Letters to the Editor

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Dear Sir: The fascinating story ofMendel as again brought out by Fong [i] and Dodson [2] can be summarized by stating diat only because Mendel was ignored while living did he gain immortal fame after deadi. He made important, actually revolutionary, new observations and offered a clear and simple explanation which has endured. Fortuitously, he meticulously recorded his observations and thus preserved them for all time. That his contemporaries ignored his work is easy to understand: He offered a new idea contrary to the accepted mode ofthinking. Ifhis colleagues had had even an inkling ofthe significance ofhis work, they undoubtedly would have attacked his thesis and thence pointed out that in 1823 T. A. Knight made similar observations on crossing varieties of garden peas, without perhaps mentioning that Mendel made his studies quantitative by counting and recording the number ofdifferent types ofprogeny. IfMendel had then attempted to defend himself, he probably would have encountered hostile editors who would have rejected his papersjust as Bateson who introduced Mendelism to England had his papers barred from publication, even in Nature. The scientists' inhumanity to scientists came with the birth ofscience and appears never to have diminished. What the true motives and attitude ofDeVries, Tschermak, and Correns were toward Mendel can only be conjectural, but, ironically, the outcome oftheir action was to establish Mendelism. As a reward, their names will always be linked widi the name ofMendel and therefore shall not be forgotten. They helped to establish an epoch-making discovery that Lysenko with the might ofStalin could not crush, thereby demonstrating again that truth eventually triumphs. references 1.Peter Fong. Perspect. Biol. Med., 12:636, 1969. 2.Edward O. Dodson. Perspect. Biol. Med., 13:452, 1970. Armand J. Quick, M.D. Hemostasis Research Laboratory Marquette School ofMedicine Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53233 Dear Sir: It is my unpleasant task to raise reasonable doubt concerning the purported complete safety ofvasectomy, on the basis ofwhich it has become a preferred method ofvoluntary sterilization. I do not challenge either the increasing demographic emphasis upon die 17Ó Letters to the Editor Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1970 need for limiting family size or die simplicity and effectiveness ofthis operation. At the present time, vasectomy probably represents die most massive surgical procedure affecting thefunction ofa normal organ ever elected by young men. Its magnitude is indicated by the estimate that 7percent ofthe husbands offertile wives in the soudiwestern United States have been vasectomized. The gadiering stampede has been influenced by (1) promotion in the lay press [1]; (2) enthusiastic support from many medical and paramedical groups, including the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, and Planned Parenthood groups; (3) increasing awareness ofdie potential adverse effects of birth-control preparations in women; and (4) die encouragement of vasectomy by governments, notably India's. This note ofcaution was initiated by my repeated observations as a consultant in internal medicine. They concern a number ofmale patients (chiefly in their twenties and thirties) who presented with unexplained thrombophlebitis (six patients) and a host of puzzling systemic disorders afteranelective vasectomy—generally within one or two years. All stated diey had enjoyed good health previously. The diverse features for which these persons sought consultation included prolonged fever, ardiritis, recurrentinfection, generalized lymph node enlargement, various skin eruptions, multiple sclerosis (two patients), glomerulonephritis, interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, severe narcolepsy, hypoglycemia , liverdysfunction (increased BSP retention), increased circulating gamma globulin , and a biologic false-positive serologic reaction. One patient may have died of leukemia subsequently. My initial observations were reported two years ago [2, 3]. They are consistent with a number of experimental studies concerning the effects of vasectomy in animals. The possible immunologic and padiogenetic mechanisms involved, reviewed in the first cited report, include induced hormonal imbalances, autosensitization to testicular nucleoprotein , and altered blood coagulation. There is an urgent need to clarify this issue ifa possible wholesale medical and biologic disaster is to be averted as more men continue to submit to the procedure. The first step is a careful analysis ofthe subsequent medical histories oflarge numbers ofvasectomized men. Restraint should be exercised, however, when projecting the purported innocuousness of existing mass vasectomy programs—as in India and other famine-threatened...