Endometriosis is a medical condition that involves abnormal growths of tissue resembling the endometrium, which is the tissue that lines the inside of the uterus. Those growths, called endometrial lesions, typically form outside the uterus, but can spread to other reproductive organs such as ovaries and fallopian tubes. Endometrial lesions swell and bleed during menstruation, which can cause painful and heavy menstruation, as well as infertility. As of 2021, there is no cure for endometriosis, although medical therapies such as birth control pills and GnRH analogues can treat the painful symptoms of endometriosis. More than eleven percent of women between the ages fifteen and forty-four in the US have endometriosis, which can often decrease a woman’s quality of life due to painful symptoms and impair her reproductive potential.

First manufactured in 1988 by Serono laboratories, recombinant gonadotropins are synthetic hormones that can stimulate egg production in women for use in fertility treatments. Recombinant gonadotropins are artificially created using recombinant DNA technology, a technology that joins together DNA from different organisms. In vertebrates, naturally-occurring gonadotropins regulate the growth and function of the gonads, known as testes in males and ovaries in females. Medical professionals can derive female gonadotropins from the urine of pregnant and post-menopausal women, often using it to facilitate in vitro fertilization, or IVF. With the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, demand for human-derived gonadotropins rose to a global yearly demand of 120 million liters of urine by the beginning of the twenty-first century, which resulted in a demand that could not be met by traditional technologies at that time. Therefore, researchers created recombinant gonadotropins to establish a safer and more consistent method of human gonadotropin collection that met the high demand for its use in fertility treatments.

In 1938, physician Henry Hubert Turner published “A Syndrome of Infantilism, Congenital Webbed Neck, and Cubitus Valgus,” hereafter “A Syndrome of Infantilism,” in the journal Endocrinology, in which he described a condition that researchers later named Turner syndrome. Turner syndrome is a genetic condition that affects biological females, characterized by a partially or completely missing X chromosome. In the paper, Turner describes a previously unrecognized set of symptoms in seven different females, including a lack of physical and sexual development, infertility, webbed neck, and elbow deformities, among others. Turner also records various methods of hormone treatments for his patients, such as growth hormone and estrogen injections. “A Syndrome of Infantilism” was one of the first published descriptions of Turner syndrome, a developmental condition that affects one in 2,500 live female births globally, and highlighted the use of hormone treatments to promote the development of stunted physical and sexual growth.