masculine.

Interesting. Er, so,

remember the finger-tapping?

Uh-huh. You managed to squeeze in

another three taps

per minute. Whoo-hoo!

His spatial awareness

has also dramatically improved.

Last time, you did 75 correct.

This time, you did 118 correct.

Right. That's pretty much

the end of the good news... Right.

..because, er, with becoming a male,

erm, you also lost a little bit.

Max's visual memory

has deteriorated,

and he's not as good with words.

I was actually surprised.

I didn't...

I was thinking maybe one or two...

tests would change, and, er...

Erm, this is after all

a fairly brief period of time.

You would expect changes

on those tests

to take place over a longer period.

Max is still sceptical

about the extent to which

testosterone has changed his brain.

But he acknowledges

it has affected how he feels.

My body is changing, and it has

been surprising to go through that.

It's been kind of exciting, and

there were changes that I wasn't...

that I didn't expect to go through.

There was a period of time

where I had a really hard time

crying,

and it felt biological to me.

There was something biochemical

preventing me from doing it.

Like, it really felt

like a big block,

and that was kind of

a scary moment for me.

For most people, the biggest

impact that science has had on

our sex lives has been in giving us

greater control over reproduction.

Thanks to medical advances

over recent decades,

today, more healthy babies

are born than ever before.

And the invention of

the contraceptive pill

gave women the power

to decide when they have them.

As pills go, THE Pill

is a particularly tiny one,

and yet its effect

on the sex lives of women

has been monumental.

But behind this little piece

of sexual liberation

is the story of

an intrepid scientist

who went to the ends of the earth,

and then disappeared.

In order to make

a contraceptive pill for women,

scientists needed a source

of the sex hormone progesterone.

But in the early part

of the last century,

producing these hormones

in a laboratory

was difficult,

and phenomenally expensive.

But Professor Russell Marker,

of Pennsylvania State University,

had an idea.

He knew that some animal hormones

were very similar

to chemicals in plants,

and he identified

a raw botanic ingredient

that theoretically could be used

to produce progesterone.

Using the roots of a yucca plant

he found in the

south-western United States,

he proved his chemical principle.

However, this plant didn't naturally

produce enough of the raw material

to ever be economically viable.

Then, in November 1941, Marker

found what he was looking for.

In an old botany textbook,

he saw a rare type of wild yam

with an enormous root system that

was said to weigh almost 100 kilos.

But there was a problem -

the yam only grew in an isolated

region of the Mexican jungle.

The intrepid Marker

travelled there alone

and smuggled two huge roots

of this rare plant

back to the United States.

Once home, he successfully

synthesised 2kg of progesterone -

far more than anyone

had ever seen before.

Marker wanted to go into business,

but he was shunned by

the major pharmaceutical companies,

so he founded his own,

called Syntex,

and began to produce

more progesterone.

But in 1949, with

business about to boom,

Marker mysteriously vanished.

His work would lay the foundations

for the production of the modern

contraceptive pill in the 1960s.

But Marker himself was

still nowhere to be found.

It was rumoured that he'd died

in a mental institution in Mexico.

But in 1977, Horizon tracked down

the elusive professor.

He was living just a few miles away

from Penn State University,

where he first made

his remarkable discovery.

In this interview from the time,

it's not difficult to see

why Marker had become

so disillusioned with big business.

At the end of the year,

when I thought the profits

should be distributed...

I knew that there

were very nice profits,

including the profit

that was obtained

from the first 2kg of progesterone

that I had made.

And I had made

25 or 30kg during the year

of progesterone - it was

selling for over 25 a gram

at that time.

I went to the senior partner

in the firm

and asked him about the profits,

and he said there were no profits.

And he eventually told me that, er,

he had taken the profits as salary,

and there was nothing

I could do about it.

So I walked out of Syntex.

The Pill gave women the power

to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

But for couples who want children,

becoming pregnant

can sometimes be difficult.

Many problems can interfere

with conception,

causing anguish for parents.

It was once thought that being able

to control this natural process

would be impossible.

Then, in 1978, a baby was born

using a radical new technique

that has revolutionised

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