Breeder Who Aids Research Into Cancer

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 27, 1 December 1950, Page 4

Breeder Who Aids Research Into Cancer

A man who talks of ;“mice and men,” especially mice, hopes today that sometime, somewhere in the woi’ld, his life work with the tiny rodents will be the key to the locked door shutting away the secret of cancer cure. Starting with a pair of mice he first mated in 1920, he has bred 300,000 descendants, from which scientists in many countries have received, and will continue to receive shipments to help their research. Dr Leonell C. Strong, now of the Yale School of Medicine, is the man who began breeding laboratory mice for his own cancer research in his bedroom—until the landlord objected. He was then an imaginative young doctor, and he never guessed what .fame his mice couple would bring him, but now, 30 years and 300,000 mice later, his pedigreed rodents are being used in medical research throughout the world, for Dr Strong, by careful, patient breeding transformed the lowly mouse into one of the most valuable, laboratory tools for the scientist. He has shown through his mice that heredity does influence ' the reaction of living tissue to an attack by cancer.