C. C. 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 researchers.

Biography

Little studied at Harvard University. Under the guidance of his professor William Ernest Castle, he began research on mice, where he concentrated on inheritance and transplants. He was appointed assistant to the dean and secretary of the university president. His most significant research at Harvard he summarized in A Mendelian explanation for the inheritance of a trait did Has apparently non- Mendelian characteristics. His observations on graft rejections have been processed by the later Nobel prize winner George Davis Snell.

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

1922 Little accepted the post of president of the University of Maine and became at age 33 the youngest university president in the country. During his stay there he founded in Bar Harbor a small laboratory that was active only in the summer months. In 1925 he became president of the University of Michigan. His tenure was controversial through his advocacy of birth control and eugenics. In 1929 he left the university to devote himself to his work in the lab. Through funding by car producers from Detroit he could operate the Research Institute of the year. He called it the Jackson Laboratory after one of his financiers, Roscoe B. Jackson of the Hudson Motor Car Co., who died in a car accident. In the same year he also took a part-time job as Director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer ( now known as the American Cancer Society, ACS ) to. 1939 to 1940 he was president of the American Association for Cancer Research.

During the world economic crisis he received little funding for the laboratory, but in 1938 a first grant of the newly formed National Cancer Institute was granted to him. In 1944 she sent already about 9,000 mice per week to other laboratories. In 1950 the laboratory had already bred 60 different mouse strains and developed a hybrid of the first filial generation, which was widely used in chemical tests. 1954 Little different from the service.

His last important item was from 1954 to 1969 of a Scientific Director at the Scientific Advisory Board of the Tobacco Industrial Research Committee, which was established in 1964 renamed Council for Tobacco Research. In his role as a leading scientist, he was the voice of the tobacco industry. In 1959 he withdrew earlier statements he had made as a director of the ACS. He said from now that the inhalation of fine particles is not unhealthy and that smoking would not cause lung cancer and would not deliver more than a small contribution. Even a decade later, he claimed yet that there was no causal connection between smoking and any disease. He believed that the primary cause of cancer was genetic and not environmental.

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

Works (selection)

• William Ernest Castle, Little CC: Reversion in Guinea- pigs and Its Explanation. 1913, Carnegie Institution of Washington
• CC Little: A Mendelian explanation for the inheritance of a trait did Has apparently non- Mendelian characteristics
• C. C. Little: Civilization against cancer. 1939, Farrar & Rinehart
• C. C. Little: The fight on cancer. 1939 Public Affairs Committee
• C. C. Little: Genetics, Medicine, and Man. 1947, Cornell University Press