Sheldon Segal

Sheldon Jerome Segal (March 15, 1926 – October 17, 2009) was an American embryologist and biochemist who spent his entire career working on contraception, and made major innovations in the field of long-lasting alternatives, with Chilean physician Horacio Croxatto, including in the creation of Norplant, the first major development advance in birth control since the birth control pill.

Early life and education Segal was born on March 15, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Erasmus Hall High School. He enlisted in the United States Navy during World War II when he was 16 years old. He was assigned to an attack transport that was to have been sent for the land invasion of Japan. When the war ended with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obviating the need for naval landings, he was sent to participate in nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. He left the Navy with the rank of lieutenant (junior grade). After completing his military service, Segal earned a bachelor's degree at Dartmouth College in 1947 and was awarded his doctorate degree from the University of Iowa in 1947 in biochemistry and embryology. In 1986 Segal received an honorary doctorate from the faculty of medicine at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Contraception career The Population Council hired him in 1956 as assistant medical director for its biomedical research laboratories and he was named as director in 1963. Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories withdrew the product in 2002 after court cases that argued that a number of major side effects had not been properly disclosed. The book stated that early women would menstruate very infrequently because of frequent pregnancies, child nursing and physical demands and that the side effects of the "incessant ovulation" that modern women experience could include anemia and endometriosis.

Segal was awarded the UN Population Award in 1984, sharing it with Carmen Mirro of Panama. In 2006 he won the Prix Galien USA Pro Bono Humanum Prize along with the Population Council for his inventorship of Norplant.

Personal life and death He was married to novelist Harriet (Feinberg) Segal. The couple had three daughters.

A resident of New York City. Segal died at his summer home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at age 83 on October 17, 2009, because of congestive heart failure.