EDGAR ALLEN 



from Danforth's letter to the present bio- 

 grapher : 



"On my way to the 1923 meeting of 

 Anatomists I went around by St. Louis 

 and had dinner that night at the Allen 

 home. In the evening Doisy, Allen, and 

 I had a long and animated discussion 

 over how their findings should be re- 

 ported. Allen, sanguine and ebullient, 

 was all for announcing them imme- 

 diately at the Anatomists' meeting, 

 even though there w^as no place for 

 such an announcement on the program. 

 Doisy, no less convinced of the im- 

 portance of the findings, so far as they 

 went, but temperamentally careful and 

 thorough, thought any announcement 

 should be withheld till more extensive 

 data could be presented. Allen did not 

 weaken, and when he was called upon 

 at the meetings to present his paper, 

 "Ovogenesis during sexual maturity," 

 whic-h had been duly submitted and 

 published in the abstracts, he by-passed 

 that paper with only a few remarks 

 and used the available time to tell about 

 the effects of follicular hormone on 

 spayed mice. I think this oral report was 

 the first public announcement, the first 

 published one being the AUen-Doisy 

 paper in the Journal of the American 

 Medical Association, September, 1923." 

 Danforth's letter continues: 



"When the report was presented, I 

 think it was received on the whole with 

 reservation if not outright skepticism, 

 particularly since no abstract had been 

 published and the topic was unan- 

 nounced and unexpected. George Corner 

 said later that was true in his case. 

 Someone else who was there told me of 

 his own skepticism and said that he 

 thought Allen, relatively unknown and 

 with an unconventional idea, was re- 

 garded as something of an 'upstart.' 

 Stockard is said to have made some very 

 caustic comments, which I don't recall. 

 Herbert M. Evans seems to have been 

 among the few who immediately sensed 

 the significance of the paper. He and 1 

 returned to California on the same train 

 and over and over he kept saying, '1 



think Edgar (he sometimes called him 



Ezra) Allen has something,' or words 



to that effect." 



Cooperation with Doisy continued in a 

 skillful chemical analysis which soon made 

 possible the isolation and chemical identifica- 

 tion of the estrogenic hormones. It is un- 

 likely that this stage of the investigation 

 would have been greatly prolonged had 

 Allen adhered to a 9 to 5 o'clock schedule 

 or a 40-hour wTek, but it is apparent from a 

 letter he wTote to Doctor Carl G. Hartman 

 that the discovery of the Allen-Doisy test 

 for estrogens might ha\'e been delayed had 

 he not made a midnight trip to the lab- 

 oratory. According to Hartman, "It was 

 Saturday night and Ed and his wife had 

 been at the theatre. Would he or would he 

 not make a midnight visit to the animal 

 colony at the University in St. Louis and 

 examine the castrated mice which had been 

 receiving Doisy's extracts? He did and 

 much to his delight found cornificd cells in 

 the vaginal smears, which might not have 

 been there if he had waited till Monday 

 morning I" 



Beyond this point, most of what happened 

 has been recorded by the earlier biographers. 

 In 1923, and almost certainly before the 

 importance of his work was fully appreciated, 

 Allen was appointed Chairman of the De- 

 partment of Anatomy in the then 2-year 

 University of Missouri School of Medicine. 

 He was made Associate Dean of the School 

 of Medicine in 1929 and Dean the follow- 

 ing year. He was happy at Columbia, 

 "things have worked out so nicely here. . . ," 

 he wrote Danforth, and later he began to 

 think he "was planted definitely in Mis- 

 souri." But April 1, 1933, he wrote, "Dean 

 Winternitz visited Columbia day before yes- 

 terday and asked me to go on to Yale ..." 

 as Professor of Anatomy and Chairman of 

 the Department of Anatomy in \hc ^'ale 

 University School of McHlicine. 



The unusual extent to which his reseai'ch 

 and lh(> i-esearch he super\is('(l in his de- 

 partment were suggested by his thesis has 

 been indicated. We find, theictoic, investiga- 

 tions pertaining to the problem of oxogenesis. 

 At a time when it was generally assumed 

 that the female mammal possesses a full 



