 |  | | | Virgin mother | Friday 24 August 2001 | | |
You may think that there's been only one virgin birth in the past 2000 years.
But an investigation in the 1950s by a journalist and a team of doctors led them to believe the claim of a young German woman that she didn't lose her virginity until she married - 2 years after her daughter was born.
The story ran in The Sunday Pictorial for five weeks and doubled the paper's circulation. And for the serious scientific reader, details of the virgin conception - or parthenogenesis as it's known - were reported in The Lancet.
Philip Cohen from the San Francisco bureau of New Scientist and Audrey Whiting, the journalist who broke the story, told Claudia Hammond about how the throw away remark by a leading biologist triggered the nationwide hunt for a virgin mother.
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