EDGAR ALLEN 



no permanent po.sition in sight, but he must 

 have sought the help of Mead, for during 

 the summer of 1919 he was an investigator 

 in the laboratory of the U. S. Fish Com- 

 mission at Woods Hole. Doctor H. C. 

 Bumpus, an older colleague of Mead's, had 

 been Director of the Biological Laboratory 

 in the Fish Commission at Woods Hole 

 and summer appointments, paying two or 

 three himdred dollars, were a source of 

 help to the graduate students at Brown in 

 that period. The summer seems to have been 

 important, not because of any research 

 Allen did, but because it was then that 

 Charles Danforth, who was at Cold Spring 

 Harbor for the summer and had heard 

 Doctor FL E. Walter speak highly of Allen, 

 wrote him and called his attention to the 

 instructorship then open in Washington 

 University School of Medicine. Danforth 

 suggested that Allen communicate with 

 Doctor Robert J. Terry, head of anatomy 

 in that institution. He must have done so 

 promptly and been accepted, with the un- 

 derstanding that graduate study would hv 

 continued. Danforth's recollection of his 

 first sight of Allen is repeated: 



"When I returned to St. Louis in 

 the fall and went up to the anatomy 

 department I saw a man in the hall 

 whose white liair and impressive bear- 

 ing led me to suspect that he was prob- 

 ably a distinguished alumnus returning 

 for a visit. I soon learned, however, 

 that this was Mr. Allen, who had been 

 appointed instructor in anatomy and 

 was already installed in an office on the 

 third floor." 



Little time seems to have been lost in 

 starting his work for the Ph.D., although 

 the circumstances under which the choice 

 of a problem was made ar(^ somewhat 

 ohscuiv. Doctor H. H. Willier who met 

 Allen for- the first time that sunnner (prob- 

 ably on "stony beach") does not remembei- 

 that he mentioned any special interest in 

 the physiology of sex and reproduction. 

 Danforth, who saw nuich of him from this 

 time on, l;elie\-(>s that two cii'cunistaiices 

 may lia\-e licen important. His oflice was 

 on the floor with that of Doctoi' I.co Locb, 

 always a stimulating p(M-soii, and in the 



animal quarters above was a colony of 

 mice which had been developed for use in 

 what was perhaps the first course in em- 

 bryology to be based exclusively on mam- 

 malian material — gametogenesis, follicular 

 growth, ovulation, fertilization, cleavage, 

 etc. He probably discussed problems with 

 Loeb and he must have read the recent 

 paper of Stockard and Papanicolaou in 

 which changes in the vaginal epithelium 

 in the guinea pig were correlated with the 

 o^'arian cycle. Whether he was sensitive to 

 the generally increasing interest in reproduc- 

 tive phenomena or was influenced more by 

 the fact that the mouse had been in- 

 adequately studied and was right at hand 

 and ready is not known. The latter pos- 

 sibility would have been consistent with 

 his temperament and the way he worked. 

 On the other hand, the fact that the first 

 of the three "purposes" stated in his thesis 

 was "to make possible a more efficient 

 mating for the collection of embryological 

 material" may indicate that the larger im- 

 portance of what he was about to start was 

 not yet apparent to him. 



With the double responsibility of teach- 

 ing and doing the research for a thesis, 

 he must have worked incredibly long hours. 

 But the rewards were great. The observa- 

 tions recorded in his thesis, "The oestrous 

 cycle in the mouse," ignited the fire that 

 was to burn and to be spread during the 

 remaining years of his life, and to eradicate 

 fore\'er the diffidence which characterized 

 him during his earlier graduate years at 

 Brown. Briefly, he observed that large 

 follicles were present in the proestrous and 

 cstrous stages of the cycle, but that ovula- 

 tion had occurred by the time of the 

 metestrum. Regressive changes were noted 

 in the uterus and these were analogized 

 with menstruation in lower primates and 

 the human female. The reference on page 

 111 to Hobin.son's belief that a secretion 

 tVoni the follicle causes estrous changes 

 rcxcals how close he was to the hypothesis 

 that was to rccciNc gencn-al acc(>ptance only 

 a few years latci'. It is clear, how(>\-ei', that 

 he was not rcad^' for this simple and direct 

 conclusion. Instead, he started by rejecting 

 the suggestion that 1 h(^ growth stimulus 



