Greta Garbo's Eggs.
Dr Gregory Goodwin Pincus was the doctor who made his name in 1937 by artificially fertilising a rabbit egg. The idea was already controversial with the rabbit, so Dr Pincus continued to research in his spare time throughout his life to achieve artificial insemination in humans. Mainly by experimenting at home with his own sperm and eggs from a neighbour's wife who, in return, received free treatment for her varicose veins.
Dr Pincus' secret medical records were found in 2013 behind a loose plank in a closet in his former home in Boston. They revealed that Greta Garbo had visited him on several occasions to freeze eggs. The experiment with the rabbit had caught her attention in an article in which Dr Pincus suggested that in the future women would be able to freeze their eggs and then fertilise them at their convenience. Greta was 36 years old and had already decided that the flop 'The Twins” would be her last film. She had also long since given up the idea of having to live with a man and assumed that she would remain childless. Dr Pincus kept Garbo's eggs with the promise that when he solved the secret, her eggs would be the first in the world to be inseminated. He continued his research until it ended with him in 1967.
When Dr Pincus' house was further searched, a General Electric household freezer was discovered in a hidden part of the house's crawl space, still switched on and on maximum cooling. A dismembered deer and a large number of test tubes were found, four of them marked with the initials G.G, just as stated in his journals. The find was quickly moved to the Massachusetts General Hospital and taken care of by doctors who eventually found the eggs to be in perfect condition and fully viable. Since Greta became a US citizen in 1951, it was thought that ownership of the eggs was a non-issue. But when Garbo's will was re-examined, the somewhat heavy-handed lines demanding that her body be shipped and buried in Sweden took on a whole new meaning. The eggs belonged in Sweden.
The then Swedish government literally had the eggs on its table when they were flown home for storage at the Karolinska Institute. The government chose not to publicise the find because they didn’t know what to do with it. The Minister of Culture proposed a Greta Garbo museum where a transparent freezer containing the eggs could be the epicentre of the museum. The Minister of Finance agreed that Garbo's eggs were a cultural issue but also recognised the political opportunity. They all knew that an election loss was imminent and that only a miracle could save the government from losing power - Greta Garbo's unborn child.
Through secret contacts with the Writers Guild and the National Writers Union, the search for a suitable husband began. Unfortunately, the rumour spread quickly and a horde of self-proclaimed men of culture got in touch and gave long monologues about why their particular gene sets were most compatible with Garbo's. Many prominent men stood at the front of the line with their fly open. Even some men from the Sabelskjöld family, to whom Greta Garbo was related, thought they should have the right to fertilise Greta's eggs. When someone pointed out that kinship is hardly classed as an asset in the context of fertilisation, they got touchy and replied that parents with kinship was completely natural in their family. A number of younger cultural women also came forward and offered their wombs for the fertilised egg. Many brought letters of recommendation from their gynaecologists, attesting to the excellence of their reproductive organs.
When the rumour of Garbo's egg reached the tabloids, the entire government was forced to hold an emergency meeting. The Prime Minister agreed that Greta Garbo's children could be the deceptive manoeuvre he needed to hide the fact that the party had completely lost all ideas and any will to change. But he didn't want to contribute to cultural elitism, meaning that the semen issue must be decided more democratically. The Minister of Culture agreed and suggested that all men who wanted to contribute should be allowed to do so and that everyone's donation should be mixed in a pump pot thermos, which created a short but interesting discussion about the different types of thermos on the market. When the Foreign Minister suggested that semen could then be taken from an existing sperm bank, the female Minister of Agriculture got angry. She said that men who were so vain as to want to spread their seed indiscriminately, should not be allowed to have children at all.
The whole issue was naturally resolved when the Karolinska Institute suffered an unexpected power cut. The freezer with Greta Garbo's eggs died and so did the dream of the perfect child.