Enduring Vision
Father of The Pill raises sex, ethics issues
 |
|
Carl Djerassi presented the 2002 Karlovitz Lecture, "Sex in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
|
"The day will come when sex and reproduction are separate."
So said Carl Djerassi during the 2002 Karlovitz Lecture, "Sex in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," presented by the Georgia Tech College of Sciences.
"When you talk about the separation of sex and reproduction people think it's terrible," Djerassi said, "but they are fooling themselves because the majority of people who have sex, most of the time, are not doing it for the purpose of reproduction."
The beginning of the separation of sex and reproduction came in 1960, Dejrrasi said, with the introduction of oral contraceptives.
The counterpart to sex without reproduction, reproduction without sex, was made possible in 1977 with the birth of the first baby created through in-vitro fertilization, the first "test tube baby."
"Since that time, over 1 million babies have been born in the world without sexual intercourse, and 1 million people have done this because one of the two in the couple was infertile or had infertility problems," Djerassi said. "The question becomes, 'Is it OK for an infertile person to demand of society or medicine to do something to enable them to become parents?' The vast majority would say, 'Sure, why not?' And that is why in-vitro fertilization was invented."
A recent development in assisted reproduction, Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection — in which a single sperm is used to fertilize an egg — has aroused new controversy due to questions of whether it will be used to create "designer babies."
Enduring Vision
 |
|
Ernest Welch shares his view of a lifetime
|
It's a struggle for Ernest Welch to lift his 45-pound 8-by-10-view camera onto an equally cumbersome tripod. A slight-framed man, Welch literally disappears after he covers his head with the black focusing cloth. He has lugged the imposing camera all over Atlanta capturing serene images of gardens and flowers and lawns.
He hopes those images will be his legacy. The 96-year-old Atlantan, a 1928 graduate of Georgia Tech's School of Commerce, has taken photographs most of his life, but after retiring more than 30 years ago, it became his passion.
Last fall, Welch's work was presented in a retrospective exhibition of landscape and portrait photography at Georgia State University, where he earned a fine arts degree in 1999. The exhibit, titled "An Enduring Vision: Photographs by Ernest Welch," was made up of stark sepia images culled from nearly a lifetime.
Welch began taking pictures with an old Kodak while stationed as a counter-intelligence agent in Luxembourg and France in World War II. He wanted to show his family combat scenes and photos of his buddies.
Instead, Welch recorded beauty in the ruins of battle and hope in the war-weary eyes of civilians. Those photos made up a significant part of the exhibition.
After the war, Welch made a career of sales and marketing with Sonoco Products, a global manufacturer of industrial and consumer packaging solutions, until he retired in 1971.
"I was constantly on the road with that job," Welch explains, "and wherever I went, I took a 35-millimeter camera. I was taking a lot of pictures but I realized I didn't know what I was doing. I admired Ansel Adams, so I began going to workshops put on by the Friends of Photography in Carmel, California, in hopes of being able to attend one of his workshops.
Stimulated by the workshop experience, Welch enrolled in photography classes at Georgia State in 1990.
"I went back to school to learn," Welch says. "I hadn't really even considered earning a degree, but one day I realized I had so many photo courses, I might as well get one."
©2003 Georgia Tech Alumni Association
