You Want to Have Sons, Get Fat, Harvard Researcher's Study Shows

Study of 18,000 men who attended Harvard between 1880 and 1916 indicates the fatter a man is, the more likely he is to have sons.

Albert Damon '38, research follow in Medical Anthropology, has found that approximately 75 per cent of the children born to stocky men were males. He has not yet been able to explain this effect.

Damon is making the study in an attempt to find clues linking a person's body build to his life expectancy. Although his data are still incomplete, he has reached several preliminary conclusions.

For example, Damon's findings have contradicted the common belief that baldness, a sex-linked characteristic, is assoociated with virility. In a selected group of 1300 subjects, he found that degree of baldness made no significant difference in the number or sex of children.

The study, sponsored by the American Heart Association, is based upon measurements taken on Harvard undergraduates when they registered for lockers in Hemenway Gymnasium. Some of the figures date back to 1850, but the bulk of the data was collected over a forty year period after 1879. Later reports on marriage, number and sex of children, and data and cause of death are still being filed.

Although 92 per cent of the subjects studied are now dead, information on their life has often been slow in reaching Damon's office, and the study should take several more years to complete. He is now filing the data on punched cards for analysis at the Harvard Computer Center.

When tabulation is complete, he will try to relate details of physique to chances of contracting lung cancer and heart disease. With these figures, he hopes that anthropologists and physicians will be able to predict life expectancy much more accurately than is now possible.