Aldred Scott Warthin’s Family ‘G’: The American Plot Against Cancer and Heredity (1895–1940)

Abstract

According to many, the genetic technology used in cancer is a promising test case of twenty-first century 'genomic medicine'. However, it is important to realize that accounting for the genetic or hereditary factors in cancer medicine is not new. Since at least the eighteenth century, medical doctors and patients have tried to establish links between heredity and cancer. Following the excitement over the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's theory of hereditary transmission (1900), there was renewed interest in the question of a linkage between heredity and cancer. Researchers began to pay attention to the statistical use of family studies as a means to calculate Mendelian ratios of disease inheritance. In 1913, the Michigan University pathologist Aldred Scott Warthin (1866Warthin ( -1931 published his first study of a pedigree with a so-called inherited susceptibility for cancer. Family G's susceptibility was associated with the risk of creating an 'inferior stock'. Given the number of studies on heredity and disease and the vogue for eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, one would have expected strong support for Warthin's study. Family G (one of the longest systematically studied cancer genealogies in the world and currently associated with Lynch syndrome) might have been accepted (if not for purely scientific reasons) as part of the eugenics gospel as an exemplary case of a degenerative stock. After all, Warthin was a rising star within the American medical establishment and had become part of John Kellogg's eugenic priesthood in Michigan. Ultimately, none of these likely Earlier versions of this paper were presented under the same title at the Third International

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“…Indeed, Warthin documented a family with what we now know to be Lynch syndrome long before DNA itself was discovered. 3 Likewise, familial adenomatous polyposis, Peutz Jeghers, and juvenile polyposis syndromes were described, diagnosed, and treated for many years before the advent of genomic medicine.…”