Dr. Min-Chueh Chang; Helped to Develop Birth Control Pill

Dr. Min-Chueh Chang, a developer of the birth control pill and a pioneer in research that made in vitro fertilization possible, has died. He was 82.

Chang, who died Wednesday of unreported causes, did much of his work at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where he rose to the rank of scientist emeritus.

Last year, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious honor that can be given to an American scientist short of the Nobel Prize.

In 1951, Chang began studying synthetic progestins’ effects on reproduction. The research, done with Dr. Gregory Pincus, a founder of the foundation, led to the development of an oral contraceptive in 1959.

Chang also is credited with carrying out basic research in the 1950s into techniques that made it possible to fertilize a human egg with sperm outside the body, resulting in the births of so-called “test-tube babies.”