Sex Control

For years a technique for determining sex at the time of conception has been plugged by the New York Daily News (TIME, Dec. 23, 1940). The News advocates preliminary douching with bicarbonate of soda to get males, with lactic acid to get females. Last month this theory was lambasted by the Journal of Heredity, which called it "delightfully cockeyed but potentially dangerous."

The News's Sex Control Reporter Carl Warren cited an independent investigation at the University of Illinois which gave impressive support to his theory. He insists that "science has muffed a great discovery which . . . may be dug out of the files of the News years hence and proved correct." But Editor Robert C. Cook of the Journal of Heredity, who long ago offered to eat an entire issue of his dry publication if Warren was right, had powerful evidence and serenely concluded: "Rats and rabbits, as well as people, will have to go on for the present in the old-time way." The evidence:

> The Bureau of Animal Industry, U.S. DepartmenUof Agriculture, had taken up the study. Female rabbits and swine were treated with acid or alkali just before breeding. The Bureau's 2,383 young rabbits and 219 pigs were born with no significant change in the normal sex ratio. The Bureau therefore concluded that douche treatments and alteration of the acidity of the semen were without effect.

> At the University of Wisconsin rabbit sperm was treated with sodium bicarbonate or lactic acid just before it was used for artificial insemination. Again there was no disturbance of the normal ratio of the sexes, but the lactic acid treatment greatly reduced fertility.

> But by a different method two distinct strains of fruit flies have been obtained at Iowa State College, one with 100% male offspring, the other 100% female. The key is a lethal gene--lethal in that it prevents the embryo of the unwanted sex from reaching maturity. When this gene is combined with the chromosome that determines sex, one sex or the other is eliminated.

Editor Cook calls this evidence a "beautiful confirmation" of the genetic concept that sex is determined by a chromosome balance between sperm and egg. But the Iowa research offered no promise of immediate or even remote application to animals or humans. Not enough is known about their chromosomes and methods of controlling them.

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