G's Family

Long before the Civil War a German known to medical history only as G settled in wild Washtenaw County, Michigan, near the village of Ann Arbor. As Indians withdrew into the northern forests, Pioneer G cleared woodlands, cultivated crops, bred children. When at the age of 60 he died of cancer of the intestines in 1856, he left ten children. Four of his five sons, two of his five daughters subsequently died of cancer. The third generation of G's numbered 70, of whom 33 died of cancer.

The fourth generation of this remarkable cancer family was breeding away when it came to the attention of the late (1866-1931) Professor Aldred Scott Warthin, University of Michigan pathologist. From an intelligent young woman of the family, who shortly after died of cancer, Professor Warthin got the family's genealogy and history. From medical records and his own observations he learned enough to state in 1913 that "in certain families [there is] an inherited susceptibility to cancer." By 1925, when he published a second study of the G family, Dr. Warthin was surer than ever of the "recessive familial susceptibility to the development of cancer."

Last week one of Dr. Warthin's associates, Professor Carl Vernon Weller, and one of his young graduates, Dr. Isador Jerome Hauser, published a third analysis of the G family which, now in its sixth Michigan generation, numbers 305 living and dead. In the American Journal of Cancer Drs. Hauser and Weller note that all members of this family have good reason to fear being stricken by the age of 25. Of the 174 living and dead who reached that age, 41 (23.6%) developed cancers of one sort or another. One noteworthy fact about this ill-fated family is that 20 of the men, six of the women died of cancer of the stomach or of the bowels. Fifteen women died of cancer of the womb.

In only two of Pioneer G's family branches has cancer never appeared. These noncancerous lines run down from his two daughters who never had cancer.

In the younger generations of the other lines the affliction seems to be lessening its burden. But Drs. Hauser and Weller grimly warn: "This may be more apparent than real. Not until the full effect of age becomes known in the third and fourth generations can this be known."

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