way. As I said, the most important problem was for it to be 

 a university-wide center and not a School of Public Health 

 center. Jack was always in conflict with the medical 

 school, so we never really did get much involved with the 

 medical school, although we got involved with John Rock, who 

 ran the Rock Clinic, which was essentially an infertility 

 clinic. He was quite old by this time, but he was a 

 Catholic and a very courageous man, vigorously opposing the 

 Catholic position on birth control. He had actually been 

 the one who tested the oral contraceptive in Puerto Rico. 

 The original work was done by a man named Pincus at the 

 Worchester Foundation for Biological Research, Gregory 

 Pincus. So it was Pincus and Rock who were involved in the 

 development of the oral contraceptive. And we tried our 

 best to be in close contact with John. I'll tell you 

 something about that later. 



The main problem at the beginning was to have a place 

 on the Cambridge side of the river, and Jack found this 

 little house, 9 Bow Street, which belonged to Harvard. I 

 guess it had originally been what they call at Harvard "a 

 cat house." It doesn't mean a whorehouse, it means a 

 boarding house, before the various houses were developed, 

 the Adams House, the Eliot House, Freeland House, and so 

 forth. It was built about 1860. It was a three-story 

 building with a basement, and it looked pretty ideal for our 

 center. It was small enough that it was very intimate and 

 cozy. 



Then Bill Claff, the business manager of the School of 

 Public Health, found some lovely furniture in a Harvard 

 warehouse which had belonged to the Cabot family. There was 

 a huge dining room table, and we built a big conference room 

 in 9 Bow Street and put this table in it. It filled most of 

 the room. It was just perfect. Lots of hardwood chairs 

 around it, and lots of chairs that had belonged to the 

 Cabots. Then downstairs we had a little library and 

 office space and administrative space. 



Pauline Wycoff really pretty much supervised the 

 reconstruction for this house. We decorated it over the 

 door with a statue of a baby, about so big [gestures size] , 

 and then various things that I brought back from India. 



At the same time that I went to Harvard, I became a 

 member of the Education Commission of the government of 

 India, more or less over Jack's dead body, because he 

 thought I should spend all my time raising money for the 

 center. But I felt that I needed to know a lot more about 

 developing countries, that this was a very important thing 

 to do educationally, for me, and therefore for the center. 

 So I spent about one month out of three in India between 

 1964 and 1966. 



Sharp: I saw a record of a lot of trips going back and forth. 



Revelle: Yes. This was a fifteen-member commission. Ten of them 

 were Indians, Indian "educationists," as they call 

 themselves . Then there was one Frenchman and one Japanese 

 and one Russian, one Englishman, and I was the American 



