CC Little

CC Little (born October 6, 1888 in Brookline , Massachusetts , † December 22, 1971 ; actually: Clarence Cook Little ) was an American geneticist and cancer and tobacco researcher .

biography

Little graduated from Harvard University . Under the direction of his Professor William Ernest Castle , he began research on mice, focusing on heredity and transplants. He became assistant to the dean and secretary to the university president. He summarized his most important research at Harvard in A Mendelian explanation for the inheritance of a trait that has apparently non-Mendelian characteristics . His observations on transplant rejection were processed by later Nobel Prize winner George Davis Snell .

During World War I , Little served in the United States Army Signal Corps and rose to the rank of major . He then worked for three years at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . In 1921 he founded the American Birth Control League together with Margaret Sanger and Lothrop Stoddard .

In 1922 Little accepted the post of President of the University of Maine , becoming the youngest university president in the country at the age of 33. During his stay there, he set up a small laboratory in Bar Harbor that was only active during the summer months. In 1925 he moved to the University of Michigan as President , where he succeeded Alfred Henry Lloyd . His tenure was controversial for his advocacy of birth control and eugenics . In 1929 he left the university to devote himself to his work in the laboratory. With funding from Detroit auto manufacturers , he was able to run the research institute year round. He named it Jackson Laboratory after one of its financiers, Roscoe B. Jackson of Hudson Motor Car Co. , who died in a car accident. That same year he also took a part-time job as executive director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer (now known as the American Cancer Society , ACS). In 1934 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . From 1939 to 1940 he was president of the American Association for Cancer Research . In 1945 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

He received little grants for the laboratory during the Great Depression, but in 1938 he received an initial grant from the newly formed National Cancer Institute . In 1944 they were already sending around 9,000 mice a week to other laboratories. By 1950, the laboratory had already bred 60 different mouse strains and developed a first- generation hybrid that was widely used in chemical tests. In 1954 Little left the service.

His last significant post from 1954 to 1969 was that of Scientific Director on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Tobacco Industrial Research Committee , which was renamed the Council for Tobacco Research in 1964 . In his role as a leading scientist, he became the voice of the tobacco industry . In 1959, he withdrew earlier statements made as director of the ACS. He now testified that inhaling fine particles was not unhealthy and that smoking would not cause lung cancer and would at most make a small contribution to it. Even a decade later, he maintained that there was no causal link between smoking and any disease. He believed that the main cause of cancer was genetic, not environmental.

In 1971 he died of a heart attack at the age of 83 .

Works (selection)

• William Ernest Castle, CC Little: Reversion in Guinea-pigs and Its Explanation. 1913, Carnegie Institution of Washington
• CC Little: A Mendelian explanation for the inheritance of a trait that apparently has non-Mendelian characteristics
• CC Little: Civilization against cancer. 1939, Farrar & Rinehart
• CC Little: The fight on cancer. 1939, Public Affairs Committee
• CC Little: Genetics, Medicine, and Man. 1947, Cornell University Press
• HJ Muller, CC Little, Laurence H. Snyder: The Inheritance of Coat Color in Dogs. 1957, Cornell University Press, ISBN 0876056214

literature

• National Academy of Sciences Staff: Biographical Memoirs. 1975, National Academies Press, ISBN 0309022401

Web links

• Literature by and about CC Little in the catalog of the German National Library
• CC Little, Cancer and Inbred Mice (English)