Jack Lippes

Origins and early life

Jack Lippes was born in Buffalo, New York, on 19 February 1924, the youngest of six children, and grew up above the family business, the Lippes Bakery at Northland and Wohlers avenues, where as a boy he helped prepare and deliver bagels and cheesecakes.

Work and career

In 2005 the magazine Western New York Heritage listed the Lippes Bakery among the Jewish family enterprises of Buffalo, and that Jewish family is the route by which he appears here. He earned his medical degree at the University of Buffalo in 1947 and, after residencies in Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and Omaha, returned in 1952 to open a practice and to teach obstetrics and gynaecology at the medical school. Looking for a contraceptive more effective than the methods of his day, he reread the neglected literature on intrauterine devices and, in 1959, designed an extended S-shape of flexible plastic, baking his first prototypes in a mould on a cookie sheet.

Distributed from 1962, the Lippes Loop became the most widely prescribed intrauterine device in the United States and set the standard for the devices that followed. For the Population Council he toured Tunisia, Pakistan, Taiwan and South Korea to advise on family planning, and he was a consultant to a reproduction committee of the World Health Organization. He was medical director of Planned Parenthood of Buffalo from 1962 to 1978, created the first postgraduate course on contraception at the university's medical school in 1965, and in 1981 helped open the first in vitro fertilisation clinic in Buffalo.

In 2010 he became the first American to receive the annual medal of the European Society of Contraception and Reproductive Health. He died in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, on 7 December 2022, at the age of 98.