Edgar Allen was an American physiologist and anatomist. He was the discoverer of estrogen and creator of the field of endocrinology.
Background
Edgar Allen was born on May 2, 1892 in Canon City, Colorado, United States. He was the fifth of nine children and second of four surviving sons of Asa and Edith (Day) Allen. Both parents were descended from English settlers in New England in the 1630s, though the Allens, as Loyalists during the American Revolution, had removed to Canada, where Edgar's father was born. A graduate of the New York Medical School, Asa Allen had moved west with his wife via Michigan and Wisconsin; for a time he practiced in the gold-rush town of Cripple Creek, Colorado. In 1900 he moved back east to Providence, Rhode Island, where Edgar grew up. The family was not prosperous.
Education
When Allen was in his early teens his father died, his mother found work as a librarian, and he and his brothers (one of whom, Richard Day Allen, became a leader in the vocational education movement) worked at odd jobs while attending high school in Pawtucket and Cranston, Rhode Island. Allen then entered Brown University, where he earned his way by waiting on tables, tending furnaces, reading electric or gas meters, and teaching swimming. He also learned to sail in Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound and acquired a love for the sea that continued throughout his life. After receiving the Ph. B. degree from Brown in 1915, Allen entered the graduate school there to study biology and embryology, receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1916.
He carried out research for his doctoral thesis, "The Oestrous Cycle of the Mouse, " at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri receiving his Ph. D. from Brown in 1921.
He received honorary degrees from Brown and Washington universities.
Career
In 1919 Allen became an instructor in anatomy at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. The studies for his doctoral degree during that time stimulated his interest in the physiology of reproduction and the sources of the ovarian hormones that induce the changes occurring during the estrous cycle. Working in close collaboration with the biochemist Edward A. Doisy, he was able to extract from ovarian follicles a cell-free material that produced the vaginal and uterine growth characteristic of that occurring during estrus. This finding, first reported in the spring of 1923 at a meeting of anatomists in Chicago, started a course of research that occupied both Allen and Doisy for many years.
In 1923 Allen was appointed professor of anatomy and chairman of the department in the medical school of the University of Missouri at Columbia, and in 1930 he became dean of the school and director of the University Hospitals. During this period he continued research on ovarian physiology and endocrinology with Doisy, who purified and subsequently chemically identified one of the female sex hormones, estradiol. Allen also collaborated with others, especially J. P. Pratt, chief gynecologist at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, in studies of ova, ovarian function, and ovulation in women, work that culminated in their securing the first living ova from the human oviduct. Allen also established a colony of rhesus monkeys so that he could study ovarian function and regulation in primates.
In 1933 Allen left the University of Missouri to become professor of anatomy at the Yale University medical school. There he established laboratories to continue his studies on the endocrine aspects of reproduction, and also developed an intense interest in the relation of sex hormones to cancer. The action of the ovarian follicular hormones in stimulating growth especially interested him. His tremendous enthusiasm and energy attracted investigators, young and old, to work with him, and also attracted funds to support his researches.
While at Missouri he edited and wrote a chapter for the first edition of Sex and Internal Secretions (1932), a collection of contributions by endocrinologists and biologists. His papers dealt with the influence of estrogens in producing mammary and uterine cancer, with estrogen-withdrawal uterine bleeding in monkeys, with the application of colchicine to the study of growth processes, and with the mammalian egg and its development.
In 1934 he suffered a severe coronary occlusion, but after his recovery continued to work. At the beginning of World War II he joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and while on patrol he died of a heart attack, at the age of fifty. He was cremated, and the ashes were scattered at sea.
Achievements
Allen is best known as a prominent scientist who introduced the field of endocrinology. His publications, alone and with collaborators, number nearly 150 papers and books.
Allen was enrolled in the Legion of Honor in Paris in 1937. He was awarded the Baly Medal of the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1941.
Allen was president of the American Society for the Study of Internal Secretions (1941-1942), which later became the Endocrine Society, and, at the time of his death, of the American Association of Anatomists.
Allen was a ruddy-faced man, full of enthusiasm and drive.
Interests
Allen enjoyed sailing and he was never tired of challenging the winds and tides.
Connections
On July 28, 1918 Allen married Marion Robins Pfeiffer, a student at Pembroke, the women's college of Brown. Their two daughters were Frances Isabelle and Marjorie Eleanor.
