In this compelling new novel Carl Djerassi moves beyond the familiar worlds of laboratory and home to investigate the "tribal culture" of the international science community. The novel's backdrop is a series of conferences, based on the Nobel Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, where jet-setting scientists gather to discuss the global implications of their discoveries.

In this setting a man and a woman meet and become lovers. Menachem Dvir, a fiftyish Israeli nuclear engineer, is a married man rendered sterile by his exposure to radiation; Melanie Laidlaw, the American director of a foundation supporting research in reproductive biology, is the childless widow of a prominent scientist.

Now in her late thirties, Laidlaw concocts a scheme to steal her lover's sperm in order to determine whether it is suitable for ICSI - a revolutionary development of the early 1990s involving injection of a single sperm into an egg for the treatment of male infertility and fully documented in this novel. What happens next is pure Djerassi - an unpredictable and thrilling page-turner.