One in Half a Million

Ever since he was a boy, Abe Goldstein, now 30, had had to get along with only one eye; the other one was removed because of a rare malignant tumor, retinoblastoma, which occurs in only one out of 500,000 children with eye trouble. Surgery is necessary to prevent the cancer from spreading along the optic nerve to the brain, or through the blood stream to the liver and the other organs of the body, causing death.

Abe Goldstein managed well enough with one eye to put in 40 months of Army service as an MP in the Pacific. He got married, had two children. Doctors know that the tumor may be hereditary, but do not know the exact chances of a child's inheriting it. Struggling to get his own business going, Goldstein found decent housing; recently he moved his wife Anita, 24, and their two infants into a Brooklyn veterans' project.

Last week, Baby Michael Goldstein and his sister Karen, 2 1/2, were in the Ophthalmological Institute of Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; they had the same disease. Karen had one eye removed; X-ray treatments were begun to try to save the other eye. Baby Michael, eleven months old, lost both eyes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.