He flashes forward in time to the 1980s and the present as science tries to understand the particular vulnerability of American women to breast, ovarian and uterine cancers, compared with other countries and cultures. The answer, Mr. Gladwell suggests, may be in the Pill and those 12 periods that it guarantees a woman each year. Dr. Rock's science could have provided a cycle of any length - as newer varieties of the Pill now do.
But "in John Rock's mind, the dictates of religion and the principles of science got mixed up, and only now are we beginning to untangle them."
This means that American women - waiting longer to have children, having fewer of them and breast-feeding for shorter periods of time, if at all - are subject to perhaps 400 periods in a lifetime, compared with women in other cultures who have more pregnancies, breast-feed longer and endure only 100 periods in a lifetime.
"In other words, what we think of as normal - frequent menses - is in evolutionary terms abnormal," Mr. Gladwell writes.
A woman's cycle (the explosive release of an egg from the ovaries and the regular build-up and break-down of the endometrium in the uterus) subjects her body to just the kind of cell division and reproduction that an opportunistic cancer takes advantage of. That is what cancer is, after all: cell division run amok.
It appears, Mr. Gladwell writes with the help of his scientist interviewees, that the price of the Pill's monthly week off may be enormous for women, and not just in terms of menstrual discomfort.
Back to John Rock.
The church would eventually ban the use of the Pill by Catholics. "No amount of word juggling can make abstinence from sexual relations and the suppression of ovulation one and the same thing," concluded the Catholic journal America.
If Dr. Rock had been able to pitch the Pill as an anti-cancer drug instead of an anti-pregnancy drug, his story might have had a different ending.
As it was, however, Dr. Rock abandoned his faith before his death, declaring it nothing but a "solace for the masses."
In the end, Mr. Gladwell writes, neither Dr. Rock nor his church was able to reconcile the requirements of his faith and the results of his science.
Susan Reimer's column appears Mondays.
