Medicine: Cancer Army

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Dr. C. C. Little, Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Me.

Clarence Cook Little's grandfather was James Lovell Little, a dominating Massachusetts businessman who made Father James Lovell Jr. quit studying architecture at Harvard and go into business.

James Lovell Little Jr. compensated for this transfer by taking up natural sciences as a hobby. He was the first man in the U. S. to breed Scottish terriers. He also bred cocker and clumber spaniels, dachshunds. Son Clarence Cook took up the avocation, now breeds Scotties and dachshunds in his own Newcastle Kennels at Bar Harbor, and is a qualified judge of nine other breeds.

"Pete" Little was practically born a geneticist. He received a pair of pigeons when he was 3 years old. By the time he was 7 he bred a pair which won a first prize. Then he took up mice. He inbred his first pair of mice, brown brother and sister, in 1909 when he was a Harvard junior, and has been inbreeding their progeny ever since. The herd accompanied him to Cold Spring Harbor, L. I. when he became assistant director of the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution (1919), to Orono, Me.

when he became president of the University of Maine (1922), to Ann Arbor, Mich, when he became president of the University of Michigan (1925), to Bar Harbor, where he became director of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in 1929. At Bar Harbor, in a small building whose solid brick walls exclude stray mice, he produces 150,000 mice a year, sells 50,000 to other scientific institutions for research, anatomizes 25,000 to analyze their inherited characteristics, especially their susceptibility to cancer.

His own mice were his particular solace when he was president of the University of Michigan. After their initial enthusiasm for the youngest university president of his time, the regents of the University heckled him for his liberal views on education and student behavior, and for his refusal to let Michigan politicians dispose of University money. Disappointed, he resigned after four years. Almost immediately he divorced his wife, daughter of a Boston architect, on grounds of cruelty and technical desertion. He gave her and their two sons and daughter every dollar he owned (about $100,000), and at the age of 41 started life anew.

Roscoe Bradbury Jackson Memorial Laboratory, founded at Dr. Little's suggestion, in memory of the late organizer and president of Hudson Motor Co., offered him a $3,000-a-year job as director.