Pregnant Men

Last week a Manhattan cancer specialist announced a positive method of detecting a teratoma of the testicle, which is a monstrous kind of pregnancy in men. The test is precisely the test for pregnancy in women.

Men, of course, cannot bear babies despite the romantic notions called couvade, whereby the father writhes in bed when the mother goes through labor. But men may harbor the elements of muscle, skin, hair, cartilage and organs which go to make up a baby. The monstrosity's favorite nest is a testicle. In itself the teratoma is not dangerous. But its parts, being embryonic in nature, may at any provocation burst into a rage of growth. Then a man has a wild cancer sending its buds throughout his system and early recognition of the monstrosity, its prompt abortion by x-ray and castration, become important.

Dr. Russell Sweetser Ferguson of Manhattan's Memorial Hospital got the clue for his teratoma detector from Dr. Bernhard Zondek, German Jew now without a job (TIME, June 5). Dr. Zondek and Dr. Selmar Aschheim, his colleague, found that the pituitary gland of women enlarges during pregnancy and produces two sex hormones, Prolan A and Prolan B. As soon as a woman begins to gestate a baby she begins to create those hormones, and they promptly appear in her urine.

A sexually immature female mouse injected with a concentrate of the urine of pregnancy will in four days begin to produce eggs precisely as if she were full grown. The seminal vesicles of an immature male mouse similarly treated will grow large. This Aschheim-Zondek test for pregnancy is delicate and practically infallible.

If pregnant women produce Prolan A and Prolan B, perhaps men with teratomata might produce the same sex hormones. In Manhattan Dr. Ferguson was excited by this surmise as was Dr. Zondek in Germany. Dr. Ferguson pounced on the premise. Memorial Hospital gave him plenty of teratoma cases and enabled Dr. Ferguson to announce last week (in the American Journal of Cancer) that the hormone test for teratomata is 98% positive. It detects a testicular monstrosity within three weeks of the onset of the swelling. The younger the teratoma, that is, the more primitive the fetal elements, the stronger is the hormone reaction. "Adult" tumors give weak reactions because their contents are bits of fully formed body parts.

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