C. C. Little

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Clarence Cook "C.C." Little (October 6, 1888 – December 22, 1971) was an American genetics, cancer, and tobacco researcher.

He was born in Brookline, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University. While studying under W. E. Castle, Little began his work with mice, focused on inheritance, transplants, and grafts. He also was an assistant dean and secretary to the president. His most important research occurred at Harvard, including what some call his most brilliant work, "A Mendelian explanation for the inheritance of a trait that has apparently non-Mendelian characteristics". His observations on transplant rejection became codified into the "five laws of transplant immunology" by George Snell. Little developed the "DBA (Dilute, Brown and non-Agouti)" strain of mice while at Harvard.

During World War I Little served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, attaining the rank of Major. Following the war he spent three years at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1921 he helped found the American Birth Control League with Margaret Sanger and Lothrop Stoddard.

Little accepted the post of President of the University of Maine in 1922, becoming at age 33 the youngest university president in the country. While there he started a summer laboratory in Bar Harbor. In 1925 he left to become the President of the University of Michigan. His tenure at the university was controversial due to his outspokenness in favor of eugenics, birth control, and euthanasia. He left Michigan in 1929 in order to devote himself to his research at Bar Harbor. With funding from Detroit car manufacturers he was able to improve the facility for year-round use. He renamed it the "Jackson Laboratory" in honor of one donor, Roscoe B. Jackson of the Hudson Motor Car Corporation, who had died in a car accident. Also in 1929 he took on a part-time job as managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer (later became the American Cancer Society (ACS)).

Funding for the Jackson Laboratory was extremely limited during the Great Depression, but it received one of the first grants from the newly formed National Cancer Institute in 1938. Little energetically developed both the lab and the ACS, and by 1944 they were shipping 9000 mice a week to other laboratories. A brush fire destroyed the laboratory and all of the livestock in 1947, but it was quickly rebuilt and most mouse strains were recovered from other labs around the world. By 1950 the lab was maintaining 60 inbred strains, and had developed the F1 hybrid that became widely used for chemical testing. Little resigned in 1954.

His last major post, from 1954 to 1969, was as the Scientific Director of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Tobacco Industrial Research Committee (renamed Council for Tobacco Research in 1964). In that role he was a leading scientific voice of the tobacco industry and oversaw a USD$1 million research budget that gave grants to hundreds of scientists. [1][2] In 1959 he refuted his earlier assertion, made as Director of the ACS, that inhaling fine particles is unhealthy, and stated that smoking does not cause lung cancer and is at most a minor contributing factor. [3]. A decade later he said, "there is no demonstrated causal relationship between smoking or any disease."[4] In keeping with his earlier research he believed that the main cause of cancer was genetic, not environmental.

He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 83.

[edit] References


Presidents of University of Michigan
Monteith • Tappan • Haven • Frieze • Angell • Hutchins • Burton • Lloyd • Little • Ruthven • Hatcher • Fleming • Smith • Shapiro • Fleming • Duderstadt • Neal • Bollinger • White • Coleman
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