Background

Edgar Allen was born on May 2, 1892, in Canon City, Colorado to Edith Day and Asa Allen. His father was a physician. Allen spent his free of school time sailing off the coast of Rhode Island, where he learned to navigate the currents of Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. The death of Allen's father in 1921 left the family in financial trouble, forcing his mother to work as a librarian and the children to work while going to school.

Education

Allen received his early education in the public schools of Pawtucket and Cranston, Rhode Island. Then he attended Brown University and earned all of his higher degrees at that institution: B.S. (1915), M.A. (biology, 1916), Ph.D. (biology, 1921). During World War I his studies were interrupted for a short time by military service. In 1919, Allen received an honorable discharge from the army and returned to graduate studies at Brown University, working toward a Ph.D in biology.

Career

Allen’s distinguished academic career began in 1918 when he was appointed instructor in anatomy at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. In 1923 he moved to the University of Missouri, where he served initially as professor of anatomy and subsequently as dean of the medical school and director of university hospitals. In 1933 he returned to the east coast as professor of anatomy and chairman of the department at the Yale School of Medicine, a position he held until his death.

Allen’s Ph.D. thesis on the estrous cycle of the mouse (published in 1922) is a thorough description of the histological changes that occur in primary and secondary sex organs during the reproductive cycle. During the early 1920’s several investigators had suggested that the ovary might be the control center for this cycle; it was thought that the fluid content of the corpus luteum might be the active agent of control. Allen’s Ph.D. thesis cast doubt on this latter hypothesis. He noticed that at any given time during the cycle corpora lutea can be found in many different stages of degeneration, making it highly unlikely that they could be controlling a continuous series of progressive histological changes.

In 1923 Allen undertook a study of ovogenesis during sexual maturity and discovered that females are not born with a complete complement of ova; ova are continually formed in the germinal epithelium and the follicles that develop around them have a cycle of growth and decay not unlike that of the corpus luteum. This fact led Allen to suspect that the ovarian follicle, not the corpus luteum, might be the focus of control. In collaboration with a biochemist, E. A. Doisy, Allen proceeded to test this hypothesis by extracting a fluid from the follicle and determining its effects. He found that repeated injections of the follicular fluid produced histological changes that were identical to the early stages of normal estrus; when the injections were halted, the later phases ensued.

A devoted sailor, Allen joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary at the onset of World War II and died of a heart attack while commanding a patrol boat on Long Island Sound.

Achievements

• Allen and Doisy had discovered the existence and the effects of estrogen. Within fifteen years the other hormones that influence estrus were also discovered and the relations between them were becoming clear. All of Allen’s subsequent investigations were concerned, in some way, with these sex hormones. He proved that estrogen causes the onset of puberty in immature female animals and demonstrated that the hormonal mechanisms of primates (including man) are very similar to those of rodents, on which the original studies had been done. Allen also studied the relation between estrogen and malignancy, in order to determine whether there is any similarity between rapid cell growth caused by estrogenic stimulation and rapid cell growth that is characteristic of cancerous tissue. In addition, Allen’s publications contain a wealth of methodological information that was of great value to subsequent researches in endocrinology.
  
  His contribution was greatly recognized and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1914. Allen also was awarded the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society in 1926 and the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1936. Brown, Yale, and Washington universities awarded him honorary degrees. The French government made him a member of the Legion of Honor (1937), and the Royal College of Physicians awarded him its Baly Medal (1941). He also served as an advisory trustee (1939-1943) and member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Cancer Research Foundation.

Works

More photos

• Other Work

  • The Anatomical Record
  • Cancer Research
  • Journal of Anatomy and Physiology

Views

Edgar Allen identified and outlined the role of female sex hormones and discovered estrogen in the early 1900s in the United States. In 1923, Allen, through his research with mice, isolated the primary ovarian hormone, later renamed estrogen, from ovarian follicles and tested its effect through injections in the uterine tissues of mice. Allen's work on estrogen, enabled researchers to further study hormones and the endocrine system.

Membership

Allen was a member, and president, of two scientific societies, the American Association of Anatomists and the Association for the Study of Internal Secretions.

Connections

In 1918 Edgar Allen married Marion Pfieffer of Providence, who was one of his classmates from Brown University. The couple had two daughters, Frances Isabelle Allen and Majorie Eleanor Allen.

Father:

Edith Day

Mother:

Asa Allen

collaborator:

Edward Adelbert Doisy

In collaboration with a biochemist, E. A. Doisy, Allen proceeded to test this hypothesis by extracting a fluid from the follicle and determining its effects.

Wife:

Marion Pfieffer

Daughter:

Frances Isabelle Allen

Daughter:

Majorie Eleanor Allen

collaborator:

Jean Paul Pratt

In 1928, Allen collaborated with Jean Paul Pratt, a physician at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. Allen, Pratt, and a group of researchers devised one of the first plans to safely remove living human eggs (ova) from the uterine tubes of women. Together, Allen and Pratt correlated the conditions of the recovered eggs with the menstrual cycles of the patients, concluding from their five recovered eggs that ovulation occurred somewhere in the middle of a female's reproductive cycle around the fifteenth day.

References

• The Anatomical Record
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Science. Volume 97