Biographical Memoirs Volume 45 (1974) / Chapter Skim
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Herbert McLean Evans
Herbert McLean Evans
Pages 161-202
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From page 162... ...
W Evans was a man of vigorous rather than polished character; Bessie McLean Evans and her brother Robert were persons of refined manners and tastes.
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From page 163... ...
In the autumn he enrolled in the medical school of the university, in whose Berkeley laboratories he pursued the courses of the first year of professional study. The professor of anatomy was Joseph Marshall Flint, a surgeon who had done some anatomical research at Johns Hopkins and a stimulating lecturer; his associates were Irving Hardesty, a productive histologist, and Robert Orton Moody, a competent teacher of gross human anatomy.
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From page 164... ...
After about a year, the birth of their daughter Marian in the Johns Hopkins Hospital ended the deception and Anabel's isolation, although as the wife of an impecunious and intensely busy student her'lot was still far from easy. During his medical year at Berkeley, Evans had taken the usual course in human anatomy with dissection.
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From page 165... ...
In the same year Evans published in the American Journal of Anatomy a very creditable article on the blood circulation in the walls of large lymphatic vessels, illustrated with his own drawings made in the style of the great Johns Hopkins medical artist Max Broedel. About the same time he had begun research on embryonic blood vessels.
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From page 166... ...
This fundamental observation was the basis of Evans's authoritative contribution to the Keibel-Mall Manual, Chapter X\7III, Section III. From the first, Evans felt little interest in the clinical courses at Johns Hopkins, particularly when they took his time from such exciting activities as injecting embryonic blood vessels.
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From page 167... ...
Evans this was a heavy blow, for he thought practice far more important than research. It was undoubtedly the feeling that his father undervalued his choice of career that instilled in Herbert Evans an urgent desire to impress his parents by success in his chosen work and in later life to win the highest academic honors.
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From page 168... ...
Evans, who was given a Carnegie appointment concurrently with his Johns Hopkins post, then devoted a good deal of his time to the sectioning of early human embryos and to reconstructing them in wax from the sections—"A wearisome thing to do," he said, "compared with making the living embryo pump indict ink as though it were blood to show the multitudinous vascular channels." This strong inclination to experimental rather than purely morphological research was a partial cause of Evans's dropping a major project that Mall had suggested, a descriptive study of the human embryo during the period of somite formation. Another reason was that when Evans finally deft Baltimore, Mall was unwilling to let him take along, even for his temporary use, the rare and precious serially sectioned embryos necessary for the study—one or two of which, at least, Evans had himself collected and laboriously sectioned during Mall's summer absences.
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From page 169... ...
During the year before Evans's advent, Smith and his wife, who had done some postgraduate work in biology, had carried almost the entire teaching load, to the detriment of the research program in experimental embryology that Smith had brought with him from Cornell. To build up the department, Evans took with him from Johns Hopkins two young people who had shown competence for anatomical research—Katherine l.
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From page 170... ...
Associate Professor Moody, perhaps a little surprised by the inrush of all this youthful enthusiasm, retained charge of gross anatomy, with Smith and one of the newcomers helping him. With the staff thus fully manned, the reorganized department resumed its work in the autumn of 1919 in a small frame building, once the university's printing shop, that had been adapted for the teaching of human anatomy when the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 forced the transfer of preclinical classes to Berkeley.
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From page 171... ...
We were thus led to seek out and read recent contributions to the literature concerned with our special subjects. This pursuit inevitably led us to doubt didactic textbook statements unless verified by our own personal observations.
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From page 172... ...
Despite harassing episodes such as these, Evans had a wife still willing to yield her impetuosities to his, junior colleagues anxious to be helpful, and a devoted secretary and thus was able to keep the Berkeley department of anatomy happily productive and himself moving from one achievement to another. Resuming work on the vital staining of connective tissue cells, he quickly produced in collaboration with Katherine Scott a monograph (1921)
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From page 173... ...
Such changes are revealed by microscopic examination of cells scraped from the vagina. With this simple and expeditious method Evans BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS and Long, working together in the anatomical laboratory, soon found that the female rat has a quite regular cycle of about five days and that the occurrence of estrus and the time of ovulation can be determined by the vaginal test.
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From page 174... ...
In 1923 they announced the existence of a hitherto unrecognized dietary factor that is essential for reproduction; in its absence female rats, although they grew well and in maturity ran regular cycles, could not carry their young to birth because early in pregnancy they suffered breakdown of the placentas and resorbed their fetuses. Male rats, if their food lacked the same ingredient, became sterile by deterioration of the sperm-forming cells of the testes.
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From page 175... ...
In the ovaries of treated female rats an excessive amount of luteal tissue was formed by luteinization of the ovarian follicles. This observation was the basis of the subsequent search for a specific luteotropic hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe.
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From page 176... ...
The opposite conclusion of Evans and Swezy (1929, 1931) , based largely on study of the rhesus monkey, that ova are formed after birth and in sexual maturity, has not been confirmed by subsequent workers carefully examining similar material.
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From page 177... ...
A Long on the growth hormone, Evans as stated above had found in 1921 that their extracts of the anterior lobe strongly affected the ovaries of experimentally treated female rats, causing persistence of the corpora ]
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From page 178... ...
hormones and in obtaining the earliest evidence for a mammatropic hormone, investigators elsewhere had recognized that two other organs are also targets for the action of anterior pituitary hormones. Philip Smith's skillful ablation of the pituitary rudiment of frog tadpoles, done in Evans's laboratory, as already mentioned, had revealed that in tadpoles so deprived the thyroid gland does not develop.
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From page 179... ...
By the mid-1930's the six hormonal products of the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland now generally recognized as distinctive substances had been isolated in various degrees of purity, namely those for growth (somatotropic, STH) , follicle stimulation (FSH)
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From page 180... ...
When he first began to experiment with pituitary extracts, nothing was known about the endocrine activity of the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland except that in some vague way it exerted control over bodily growth and was somehow essential to the reproductive function. When he retired from active research, worldwide investigation had recognized the six hormones, characterized their activities, and to a large extent revealed their chemical structure.
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From page 181... ...
The progress of research in the new laboratories was interrupted temporarily in 1932 when Simon Flexner, Director of the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City, invited Evans to spend a year at the Institute as a guest investigator.
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From page 182... ...
But we did get a lot of work done with a small group in the short period of eight or nine months." The group, in fact, made significant progress in the purification of the follicle-stimulating hormone of the pituitary gland and in clarification of the synergism between this agent and the pituitary luteinizing hormone (which they were then calling "interstitial cell stimulating hormones. The minutes of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Rockefeller Institute do not reveal anything about this visit, and none of the senior staff of that time survive to tell why nothing more came of it, if indeed it was a trial run for the brilliant Californian.
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has been described since his death by Jacob I Zeitlin, the well-known Los Angeles dealer in rare books and manuscripts.
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Mr. Zeitlin tentatively lists the medical and scientific collections as follows: 1930 A: Classics in the Medical Sciences.
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From page 185... ...
1967: First Editions in the History of Science and a Collection on the History and Bibliography of Science. Purchased by John Howell: Books, San Francisco, and Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, Los Angeles, and dispersed in a number of catalogs of both firms.
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From page 186... ...
Anabel Tulloch, the bride of his student days, exhibited as much independence and impetuosity as he had when in disregard of family pressure, he boldly set out on a scientific career. But as shown by episodes narrated earlier in this memoir she did not willingly endure the stresses of marriage to a man so intensely dedicated to science.
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From page 187... ...
BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS ~' The record in Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, 19, lJ:9 (1969) , of an interview with Dr.
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From page 188... ...
Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 19:232-34. 1909 On the earliest blood-vessels in the anterior limb buds of birds and their relation to the primary subclavian artery.
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1916 On the behavior of the mammalian ovary and especially of the atretic follicle towards vital stains of the acid azo group.
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On the existence of a hitherto unrecognized dietary factor essential for reproduction. Science, n.s., 56:650-51.
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From page 191... ...
Hyperplasia of mammary apparatus in precocious maturity induced by anterior hypophyseal hormone.
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The growth and gonad-stimulating hormones of the anterior hypophysis.
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Moon. Work performance of hypophysectomized rats treated with anterior pituitary extracts.
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Purification of the follicle stimulating hormone of the anterior pituitary. Anales de la Facultad de Medicina de Montevideo, 25: 617-26.
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Becks. Effect of crystalline estrin implants on the proximal tibia and costochondral junction of young female rats.
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Li. Antagonism of pituitary adrenocorticotropic hormone to growth hormone in hypophysectomized rats.
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Li BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1946 and L
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Li. Chemistry of anterior pituitary hormones.
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Production of multiple congenital abnormalities in young by maternal pteroylglutamic acid deficiency during gestation.
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From page 200... ...
Anterior pituitary regulation of skeletal development. In: The Biochemistry and Physiology of the Bone, ed.
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From page 201... ...
Anniversary volume commemorating founding of History of Science Dinner Club, University of California campus, Sept.
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