At the University of Wisconsin, Leon J. Cole has been treating male
rabbits with alcohol and reports that "what appear to be decisive
results have already been obtained. In the case of alcoholic poisoning
of the male the most marked result has been a lessening of his
efficiency as a sire, the alcohol apparently having had some effect on
the vitality of his spermatozoa." His experiment is properly planned and
carried out, but so far as results have been made public, they do not
appear to afford conclusive evidence that alcohol originates degeneracy
in offspring.
The long-continued and carefully conducted experiment of Charles R.
Stockard at the Cornell Medical College is most widely quoted in this
connection. He works with guinea-pigs. The animals are intoxicated
daily, six days in the week, by inhaling the fumes of alcohol to the
point where they show evident signs of its influence; their condition
may thus be compared to that of the toper who never gets "dead drunk"
but is never entirely sober. Treatment of this sort for a period as long
as three years produces no apparent bad effect on the individuals; they
continue to grow and become fat and vigorous, taking plenty of food and
behaving in a normal manner in every particular. Some of them have been
killed from time to time, and all the tissues, including the
reproductive glands, have been found perfectly normal. "The treated
animals are, therefore, little changed or injured so far as their
behavior and structure goes. Nevertheless, the effects of the treatment
are most decidedly indicated by the type of offspring to which they give
rise, whether they are mated together or with normal individuals."
Before the treatment is begun, every individual is mated at least once,
to demonstrate its possibility of giving rise to sound offspring. The
crucial test of the influence of alcohol on the germ-cells is, of
course, the mating of a previously alcoholized male with a normal,
untreated female, in a normal environment.
When the experiment was last reported,[16] it had covered five years and
four generations. The records of 682 offspring produced by 571 matings
were tabulated, 164 matings of alcoholized animals, in which either the
father, mother, or both were alcoholic, gave 64, or almost 40%, negative
results or early abortions, while only 25% of the control matings failed
to give full-term litters. Of the 100 full-term litters from alcoholic
parents 18% contained stillborn young and only 50% of all the matings
resulted in living litters, while 47% of the individuals in the litters
of living young died soon after birth. In contrast to this record 73% of
the 90 control matings gave living litters and 84% of the young in these
litters survived as normal, healthy animals.
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